A24 may have found the filmmakers to jump-start the art-house box office and, in something of a surprise, it’s the visionary directing duo of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheiert, aka The Daniels. This past weekend, their second cinematic opus, “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” opened in limited release to an impressive $509,659 or $50,965 in just 10 theaters. One of the best per-screen averages in A24 history.
The critic and audience favorite centers on Evelyn Wang (a stellar Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese-American immigrant who discovers she can access different versions of herself across the multiverse. This puts her at odds with an alternate version of her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is hell-bent on destroying all the universes. Luckily, she has a decidedly more athletic version of her husband from another timeline (comeback king Ke Huy Quan) to assist her.
The Daniels sat down with The Playlist last week to discuss their “Swiss Army Man” follow-up and admitted, well, they didn’t really have a backup plan if Yeoh said no to the role. And their explanation gives you a taste of their charming creative energy.
Scheinert starts, “Our producers were scared because we didn’t really have…
“A backup,” Kwan says finishing his sentence.
“It was scary,” Scheinert admits.
Kwan continues, “But we did come up with one where we were like, ‘O.K., Yeoh says no, we cut the budget but to like 10% of what it was, give us almost nothing. And we’ll put my mom in as the star. And so my mom will be the star and we’ll run around.'”
Scheinert explains, “The whole thing will be a performance art piece about a woman being dragged into an action movie with like celebrities around her.”
Kwan adds, “It would’ve been a little bit more charming, even rougher than it already is, but…”
“I would’ve worried for your mental health, just your mom every day,” Scheinert says. “So no, we didn’t have a backup plan and I’m sure there are so many incredible Asian American actresses out there that should and could star in a movie. We would love to see more and more movies with people like Michelle Yeoh starring in them. But right now she is a very unique artist.”
Kwan nails it on the head adding, “We’re so lucky. I mean, there’s no one like her, it would’ve been a disaster if she’d said no. Oh my God.”
Over the rest of the zoom interview, the Daniels discuss just how they tracked all the different timelines, the scene they are most proud of based on the film’s indie budget, and much, much more.
Please note: There are spoilers ahead if you have not seen the film. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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The Playlist: I read that there was a painting in your office that was slightly part of the inspiration for the movie. And I guess I’m looking at it right now. Right?
Dan Kwan: Right. And it’s actually, it might be a misunderstanding, but it wasn’t actually the impetus, it wasn’t the beginning seed. It was actually a guiding light when we were lost in the mess of the Maximus thing that we had accidentally created, looking at other Maximus art. We’d be like, “Oh, he painted this mess of a painting.” But when you pull back, it’s just a tree or you pull back, it’s just a house. And to us, we’re like, “Oh, let’s figure out what that was for our movie.” So, that was more of a way for us to clean it up. But where it starts? It’s really hard to answer that question because there’s two of us, two brains are always thinking. And so we have new ideas every day, every week. We’re just constantly adding more ideas to the pile. And one of the most appealing things about this movie was it was like a beautiful vessel to combine all of that. And the challenge to combine all of our ideas into one negative…
Daniel Scheinert: Although, really we just combined some of it.
Dan Kwan: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel Scheinert: Well, we needed to put a couple of our ideas in there. But I think it took a while before we were confident that this was the project we wanted to work on. And so it was kind of like a half-baked Sci-Fi idea until it became about a Chinese American family. And until we decided that we would go to so many multiverses all meaning came into question, and that became sort of the project of can you go there and what would it look like to watch our mom go there?
The Playlist: You guys are such visual filmmakers. Do you like writing? Is that part of your process? Or did this take three years to write?
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah. [Laughs.]
Dan Kwan: You’re very perceptive. We never thought of ourselves as writers. We did music videos and part of that process was we had to come up with ideas. And so we sort of practiced the muscle of coming up with ideas through that. And then by the time Hollywood was calling and being like, Hey, do you guys want to work on a feature sometime? We started reading a lot of scripts and just kind of ended up really frustrated by the fact that nothing was talk, nothing was speaking to us in the same way that our own work was. And so that’s when we decided maybe we should just try to write something and see what happens. And we’re still frustrated by the process. We’re not really good at it, but I think that’s part of the reasons why we’re so adventurous is because we don’t know better, we’re like, “Sure we can try this out.” But I think we have learned to, we’ve come to respect what a screenplay is for and why it is formatted the way it is and all those things. But it was definitely a long journey to get there where we were not, it did not feel intuitive because we love imagery. We love to just act it out. You know, all the things that we use when we make music videos, weren’t applicable to a screenplay.
Daniel Scheinert: I think we’ve learned to like it and we’ve learned which parts of it we like and how to take advantage of the fact that we like acting things out and we’re like, “Oh that’s allowed. Let’s get it on our feet and figure out the scene.” And we like listening to music and looking at images and planning images. And that’s allowed, even though the screenplay is going to be just words.
The Playlist: There are so many jumps between universes in this film. Obviously, it helps that there are two of you but how do you make this movie in the sense of tracking every single word, every single decision, thread and all the continuity?
Daniel Scheinert: I think it’s a constant journey, but on one hand, Dan is really good at keeping track of all the details and of weaving things through and has a little bit of a beautiful mind-brain sometimes about that. But also we don’t sweat the small stuff. I think there’s something so funny about how obsessed people are with continuity when rarely does that decide whether or not I like a movie or not. Very rarely am I like a movie is ruined because the eye lines weren’t quite the same, that’s the icing, but it’s not the cake. And so I’ve learned to respect the details more than I used to, but always focusing on the forest more than the trees is important to us when we bite off such stupidly ambitious movies.
Dan Kwan: And so we knew what we had to be perfectionists about because those were the things that without the film would fall apart and then everything else, we kind of knew which buckets to throw them in, but we weren’t precious about it. And as long as we knew why each thing was in each bucket or the fact that sometimes our crew members would reach into a bucket and replace it with whatever they had, because we didn’t have the resources to be particular, at least we knew in our heads how it was going to edit together in a way that would make sense. So, the final product feels very intentional and it is pretty close to the original script, but all the little details we just kind of allowed the universe to fill in and we just filtered it through in a way that we knew we could organize later in the edit.
Daniel Scheinert: And I will say that we had a great script supervisor who helped a lot named Julia Schachter and also every department had taken it upon themselves to care about the trees so that I could just worry about the forest. And that was great to have smart people focused on their details.
The Playlist: You had to have some sequences that you storyboarded out. This couldn’t have just been a shot list movie, right?
Daniel Scheinert: So there’s one scene that I storyboarded, everything else is shot listed just like from our heads and with our DP’s lurking. But it’s just the opening basically going from the mirror in and watching the family run around the apartment and downstairs into the laundromat. That opening sequence, which is very little effects, very little action, or whatever. But for some reason, because we were building that set, the apartment building is all built so that we could have it very specific, we had to storyboard it. So we knew exactly what we wanted to build. Otherwise, we would build something and maybe get frustrated. And so that was actually the only time.
Dan Kwan: That’s the only storyboard. And then we are very shot-listy because we also are compromising constantly, and it’s so hard to compromise and roll with the punches when there’s drawings. But the only exception is that our stunt team did a lot of pre-visualization of the fight scenes. And so those, we had a rough little movie that wasn’t quite what we wanted, but we had it as a jumping-off point to be like, “Oh yeah, do that shot. But not that one. This one we’re going to change in this way.” And that was the only way we could have shot those fight scenes so fast.
The Playlist: Even though it looks like it cost much more, this was not even a $30 million budget film. Is there one sequence or one moment you still can’t believe you pulled off?
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah. I mean, a lot. [Laughs.]
Dan Kwan: The whole movie I look back I’m like, this is one…
Daniel Scheinert: One of the things we did a lot was running with the theme of prioritizing. We would tell department heads, don’t blow all your money on this gag. It’s not important. And so we told the stunt team that when Harry Shum Jr. is running with Michelle on his shoulders, we can figure out a visual effect solution. It’s not worth blowing our budget on wires, out in the streets, and Tim Eulich, [our stunt co-ordinator], and our key rig, Colin Follenweider were just so excited about the challenge that they figured out a system and tested it out and did it anyway. And they were like, “We can do it. We can do it.” And it was so worth it just to be able to see them take turns, running on each other’s shoulders, sprinting down the streets, like they were just supported with a cable. So there was no actual lifting needed and it just made it so cinematic and cool.
Dan Kwan: But that’s how, every department was like that. [The] raccoon wasn’t supposed to look that good, but our friend, Jason Hammers, was just like “We’re going to do it. I’m going to fully make Raccoon amazing.” But that’s a microcosm of how our sets run. We tell them what matters. And then they tell us what matters to them. And then they’re going to, even if we don’t tell them to put a lot of time into it, they still do, because they’re passionate, people are willing to make the things better than they should be. But to answer your question, I think
Daniel Scheinert: And then we get the credit.
Dan Kwan: Exactly. To answer your question, though, I’d probably call it the empathy fight. It’s when Michelle nice-ness everyone to death. You know she kills them with kindness up the stairwell. That was our goal with our action movie to end in a place where the opposite of violence is the solution. It was very hard, but also on the day it was just really taxing, just paper flying everywhere, wind everywhere. People were trying to do action while s**t was flying everywhere. And that was such a pain in the butt. But then to weave it into the rest of the movie and know that it was all going to work like that it all just feels like a miracle.
“Everything Everywhere All At Once” is currently in limited release. It opens nationwide on April 8.