- Title: 'Everything Everywhere' creators set out to surprise with sci-fi action comedy
- Date: 10th May 2022
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (MAY 4, 2022) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) FILMMAKERS DANIEL KWAN AND DANIEL SCHEINERT, KNOWN AS DANIELS, SAYING: SCHEINERT "It's so scary because I don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin and my English is pretty bad, too." KWAN "I feel like it was really funny, too, because I guess that's how my family speaks. My dad's side is from Hong Kong,
- Embargoed: 24th May 2022 12:31
- Keywords: Daniel Kwan Daniel Scheinert Daniels Everything Everywhere Everything Everywhere All At Once Jackie Chan Jamie Lee Curtis Ke Huy Quan Michelle Yeoh Stephanie Hsu
- Location: VARIOUS
- City: VARIOUS
- Country: UK
- Topics: Arts/Culture/Entertainment,Europe,Film
- Reuters ID: LVA009701210052022RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:As its title suggests, "Everything Everywhere All At Once", a new film by creator duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, takes audiences on a multi-sensorial and multi-lingual adventure across multiple universes.
The movie stars Michelle Yeoh as laundromat owner Evelyn Wang who is having trouble connecting with her family and struggling to pay her taxes.
Preoccupied by an upcoming visit by her ageing, estranged father and an audit from the taxman, things come to a head during a meeting with an IRS agent (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) when her husband unexpectedly introduces her to an alternate universe.
To add to her confusion, Evelyn and versions of who she might have become with different life choices, are tasked with saving the entire system of universes from impending doom.
To help her, Evelyn is bestowed with special skills, she verse jumps from one universe to another.
"This is an action movie in which there is no villain. The villain is existence. The villain is an unloving universe," Kwan told Reuters during a visit to London to promote the movie.
"The multiverse is such a terrible thing to explore in narrative or in film, because the moment you introduce the idea of infinite possibilities, nothing that happens in this movie matters anymore. We thought that was so funny and so strange, and we asked ourselves 'could we make a movie that stares directly at this problem?'" he said.
"And that became an opportunity to kind of explore scary thoughts and philosophically kind of like resonant feelings that the more we talked about it, we're like, that's kind of what the 21st century feels like," added Scheinert in the joint interview.
The duo, collectively known as Daniels, who have previously directed music videos and the 2016 film "Swiss Army Man" started outlining the story in 2016, writing several drafts over three years.
"I think we have thousands of pages of notes that we would just be like 'oh, maybe that universe. Maybe that universe'," said Scheinert.
"I think one of the things we were always trying to do is surprise ourselves, because if we're surprising ourselves, then we will surprise the audience. And it takes a lot nowadays to surprise people because we've seen it all," added Kwan.
"Everything's a sequel. Everything's part of a franchise or a remake. And because of that, we had to constantly rewrite because we were like, we kept searching for things that really felt fresh."
The filmmakers said they initially planned to make a two-hander with Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh in the lead as a married couple.
The final version features Yeoh as the main lead, with nods to her varied real-life career, with Ke Huy Quan starring as her husband Waymond and Stephanie Hsu as their adult daughter Joy.
"When we realised that Jackie Chan is unbelievably expensive and famous and busy we just decided to focus more of our attention on Michelle's character because we already loved her and her character. And honestly, the script came alive. So it was for the best," said Scheinert.
"The more we focused on the mother, the more stories we shared about our mums, our aunts, our grandmothers and the more it became an action film we hadn't seen a hundred times, you know," he added.
In an additional sensory twist, the Daniels wrote the film's dialogue in a mix of Mandarin, Cantonese and English.
"It's so scary because I don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin and my English is pretty bad, too," Scheinert joked.
"I feel like it was really funny, too, because I guess that's how my family speaks," said Kwan, whose parents hail from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
"It was a really great opportunity for this movie because the film is about a family that already lives in a multiverse before they even go into the science-fiction version of it. They're all in their own universes, they're all in their own bubbles with different languages. They're looking past each other, speaking past each other. And so the metaphor of that language barrier just felt really interesting," said Kwan.
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" which has been a box office hit in the United States, is released in UK cinemas on Friday (May 13).
(Production: Hanna Rantala) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2022. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: None