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The idea that we can overcome nihilism by embracing kindness is a beautiful concept, explains editor Paul Rogers
Everything Everywhere All at Once sure lives up to its title. The sci-fi comedy “takes the red-pill mind-screw of The Matrix and multiplies it by infinity,” writes Variety.
The feature stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a lowly laundromat owner who discovers that she can experience endless dimensions simultaneously. In the internal logic of the film, somewhere there is a universe in which anything that could have happened to Evelyn actually did happen. That means there is a timeline where she is living a parallel life as a huge Hong Kong action star, and an opera singer, and a maid, and a teppanyaki-style chef… ad infinitum.
To infinity and beyond
Writers and co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert wanted that sense of infinity — of all of the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, and all of the tiny moving pieces underneath it — to remain top-of-mind for the audience. Even if that meant fraying their minds.
“The approach was to throw out the rules of traditional filmmaking and just whatever works then it works,” says editor Paul Rogers. “Dan and Daniel wanted to make a film, and then to break that film, and then we want it to rebuild itself.”
Rogers previously worked with the filmmakers (collectively known as the Daniels) to make the equally absurd Swiss Army Man, which featured Daniel Radcliffe playing a flatulent corpse.
“They’d been working on Everything Everywhere for 6 or 7 years and although it seems like there was a lot of experimentation – and there was – almost all of it was already in their minds by the time we shot.”
In prep, the Daniels spent an hour and a half acting out the movie scene by scene to Rogers. “There was a big giant whiteboard on the wall with diagrams and sketches of all these universes marked- ‘hotdog finger’ or ‘Alphaverse’ or ‘rock world’. It was all nonsense at the beginning but it slowly became clear that we were telling a very emotional story.”
A world of boundless choice
The script originally centred on a father and his attempt at reconciliation with his teen daughter. With Yeoh on board, the story remains a family drama at heart, which is why it has resonated with audiences, becoming a major hit for indie studio A24 and taking over $50 million worldwide.
You can also read it as an attempt to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice.
“If there was a bare bones unengaging story at the centre then the whole project would not work,” says Rogers. “Once we’d established the emotion of a mother struggling to reconnect with her daughter then we could really go to town on all the other flights of fancy.”
These are deliberately overcomplicated metaphors for the generational gaps, communication errors and ideological differences that might happen within any family. Critics say the unhinged imagination on display will leave viewers exhausted, but that could be intentional.
“We wanted people to be overwhelmed and as confused as Evelyn is but not frustrated. More confused and curious. There’s a fine line between overwhelmed, curious and excited and overwhelmed and ‘I can’t take it any more’. We trod that line carefully.”
Surreal and comic imagery
In an era of information overload, the filmmakers aren’t afraid to overload the experience. Rogers uses split screens and blurry overlay effects. There are rapidly shifting light sources and dizzying flashing lights that disorient the viewer.
The shift between universes is often accompanied by a change in aspect ratio. Surreal and comic imagery includes an entire scene involving sentient rocks, a person’s head explodes into confetti, a naked man flies in slow-motion toward the camera.
“I’ve always loved making music videos where the budgets are so low it gives you an insane freedom to experiment. You get to stretch and push and massage that footage and reshape it with any tricks you can whether that’s something as simple as sound design or colour or taking it into After Effects and tweaking things, changing out a background or a prop or an extra in the background.
“We did a lot of little split screens in the footage that you’ll never even notice, of just combining two takes or retiming a wide shot so that everyone is moving in symphony with each other.”
When Evelyn’s husband Waymond becomes Alpha Waymond in the Alpha universe of the film, Rogers devised “a scraping metal Terminator like sound” to coincide with when the character takes his glasses off. When a “reversed bell” sound rings, it’s another trigger to take the audience into another universe.
Stress after stress after stress
“We were in post for a year. We had a three-hour cut which was too exhausting and frustrating. It took a lot of trims to get it that sweet spot. In retrospect, once you’ve seen the movie, the opening seems pretty chilled. But if you go back and watch it, it’s stress after stress after stress in the laundromat and then we kick it into second gear once the Alphaverse enters. Then it doesn’t stop until the Rock universe.”
The film squashes and stretches the conventional three-act dramatic structure to extremes, as if the movie itself were jumping through a fracturing multiverse.
“We worked hard to make sure the Rock universe didn’t arrive when the viewer was past the point of no return. We hit them with the Rock universe when they’re saying: ‘I don’t know if I can take any more!’ And we give them that pause for breath and then they’re hopefully prepared for the big final frantic push at the end of the film.”
Much of Everything Everywhere was shot in a warehouse in Southern California. “It was big enough that we could wreck one part of the building, then walk away and just go somewhere else in the complex to continue filming while our team restored the initial part of the building,” says production designer Jason Kisvarday.
Jumping through a fractured multiverse
The film appears to satirise Marvel’s ever-expanding universe and arrives almost day and day with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Rogers says this is coincidental.
“Dan and Daniel have been working on the idea of the multiverse long before it became a theme in blockbuster movies.”
That said there are dozens of cinematic references in Everything Everywhere from The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey to In the Mood For Love and Ratatouille.
“Woven into the fabric of this film are a lot of Dan and Daniels’ favourite movies,” Rogers says. “One of them is Holy Motors, the 2012 fantasy drama film written and directed by Leos Carax.
“We screened this film before starting as the type of film you can make if you disregard the rules,” Rogers says. “In Holy Motors you have no idea minute to minute even second to second what’s going to happen next and that’s a really exciting place to be as an audience member.”
“For me, Everything Everywhere’s core idea is embodied in Waymond’s speech when he conveys the idea that we can overcome nihilism by embracing kindness. That is such a beautiful concept for me that I hoped audiences would response the same way.”
Moviegoers with limber imaginations may well appreciate the “lunatic ambition and nutso execution” of this high-concept hurricane, says Variety, “which ricochets like a live-action cartoon.”
Less versatile viewers it warns, will emerge frazzled, “like Wile E. Coyote after swallowing a stick of dynamite: their heads charred, blinking blankly as smoke wafts from their ears.”
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