Everything Everywhere All at Once told by its directors

Decoding the multiverse film with Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan that caused a sensation at the 2023 Oscars.

This article was originally published in Première n°532 (September 2022).

Everything Everywhere All at Once was broadcast for the first time in the clear on Friday evening on France 5. If you missed it, don't panic, the film, which won multiple awards at the 2023 Oscars, can be viewed for free in streaming on the France Télévision website for a month. And to prolong the pleasure, here is its analysis by its director duo, whom we met for its theatrical release.

After playing with a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, Daniel Scheinert And Daniel Kwan dive Michelle Yeoh at the heart of the multiverse with Everything Everywhere All at Once. A massive indie success across the Atlantic, which is fueled as much by science fiction as by Hong Kong cinema. Dissection in three acts in the company of “Daniels”.
By François Léger

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the true multiverse of madness [critique]

The visual joke in the style of Michel Gondry
In Everything Everywhere All at Oncepeople are sometimes led by raccoons in a way Ratatouille and at other times have fingers as long and soft as sausages. A big joke? A tribute to the DIY and dreamlike universe of Michel Gondry? “Aesthetically, Gondry is a pillar for us”says Daniel Scheinert. Philosophically, it is debatable: instead of using phantasmagorical visions to reveal the inner world of the characters, Everything Everywhere prefers to confront them with absurd situations to trigger enlightenment in them. “Very true. We like it to be funny, almost a joke, but we only succeeded if we managed to create an unexpected emotion from something completely wacky. On the sausage finger scenes, we kept repeating to Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh that at the end, it wasn’t going to be funny at all but simply beautiful, and that it was going to tell something of the order of the unspoken by the characters. They looked at us, not convinced: “Yeah.” (Laughs.)

The Kaufmanian temptation
The track “Gondryesque” logically refers us to another, that of Charlie Kaufman, brilliant screenwriter (in particular) ofEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Everything Everywhere has, a priori, the trappings: mental speleology, mannerist chaos, metafiction as a weapon of combat, existential farce. “I would have a hard time telling you that our basic idea doesn't have a Kaufmanian flavor,” admits Daniel Kwan. “But where we stray from it is in the absence of postmodernism, beyond the very concept of the film, of course. Everything was already imbued with this spirit, and if we have long played with the desire to add more, doing so would have taken us away from our purpose. The line was clear: high concept Matrixian, but with an authentically fun, personal and existentialist vision.” Scheinert, for his part, readily cites Holy Motors Or A Ghost Storybut in this little game of references, it is perhaps the Mr Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael which would best sum up the humanist intentions of the two authors.

Deconstructing the Hero's Journey
Everything Everywhere is unique in that the storyline doesn't have an antagonist per se – at least not quite. Daniel Kwan explains that he wanted “deconstructing the Hero’s Journey, the whole concept of bad guy and good guy, good and evil. We always thought it rang false.”. Result: it is existence itself that serves as the villain. And Kwan refers to the interview given by Stanley Kubrick to Playboy in 1968, who questioned the indifference of the universe towards us. “He basically said that if you can accept this indifference, then life can have meaning. He had this sentence: “No matter how great the darkness, we must create our own light.” It became like a guide for the film. The challenge was then to convey this idea as subtly as possible to the audience. With this nagging question constantly in our minds: were we going to be able to make it all as fun as it was? Kill Bill ? »

Michelle Yeoh's Celebration
Questioned by the Hollywood ReporterJamie Lee Curtis is the one who best sums up Michelle Yeoh's position: ” Everything Everywhereit's the perfect meeting between a role and an actress who has been patiently waiting for us to finally give her our fucking attention.” Admitted to the Hollywood club in the late 90s (Tomorrow never dies), the Malaysian star was subsequently relegated to supporting roles in America. “We didn't think about feminism or inclusion when we chose Michelle. The truth is that we only wanted her.”swears Daniel Kwan, who grew up worshipping her through the pirated VHS tapes of Hong Kong films his father brought back. “The best Hollywood action films have been heavily influenced by Asian cinema and we wanted to reconnect with this mix of cultures. And show that Michelle is so much more than a gifted fighter.” In a few scenes of the film, Yeoh is a movie star in a universe that looks very much like In the Mood for Love. A way to put it back in its rightful place on the great cinematic chessboard. Scheinert: “We even wanted her to embody the Michelle Yeoh of our universe. But it was too meta for her! However, we fed off what she is in real life.” Which allows the film to be read as much as a reflection on the actress's personality as on her career. “I think they do the same thing with Jonathan Ke Quan and James Hong. In fact, they say in Hollywood: “There was such untapped potential, why didn't you see it?” »continues the filmmaker.

The immigrant story
In his review ofEverything Everywherethe site The Verge speaks of a “horror story of immigrants in the middle of tax season.” A fun way to evoke both the relentless administrative machine that launches the story, and the trajectory of this family of Chinese origin settled in the United States who no longer know how to dialogue. On this point, Everything Everywhere is part of a recent tradition of films in which Asian-Americans finally tell their previously untold family stories, usually through the incomprehension between the new generation and the previous ones (Minari, Red Alert, The Farewell…). It’s all about language, voices to be heard, legacies that are too heavy to bear and ambitions that go beyond simple assimilation: “There were so many fun and interesting parallels to draw between the very sci-fi concept of the multiverse and the very down-to-earth lives of immigrants, of parents who speak a different language than you do. In every sense of the word, actually.”says Scheinert.

Wachowskian Philosophy
The figure of the Chosen One, kung-fu, SF and meta ambitions… The Daniels make no secret of it: Everything Everywhere is their answer to Matrix. “Except that Lana Wachowski managed to get ahead of us with Resurrections, Kwan acknowledges. But our particularity – I would almost say our credo – was the refusal of violence as an answer to everything. A sacred challenge: can a character love another until death? Can we kill with kindness? And how to end a film with an action scene where we understand each other better as human beings? The duo attempts to solve the equation by drawing on the philosophy inherent in kung fu (“to which Matrix also fueled »), and relies on the cosmic trip style Cloud Atlas. “It allows you to do things that wouldn't work in another context, Scheinert continues. We seize upon clichés to explore potentially terribly corny cinematic territories: a warrior pose suddenly becomes a hug; a simple little finger is used to fight… All this with the aim of making you believe in the power of goodness or kindness. Lana Wachowski certainly couldn't have said it better.

Pop culture in kaleidoscope
The multiplicity of being and the links between past and present run through Everything Everywhere. A vision that obviously echoes Evelyn's (Michelle Yeoh) quest for identity, but also a mirror held up to the film industry. Daniel Kwan: “There is no more “monoculture” now. No one watches or reads the same thing on a large scale anymore. The common dialogue around works that mark their time – except perhaps the Marvel films – has been over since 2000 or 2010. The industry is desperately trying to find a collective culture again. Some speak of “cultural fracking” : we drill into the past in search of the time when the whole world found itself on the same basis. Hence the massive arrival of a meta cinema, very conscious of looking back, built on the ashes of its own glory. We remake Top Gun, we make films again and again Batman. Because new ideas, new stories, will never bring people together as much as the old ones. No one wants to take the risk of novelty anymore. We try to bring up the subject on our modest scale, but the ultimate snub is Lana Wachowski, forced to shoot Matrix 4 – the film would have been made with or without her – and who gives a monumental middle finger to this process of rebooting his own work.

The Anti-Marvel Multiverse
Popularized by Marvel productions (No Way Home, Doctor Strange 2…Let’s put the excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse apart), the multiverse is already beginning to show its limits in the superheroic framework. The Daniels seize it to transform it into an overpowering narrative tool, capable of examining the flaws and missed actions of their characters. A way, also, of placing all their obsessions in the same film. “It allowed us to put side by side, in the same film, things that were a priori contradictory, Kwan analysis. And we skimmed through a bunch of ideas that never saw the light of day. Let's just say that the multiverse was a really fun and practical container, but sometimes too big. It could become anything. However, the concept pushed us to go beyond the limits.” Daniel Scheinert: “We knew that we would only allow ourselves to make this film if we explored totally absurd existential territories…” Kwan cuts him off, smiling: “Otherwise, it would have felt like we were making a Marvel movie. (Laughs.) We would have felt bad for not going far enough.”