Interview: Daniels on the Online Inspirations of Everything Everywhere All at Once

After their film Swiss Army Man, in which Daniel Radcliffe further distanced himself from his Harry Potter persona by playing a flatulent corpse, the bar was high for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (a.k.a. Daniels) to elevate their wondrous brand of whimsical, satiric surrealism. Their joint follow-up, Everything Everywhere All At Once, delivers on their singular fusion of spectacle, silliness, and sincerity. With the label A24’s patronage of the project, Kwan and Scheinert had enough budget to fully realize some of their most imaginative cinematic fantasies—of which there are many—without exploiting the endless possibilities of the multiverse for spinoff properties.

Within the heady construct of a multiversal story, Daniels locate the grounded story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a hardworking mother, wife, daughter, and business owner who feels as if she’s lost any sense of control over her life. That is, until, visitors from a timeline known as the “Alphaverse” open Evelyn’s eyes to a world of cosmic connections within which she must protect her priorities. The journey to save her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), ultimately forces Evelyn to confront that something greater than personal enmity divides them. A larger generational gap separates old-fashioned Evelyn from Joy the digital native, who sees the randomness of the world she inherits through a lens of intractable nihilism.

Daniels, who met while studying film at Emerson College, make for an ideal set of messengers to make the optimistic counterargument to this millennial malaise. As filmmakers, they rose to prominence with a series of short films and music videos that broke through the noise thanks to YouTube and Vimeo. But they’re also quite attuned to how the experience that helped make their names can break the brains of a society at large.

In a Zoom chat before the nationwide release of Everything Everywhere All at Once, I spoke with Daniels about cutting their teeth online, how the film responds to an intellectualized cultural discourse, and why they think the world has caught up to their style of storytelling.

You’ve mentioned YouTube being an inspiration for your work. How has the content itself, as well as the algorithmic way in which we consume it, affected the way you think about what kind of narrative audiences can accept?

Dan Kwan: Daaamn!

Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, let’s gooo!

DK: I will say that, early on in our careers, Vimeo and YouTube were just beginning to be a thing. We were still in film school, and everyone was competing against each other. I was like, “Why are you guys competing against each other? We have the whole world to compete against now!” I was a really anxious person growing up, and so I was like, “Holy shit, there are millions of other young promising filmmakers who are making incredible stuff. I need to be watching this stuff, I don’t need to go into class. I should be just watching Vimeo videos.”

DS: I remember your goal was to get Vimeo staff picked, and my goal was to be YouTube front paged in school. I was in a comedy troupe where we were trying to put out as much of the content as possible every other week, and we’d see that people were watching this stuff. Like, holy shit, tens of thousands of people are watching my extremely janky comedy shorts!

DK: And the funny thing is that back then we didn’t understand that there was an algorithm pushing forward things that were sensational, or would create some sort of controversy, or just trigger different emotions. Looking back on it now, of course that’s what we were doing. We were trying to push the envelope. And we realize now that we were chasing the algorithm, and in some ways we were collaborating with it. Because every time we made something, our videos would get more popular. It became this reinforcing loop. And the danger of that, obviously, is if we would go down that path for too long, [we could] end up making some really terrible stuff. And in the back of our heads, we were like, “Why are we wasting our time trying to make such shocking things? This stuff takes a lot of work, and I want to be proud of it.”

DS: I keep joking that we were a few bad decisions away from making, like, Pepe the Frog jokes. The internet could have turned into monsters! But luckily we had this conversation about not wasting people’s time and our own time and started trying to inject meaning into our videos…

DK: …into our Pepe-adjacent videos!

DS: One of the ones we like to talk about is a Chromeo music video we did where the rock ‘n’ roll gets women pregnant. Like, it’s such good rock ‘n’ roll that women are like…poof [motions growing stomach with arms]. And we’re like, “Well, that’s kind of that’s funny, but also like…why? Why would we put that out there?”

DK: It’s borderline misogynistic.

DS: So then it became this canvas. The music video is actually a fever dream of an absentee dad who’s afraid of being a father. He wakes up from the dream at the end and reaches out to his girlfriend, and we’re like, “Ooh, now we’re interested in this!”

DK: To answer your question, yes, the algorithm totally inspired our taste and voice and style…

DS: …but also us bucking the algorithm became the other half.

DK: As far as things that inspired it, I do think Cyriak was big.

DS: He’s an animator who would take one clip and see how many different ways he could ruin it. A cow eating grass is one of our favorites [“Cows Cows Cows”]. When then music hits in, the cows start dancing, and then they start growing more legs, and then there’s more cows and more cows and there’s cows on top the cows, cows inside the cows.

DK: That spiraled pretty deep. And “HowToBasic” was pretty formative early on. [There’s one video where a] guy pretends to teach you how to clean out your Xbox and instead he just shoves Big Macs in the Xbox and throws it down like an elevator shaft and then takes a bunch of raw eggs and smashes them. It’s kind of beautifully rhythmic, even though it’s horrifying.

DS: We started finding these montages on YouTube of people kissing in movies. The way it’s photographed, the aspect ratios, and the film stock just shift like crazy. And it’s filled with all these match cuts between movies from the last 100 years. They’re emotional and powerful, and you’re like, “Oh my god, yeah, kissing is cool!” It ended up being like very much an inspiration for some of the kind of mixed media, match cut, montage stuff we leaned into on this movie.

DK: Yeah, those cinema supercuts are sort of how we all look at media now. There are no rules, people are just like stealing shit from all over. Sometimes there’s still the water stamps on them; it doesn’t matter. You’re absorbing everything in this mush. And we felt like this movie needed to look and feel like that because it just felt accurate. Anyways, we could go on forever!

I don’t think that the syntax of cinema has necessarily caught up with the way that people are absorbing content in the way you describe. To use an example from a movie you cite as inspiration, Magnolia, I don’t think the raining frogs would be all that shocking to today’s audiences because people experience such wild tonal shifts when they’re consuming online video. From your end, does that free you up to take bigger risks in terms of how audiences can experience this collision of narratives and images?

DS: I don’t know if it frees us up, but it definitely makes movies hit us different. If you spend too much time on the internet, then movies that used to be really challenging feel pretty chill.

DK: It was never a conscious decision because we’ve been doing this stuff forever. For over 10 years now, we’ve been trying to collide these things. And, in some ways, I feel like the world just caught up. Because this movie was not really a reaction. We weren’t thinking, “Oh, I think audiences are ready for this!” It’s more of like, “This is what I want to see.” And we were not ready for this response. The fact that so many people are able to watch this movie where we have butt plug trophy fights and rock scenes that make you cry…we made it for us and the weirdos in the world that we knew we connect with. We didn’t expect general audiences to really eat it up in a way where I’m like, “Oh, the world is different. In the last five or six years that took us to make this film, something has changed.” And now the world is ready to absorb this absurdity and profundity at the same time, which is really cool.

DS: In some ways, we’re kind of upset with what the internet has done to our brains. We’re conflicted about it and are kind of exploring that in the movie. So it’s like a freedom and a burden. The internet has made us like numb to normal human experiences, like our brains weren’t supposed to look at feeds. We didn’t evolve for this, and it’s hard to tell what it’s doing to our mental health. In the movie, Jobu and Joy grew up on the internet, and Evelyn didn’t. This generation gap between us and our parents is unique. We’re kind of playing with that in the movie, and criticizing/just reflecting on that because it’s scary.

In terms of reflecting that internet brain while also criticizing it, were you setting any rules or grounding principles at the script stage?

DK: Yeah, we threw a lot at the wall, and we had a lot of fun. But then, the process of editing and allowing the synergies to be sharpened, we realized it was all about Evelyn—the main character, this mother, this wife, this daughter—in the middle of his chaos. Whenever she’s feeling confused, and the story asks a lot of her, then we can go crazy and off the rails. We can introduce Raccacoonie as a horror movie or the hot dog universe has a love story because the audience is confused and out of sorts, and Evelyn is at the same time. And then whenever things need to be clarified or more specific, we would bring it back down. And so it was it became pretty obvious to us near the end of writing when we could push things too far and when we couldn’t because it was all based around her journey.

DS: In the screenwriting, that suddenly gave us permission to focus on things. It was like, “Okay, that’s good for Evelyn’s character arc.” And then in shooting and editing, we would just point that camera at Michelle Yeoh, and it would just ground the movie. It’d be like, “Oh, we’re going a little too far, point at her! Okay, great, we’re back and know where we are.” She’s such an empathic, talented actress that she made the movie work in that way.

Is there an effort to reclaim or redefine absurdity in the way that your films’ randomness and strangeness in your work function as cries for the characters desperately pining for possibility and meaning in the universe—not nothingness.

DS: Are we absurdist romantic humanists?

DK: Yeah, something like that! When we were finishing Swiss Army Man, that’s when I started to make that connection. I was like, “Oh, our work is absurdist in multiple definitions of that word.” The idea that nothing matters, so anything can matter is such a fun challenge to a filmmaker. I can take two rocks and subtitles, sitting doing nothing, and I can make you feel something. It’s such a beautiful realization because, if you apply that to your own life, you can make anything matter. It’s such a superpower in some ways. Rather than it being this prison that we’re in, this idea that nothing matters, it opens up the possibility for anything to matter. And how beautiful is that? And it’s been really cool getting messages from people who have seen the movie who just wanted to let us know, “Thank you so much, I was going down a really bad path. I saw this movie, I realized anything is possible, and I don’t need to be so fatalistic about it. I can look at it through a million other lenses and maybe find a better way forward.” Yeah, absurdity, we were reading Camus and stuff like that when we were working on Swiss Army Man. It’s obviously still bleeding into this movie as well. Read into it all you want!

Is there a right or optimal way to experience the film? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think it works better to just feel your way through. But knowing how current cinephile culture reacts to multiverse storytelling, people may try to “solve” the movie. There’s probably already an “ending explained” video for this on YouTube already…

DS: I don’t react well to movies needing to be solved, or the idea that a perfect movie is one that’s air-tight and didn’t have any continuity errors. It’s like, “What? No, who cares?” That’s how you make a good car engine! A couple of people have given us a compliment that made me feel really good where they’re like, “The movie got harder and harder to keep up with, but it was a fun challenge.” It made the audience just give up and feel their way through it. We’re so proud of the second half of this movie and the fact that we made an accessible movie that hopefully makes that experience a little easier than an art film where you have to just, square one, give yourself over to it. There’s no right interpretation, but the optimal way to experience it is when Evelyn gives up, you kind of have to as well.

DK: You’re right, this movie is 100% a response to the over-intellectualizing of film consumption. It’s all about, how am I going to review this later. Even when you’re watching the movie, you’re like, “Oh, we’re at the bottom of the second act now, I can feel it!” You don’t have the language for it, but we’ve seen so many movies that you just have this like internal clock and you know exactly where you are in the movie. This film was meant to just destroy all that. It smacks you in the face for even trying. It’s like, don’t try! Stop! Give up, let go! I think the people who really struggle with this movie or can’t connect with this movie are the people who never want to let go. Which I think is fine, that’s their right.

DS: I think it’s true of modern life and politics, too. We try to look for holes and try to airtight analyze every family member’s Facebook posts to make sure they don’t accidentally say something wrong. I’m guilty of this too. There’s something so obvious but hard about just kind of like, [sighs]. Just accepting another human to see what they’re trying to say and not intellectualize every single aspect of what they posted on Facebook. It’s hard to communicate with our parents sometimes. It’s helpful sometimes just to be like, “listen, let’s just hug.”