Everything Everywhere All at Once directors: ‘A multiverse is the perfect metaphor for living in 2022’

Even beyond spending nights on the town with acclaimed filmmakers, it's not difficult to see why the duo are in such excitable form. Since their film was released in the US last month, it's been met with an astonishingly enthusiastic reception – inspiring all sorts of positive reviews and even becoming the highest-rated film of all time on the popular app Letterboxd. That success is beyond even the pair's wildest dreams, and Scheinert admits to being rather taken aback by all the adulation.

"We're very proud of the movie, but we thought it would...we knew it would challenge people," he says. "So we were kind of prepared for a divisive conversation. But it's been so humbling and beautiful that it means so much to so many people on an emotional level, like so many people are moved by it. And also having filmmakers we admire, that inspired us, say that this movie is inspiring them to take risks... it's like, Oh my God, that's the highest compliment I could get!"

As the title suggests, the film is many things at the same time. On the one hand, it's a head-spinning multiverse sci-fi, on the other an absurdist comic romp. Equally, it could be seen chiefly as an intimate portrayal of immigrant family dynamics or as a playful riposte to 21st-century nihilism. What, then, were the starting points for such a complex narrative?

"I said, 'I have a multiverse idea' and then Scheinert said, 'I hate multiverses. They make me feel nihilistic thoughts, and nothing matters," Kwan explains.

"And I was like, 'Okay, great. Let's make a movie that's nihilistic and acknowledges that!' Then it just kind of bounced back and forth until we're like, 'Oh, the multiverse is the perfect metaphor for what it feels like to live right now.' If we can explore all of our neuroses and fears through the multiverse, maybe we can learn something about ourselves. And so that was it, we're just chasing questions when we're making movies – we don't know the answers until we show it in front of an audience sometimes."

• Everything Everywhere All at Once review: Extremely ambitious and strikingly original

"And the last ingredient that was very early on was what if it's a Chinese American family?" Scheinert adds. "What if we get to pay tribute to the kung fu movies we love but instead of getting white people to do kung fu, what if it's, you know, an immigrant family? And so that was like an interesting personal fun thing, not just a high concept."

Multiverses are not exactly in short supply at the moment, in particular thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's adoption of the concept – with last December's Spider-Man: No Way Home and this month's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both making use of parallel universes. But rather than necessarily seeing their film in opposition to those behemoths, the Daniels reckon the other movies might have helped them make their point even more emphatically.

"Early on, we naively thought, 'Oh, we could set up the multiverse film and then destroy the multiverse film in one thing, and the audience could tag along,'" says Kwan. "And I think it would have worked for some people, but we're so lucky that the set-up has been done by a lot of great movies like [Spider-Man: Into the] Spider-Verse and things like that.

"And so the audience is tuned into it," he continues. "They are now prepared for this version of the film, of the multiverse concept, which is kind of meant to show how inherently problematic the multiverse is for narrative – you know, once the characters' decisions get watered down by every other universe, the character gets watered down, nothing matters. That was something we wanted to explore, and I don't think we would have been able to capture as many audience members if it wasn't for those movies."

While much of the film takes place in fantastical worlds rather different from our own – including one in which every human has hot dogs for fingers, and another which is populated only by sentient rocks – the first act of the movie is crucially devoid of any multiverse hijinks, introducing us to main character Evelyn Wang and her rather mundane existence as the owner of a frantic launderette. In these early scenes, we learn of her very real everyday stresses and the complex relations she has with various family members including her ailing father, gentle husband, and teenage daughter – whose girlfriend she has never fully accepted.

"It was so important," Scheinert says when asked how vital it was to get these early scenes right. "And it took us a while to get the confidence to do that, to be like, 'No, let's wait for it to get silly or high concept'.

"As soon as we were editing it and testing the movie on audiences, it really started to click how important it was that you care about these people before the movie gets really challenging. And also the only way to land the ending, what we're trying to say, and the emotions we're trying to hit, is if the foundation is strong at the start. So we did a lot of work refining the beginning based on people's feedback about the ending."

In many ways Everything Everywhere All at Once is rather a different proposition from the pair's previous film – Swiss Army Man, in which Daniel Radcliffe played a flatulent corpse – but one thing the two works absolutely have in common is an abundance of absurdist humour. With so many possibilities for ridiculous worlds presented by the multiverse concept, it gave the Daniels power to wildly experiment and get pretty much as zany as they wanted, and Kwan says there was one rule in terms of what could be included in the final film.

"One of the things we discovered on Swiss Army Man was that we accidentally came across the filmmaking style that took the term absurdist on both levels," he says. "On the philosophical level, it's absurdist, and also just from a comedy level, it's absurdist.

"And I think from a philosophical standpoint what we are always looking for are moments in which we can take things that feel comedically absurd, and then reinterpret it and give it new meaning and turn it into something strangely beautiful, strangely meaningful, strangely connected to our characters.

"So that's usually the litmus test," he goes on. "If we can't find a way to make the hot dog fingers something beautiful, then we should cut it out of the film. And so everything, even the rocks, it's like this is so dumb but if we can make you feel something, then that means we're transcending the joke. And it's no longer something that feels like it's too far or something that we have to cut."

"And other times, you know, we just try to make each other laugh," Scheinert cuts in. "Sometimes a few weeks later we get sick of the joke, and it's not funny anymore, and those jokes a lot of times fall by the wayside. Like witty banter, you know, isn't really... it gets old pretty fast. But our favourite jokes are ones that are funny to write, funny to shoot, and funny to edit – like, there's a new layer each step of the way."

Everything Everywhere All at Once is released in UK cinemas on 13th May. If you're looking for something else to watch, check out our TV Guide or visit our Movies hub for all the latest news.

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