Daniels brings the multiverse to madcap life in Everything Everywhere All at Once

The incomparable Michelle Yeoh plays a harried Chinese American laundromat owner facing an IRS audit in the new science-fiction action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. Evelyn Wang is just trying to sift through a mountain of paperwork and crumpled receipts to keep her life from falling apart when she unexpectedly gets pulled into an epic battle across multiple timelines. And the stakes couldn't be higher: the very survival of the entire multiverse is on the line.

Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert—collectively known as Daniels—are known for their ability to straddle genres, deftly blending comic absurdity and outré weirdness with moments of gut-wrenching poignancy. Everything Everywhere All at Once is only their second feature film together, but you'd never know it by the assured hand Daniels brought to bear on the project, somehow bringing a chaotic jumble of disparate elements together into a coherent whole that both surprises and delights. The two creators said they found inspiration while writing the script in classic kung-fu films, as well as The Matrix and Fight Club.

"I fell in love with those movies," Kwan said. "I was like, man, if I could just make something half as fun as The Matrix, but with our own stamp and our spirits, I would just die happy."

Ars spoke with Kwan and Scheinert to learn more.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Ars Technica: Why the multiverse? What is it that drew you to that concept?

Daniel Kwan: One of the first times I thought about the multiverse was maybe 15 years ago. I was watching Sherman's March, a documentary. One of the many relationships in that movie was a linguist who talks about modal realism [a philosophical argument holding that all possible worlds are real in the same way as the actual world]. I started to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I was like, "This is fantastic and beautiful." You know what's really embarrassing? I got so sucked into modal realism that I never finished the movie. Does it have a happy ending? I have no idea.

Daniel Kwan (left) and Daniel Scheinert (right), aka Daniels, on set.

Credit: Allyson Riggs/A24

So, for over a decade, we've just been fascinated with the idea of the possibility of existence, how every single possibility has the potential for existing and maybe existing all at once. Maybe the wave function doesn't collapse, and we are all just in this stew of probabilities. And we're like, let's turn that into something fun. Let's do what The Matrix did to simulation theory, let's have fun with the multiverse, but let's blow minds. Let's push it as far as it possibly can go, in a way that no one else would be brave enough to do.

Ars Technica: You touch on the concept of infinity in your film. That concept seems to be particularly difficult for our finite human minds to grasp.

Daniel Kwan: It's funny, I think one of the reasons why this movie is resonating with audiences is because, in some sense, we're already there. Everyone every day is living in infinity. It's frustrating, and it's hard, and people are getting demoralized. I once read that there's only two options to existing in chaos: you either become a nihilist, where you just try to go numb, or you dig in your heels and become more dogmatic to protect yourself. This film was meant to explore the idea of what it means to live in infinity.

Ars Technica: Many people have tried to make movies about the multiverse, with varying degrees of success. What I loved about Everything Everywhere All at Once is that it's wacky and outrageous and embraces the craziness of alternate universes, but there's an underlying sweetness and kindness. How did you manage to find that perfect tone?

Daniel Scheinert: I think a lot of our favorite science-fiction takes big ideas and then uses them to get at something human, and our least favorite science-fiction falls right in the middle. The ideas aren't that big, and it's also not that human, it's just, "Anyway... here's a spaceship." So right from the get-go, our goal was to take the idea of infinity and dramatize it. Pair it with relatable, small-scale human feelings. How does infinity make you feel? How is that relatable within our lives? We threw a lot at the wall, but that's what really stuck: [Things like] juxtaposing a passive-aggressive argument with a family member against the annihilation of every possible universe. Infinity is fun.

An overwhelmed Evelyn journeys through all of her possible lives.

Credit: Allyson Riggs/A24

Daniel Kwan: All storytelling, I'm realizing, is the same pursuit that physicists are chasing after. It's the theory of everything. How do we reconcile quantum physics with classical physics? How do we take the biggest science and the smallest science and make sense of it? That is what storytellers are trying to find, too. As above, so below. How can we take the most personal and connect it to the most universal? It's such an important challenge today, when the universal is slowly getting fractured. The universal is bloated, and it cannot be contained anymore, and our stories need to catch up, I think.

Ars Technica: How did your past projects prepare you for making this film?

Daniel Scheinert: We edited a lot of our own short films and music videos and closely collaborated with our editor, Paul, on a couple of projects. One of our many secret weapons as directors is that we know what we can compromise on. So on the first day of production, we're like, "Oh, that's an interesting ingredient. And that's an interesting ingredient. I feel like we have enough in the kitchen to cook dinner, later."

Daniel Kwan: I think a lot of directing is filled with doubt and that's why you do multiple takes. He [Daniel Scheinert] described it as cooking dinner. You're collecting all these ingredients and sometimes you overcollect and you run out of time, and then you never actually get to the cooking part. Because we think with the edit in mind, we know when we're ready to move on. "I can make that work in the edit. It's not important enough, let's move on." So there's an efficiency to our process, and that efficiency applies to almost every department of our film, because so many of these people have worked with us before. We have a shorthand. They understand what matters to us and what doesn't. A lot doesn't matter to us because this movie wouldn't have worked if we were trying to control everything.

Daniel Scheinert: And this time we changed how we wrote, we respected the screenwriting process more. It took us a while to get there because a lot of the classic celebrated screenplays that follow the rules are not my favorite movies. I never read all those screenwriting books because I always felt, "I don't need to make that movie, with the perfect hero's journey." But reading those books and then trying to make something work as well as it could on paper—before we hired a hundred people to do their respective jobs—really helped us relax and focus on all those other things once we were shooting. It was a really different process, making this movie and being confident in the screenplay before we rolled cameras.

One version of Evelyn trains in martial arts with a mentor (Jing Li).

Credit: Allyson Riggs/A24

Ars Technica: Your fight choreography harks back to classic Hong Kong action movies. I often describe Jackie Chan's style, for instance, as Found Object Fu, and I feel like you really captured that element in the film.

Daniel Scheinert: It was hugely important to us early on. We knew that we were not going to have the budget of Hollywood action movies, and also we've seen that enough. We started watching Hong Kong action movies, which are made on a tighter budget, and they're just so musical and funny—

Daniel Kwan: And the shots are just so specific.

Daniel Scheinert: It's genuinely impressive, and you can actually see what's going on. That's what we wanted to aspire to.

Daniel Kwan: We both grew up on those movies, and it was in our bones already. The hardest part was actually finding the right people to collaborate with because we knew exactly what we wanted, but not many people do that anymore—specifically at our budget level. So we were like, "How are we going to pull this off? Are we going to have to choreograph this ourselves?"

Then we found this team of guys called The Martial Club on YouTube and Instagram. They have more followers than us. By a lot. They're all self-taught. They never took any formal training. Everything they learned was from YouTube or from the old kung fu movies, so they grew up watching Michelle Yeoh. They blew us away with their short films. Not only were they doing incredibly technical stuff, they were doing incredibly funny things on a budget—just doing it in their backyard with their friends.

Daniel Scheinert: So we paired them up with our stunt coordinator, Tim Eulich, who had to invent a hybrid between how America usually does action and how YouTube does action. It's much like how Hong Kong action films are made.

Daniel Kwan: We also thought, "How can we make this safe? How can we make sure no one is exploited in this moment?" A lot of action movies have gone to Hong Kong because the crews are cheaper. That felt just so wrong for us personally. It's not why we got into filmmaking—

Daniel Scheinert: —to outsource for cheap labor, yeah. But also, as much as we love Hong Kong cinema, people get hurt a lot on those movies. And we are not interested in that part of it. Michelle told us so many wild stories of what it was like in that world. So we feel so lucky that we found this team of people and found a process where no one got hurt, but we still got to pay tribute to that tradition.

Jenny Slate plays a rude customer in one universe and a ruthless assassin with a dog in another.

Credit: Allyson Riggs/A24

Ars Technica: Every creative person has to "kill their darlings," so to speak, at some point. What did you hate to leave out in the final cut, because you knew doing so would ultimately make for a better film?

Daniel Scheinert: There were two different karaoke musical numbers in the movie, where people sing the song "Barbie Girl" by Aqua. It was really dumb and really sentimental, and that's our favorite thing, but the movie was too long. Now it's the perfect length. We always wanted to make sure the movie was not longer than a Marvel movie, and so we killed that darling. But I think it's in the fabric of the movie, even though it's not in the final cut. It was a really cathartic thing to do with the cast and crew, to have these karaoke scenes, even though it's just in a montage now.

Daniel Kwan: To me, one of the most heartbreaking things that we cut out was with Jenny Slate's character [Big Nose]. She comes in [to the laundromat], and she is a very obnoxious customer. And then she becomes this villain with a dog. Like all the other characters, we wrote a conclusion to hers that was very sentimental and beautiful, and Jenny just killed it. It was very earnest and sweet and strange in the middle of what we call the "empathy fight." It wrapped up her character in such a nice way. That's one of the few threads that had to die, but they'll be on the DVD extras hopefully, and people will get to see that she was able to offer more than just be the mean, funny person.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is now playing in select theaters, opening widely on April 8, 2022. You should definitely see it. But we strongly recommend not seeing movies in theaters unless you are fully vaccinated (and preferably boosted).