Second-film syndrome is a common ailment among filmmakers. With the success of your first feature, you may have accumulated all the cultural capital that you need in order to make an ambitious and interesting follow-up. It can end up horribly: After all, Icarus flew too close to the sun, etc., and there are thousands upon thousands of tales where great artists are brought low by biting off more than they can chew. It seemed like all those elements were there for Daniel Scheniert and Daniel Kwan, better known as the filmmaking duo Daniels, after their first feature Swiss Army Man achieved no small amount of immediate notoriety following its release in 2016. How on Earth do you follow up a moving film about a farting corpse besides going bigger and broader? How do you keep that heart?
Well, if anything, their new film, Everything Everywhere All at Once, is proof positive that second film syndrome doesn’t have to be a curse: It’s a beautiful, funny, and immensely moving tale about a woman (Michelle Yeoh) trying to do her taxes and save the laundromat that she owns with her husband (Ke Huy Quan), who stumbles into her place in a big, broad and weird multiverse. There’s a whole lot to chew on here, and we did our best to discuss it with the directors during an interview with the pair at The Liberty Hotel in Boston, not too far from where the pair met as students at Emerson College.
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Vanyaland: So, I didn’t know a single thing about Everything Everywhere aside from the A24 synopsis, which is wonderfully vague. And I was so surprised. Not because of the ambition, because you guys are clearly ambitious, given Swiss Army Man, and in that, you took this high concept idea, and just pursued it to all of these interesting emotional ends. And I’m wondering… in the process of researching for this interview, I read something about you guys reaching a deal with A24 in 2017 to make this. And so you took a couple of years and got started shooting and all that. And I’m curious, how did you manage scaling up for this project? It’s in such a different sphere than your previous film: It’s a big, broad action movie with plenty of complex sci-fi stuff in it. Did you just go all out and put every idea you had on the page in there?
Daniel Scheniert: We definitely, right from the beginning, wanted to write this differently than before. And to balance broad appeal with something still very personal and provocative. And so, we outlined it in the winter of 2016, and then for the first time read some screenwriting books, and then we were like, “Okay, so that’s the rule. Maybe we could break it, or follow it,” but it definitely… We changed our writing process. That changed it, and also we took our time. I think this time I was less upset about the rewrite process. I was like, “No, no, no, we’re going to rewrite it. It’s going to get turned inside out a few times.”
And, we did that, and it’s always so sad to throw entire characters in the trash, but there was something about… It took us a few drafts to discover who Waymond was, and who Evelyn was. And Alpha Waymond wasn’t even in the first two drafts, it was some other guy. So, we just leaned into the process, and simultaneously tried to respect screenwriting more. And I think it was easy to do because we knew we were going to break it. Right from square one, we were like, “Oh, eventually all meaning will fall apart.” And that gave us permission to be like, ‘Okay, then we’ll start in a classical “characters want things’ place.”
Kwan: It’s funny that you asked, “Did we just go all out on this one?” And the answer is yes. I do think that for a long time, and maybe now I’m finally over this feeling, but for basically our whole career, I have this feeling that every project is going to be our last. Something’s going to happen. One of us is going to die, or this next pro-
Scheniert: We legitimately both thought about like, ‘Okay, releasing Swiss Army Man with just one of us, that’ll be crazy, but appropriate.” Release takes so long. You’re just like, “One of us is going to die.” [laughs]
Kwan: I also just can’t believe we get to make movies. And so I’m always just like, “No one’s going to let us make another one after this.” And there’s this anxiety that this might be the last time I get to do something. And so, even from the very beginning, every single one of our — even our small music videos, our first music video ever, it’s just like, “I need to put everything into this, just in case.”
Kwan: And the definition of everything, grew with our abilities, and grew with our crew’s abilities. And so even Swiss Army Man, as small as it is, as quaint as it is, compared to this movie, Swiss Army Man was everything. I’m like, “I need to put everything into this movie just in case. Everything I can think of, everything…” They become —
Scheniert: The human experience. [laughs]
Kwan: …the human experience, to the best of our abilities, as first-time feature directors. Each project becomes a time capsule of who I was at the time. And so, that’s what this movie was. And the wild part about it is that our careers have grown in a way that our crew is able to pull it off now. We have all the tools and resources to pull off something that literally has everything. And I’m very scared of what’s going to be the next project. Because I don’t know what everything’s going to mean to me in the next project.
Scheniert: We outlined something simpler, and now we’re like, “We will make it.”
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Yeah. It’s interesting you bring that up, because I remember hearing an interview with Josh and Benny Safdie, right before Uncut Gems was going to come out, where they were just like, “Well, this is the project. This is what we’ve always wanted to do. I don’t know what our lives are going to look like after this, because we’ve now gotten the capital to make this one film.” And it’s interesting because I think I —
Scheniert: That’s funny.
I definitely see that ethos in your work, really just putting everything into it, and doing that stuff. No one can ever accuse you guys of half-assing anything.
Kwan: Yeah, we’re Try Hard Cinema.
Scheniert: Headline: Dan Kwan calls his own… sorry. [Laughs]
But, so I’m just thinking about it in the sense of how you do that. It’s clear that it’s in the text itself as well, for both of these things. So I’m just wondering, when you identify with your characters, and when you’re creating them, and you put things of yourself in them, do you think that subconsciously maybe reflects that desire to just live life to the fullest, with the opportunities you’ve got?
Scheniert: For sure. I mean something we were reflecting on yesterday, I don’t know if it was yesterday, but was that in some ways, we enjoy aspirational filmmaking, biting off a project that we don’t know where it’s going to take us, or if we can pull it off logistically, but also emotionally and philosophically. Where’s that going to take us? And that way we don’t get bored and we learn something along the way.
Kwan: Yeah, we write projects that will force us to grow into the filmmakers that can make those projects. Because this movie should be impossible. Why do we even try to do it? It’s so stupid, but I think that’s what drives us, we had to grow, and we had to learn, and we just had to become better filmmakers, and better human beings and be able to play with all of this stuff.
Scheniert: Dan’s metaphor was, “We threw a football to our future selves.” And we were like, “Okay, catch this.” And then four years later we’re like, “Oh, I think I… Oh, maybe we figured it out.”
Kwan: Well, yeah. It’d be like if we through football to our future selves, and then we realized, “Oh, shit. I don’t know the rules to football. My body doesn’t know how to do any this.”
Scheniert: I got slippery hands.
Kwan: Yeah. Exactly. So basically spent four or five years just training, and taking steroids. [laughs]
Scheniert: That’s what it takes.
Kwan: Yeah, exactly. And then finally, when it was time to catch it, I’m really proud of the fact that we were able to get that into the end zone, into the hoop. Sports metaphors?
Well, continuing the sports metaphor, there’s a David Foster Wallace essay I read a long time ago about the finality of sports memoir, and if you’re completing the big catch in the Super Bowl, and all that sort of stuff, you’re not going to be able to really write about it, because your body is so much in that moment that you can’t pick up on the observational things around you. And so it’s hard to replicate and put that feeling into words. And I’m just wondering, is the experience of a shoot like that for you? Do you come out with a collection of memories, and all of these experiences together, or does it just go, “I’m at work. I’m working here, my body is here right now. And when I put together this story later on, I’m not going to have much left to draw from”?
Scheniert: I think… ask follow-up questions if I don’t answer the question. I don’t know. The shoot for us really is a wild, emotional… It is like you’re at a wedding, or at the Super Bowl or something, where you’re just barely able to appreciate what’s happening, just spending so much time with these heroes of mine, and bossing them around. It’s like, you have to turn off a big chunk of my brain, or else I can’t just have a normal conversation with Michelle and Jamie.
But, we try to be really present, and I think that’s part of why the onset vibe is so important to us, is because I think it really affects the final product, at least for us. We don’t go in with the storyboards figured out to such a degree that all we have to do is boss everyone around and get our perfect shots. It’s evolving as we go. And we’re learning from each other, and people are surprising us, and we’re compromising.
Kwan: One of the best teachers that we ever encountered was this lady named Joan Darling, who she’s an actress and also an acting coach and director herself. But, lovely, lovely lady. And she changed the way I thought of the process in a pretty profound way. And she said, “As the director, you’re not a general, you’re not a dictator. You’re are a party host, and you have to make sure everyone there gets what they need. Everyone is fed, you need to introduce the right people to each other. You got to make sure everyone is entertained. You got to make sure the music is right, the lang is right. People need to feel comfortable so that they can do their best work.”
We took that to heart, and our version of it is actually, maybe we go one step further and say, “Our film sets are like summer camp, and we are the counselors, and we are here to let everyone do all the activities, have fun, share in the experience.”
Scheniert: I guess that metaphor also gives us permission to be bossy every once in a while.
Kwan: Right. Because it’s like —
Scheniert: We’re like, “Guys, you’re going to love this. Line up. This activity’s crazy.”
Kwan: But, every morning we would do a different warmup before we shot, which is a waste of time, you might think, because it’s a decent five, ten minutes out of your schedule, which you can do a lot in ten minutes, and that costs a lot. But to us, it’s so important, because it just sets the tone. And people have so much fun. And what was really fun, it was about a 40-day shoot, and halfway through, we started running out of camp exercises. And then other crew members would come like, “I want to lead this one.” And so they would come in and teach us something new. Jamie Lee Curtis came in and did a whole jazzercise aerobics class as her warmup.
Scheniert: And it involved a lot of humping.
Kwan: So it used to be an out-of-body experience. It used to be this thrill ride, and it still is, but now it’s very much a conscious decision to make the environment a beautiful, fun, and playful one too.
Scheniert: [Daniel pulls out his phone] Someone posted this recently on Instagram. This was the morning our gaffer led the warmup. He’s in the foreground.
Kwan: This is in the parking lot.
Scheniert: He made everyone dance to “What Does The Fox Say?” That song.
Oh my god.
Kwan: Because he has three kids. Everyone comes in with a different exercise, and sometimes they’re really stupid, and sometimes they’re really beautiful, but it’s just a snapshot of what it’s like to be on set. It’s more than just making the movie good. It’s about making sure everyone feels seen, included, and taken care of.
So, just to double back really quick to the writing process and whatnot, I think one of the things I liked the most about this film is your ability to take these silly cutaway jokes that you introduce as just one-off gags. I’m thinking of the hot dog fingers specifically. And you transform them into ultimately these beautiful and meaningful reflections on things. If we can’t use our hands, we’ll just use our feet sort of stuff, as you’re watching Jamie Lee play “Clare de Lune” with her toes.
And it’s wonderfully funny, but it’s also deeply meaningful. And I’m just thinking in that context, when you’re in the process of creating these things, from creating the style, the pace of that particular joke, and the way it recurs, and I don’t even necessarily know if I want to refer to it as a joke because I think it ultimately leads into the thesis of the film.
Kwan: Thank you for respecting the hotdog hand. I appreciate that.
Yeah. Well, that’s the thing, I’ve been pitching this movie to a bunch of folks, and trying to keep them preserved in the same way I was, where I’m not really telling them about anything. And the way I do it is by, “It’s got people with hot dog hands in it. You’re going to find it great.” So, I’m just wondering, do you start with that image, work backward and ultimately tie it into something? Or, do you respond more to the emotional thread, and look for things to fill it with?
Scheniert: It goes both ways. Sometimes we have an emotional feeling, but we’re like, “Oh no, if we come at it head-on, people —
Kwan: Roll their eyes.
Scheniert: …they’re going to roll their eyes. Let’s couch some jokes in there.” But I think more often, it’s the other way around, where there’s just an image that makes us laugh. And then, we either ask ourselves, “Why does it make us laugh? Is there something in there?” Or, we just think it’s even funnier if we can make that joke mean something later.
Kwan: I think the reason why that process developed, [in the] early 2000s, early 2010, 2011, was when we started to really work together. And YouTube was just starting. And everyone was talking about viral videos, and everyone was talking about, “I want things that will spread. I want weird, crazy things.” That was the ethos of being a short filmmaker. And something really didn’t sit well with me because I didn’t want to… It just felt so empty, just to chase after a viral video.
Scheniert: And then I would be like, “No, no, no. Let’s do this weird thing. It’ll get so many likes.” I was addicted to the algorithm.
Kwan: No, you just naturally love weird things. It had nothing to do with algorithms. The fact that the algorithm was forcing us into this niche. It made me like, “These things take so much time, and I want to make them good. And I want to be proud of it when we’re done. What if we try to do both at the same time?”
Scheniert: I was just thinking about one example of that, that we don’t talk about much, is we did a music video for Chromeo. And the initial idea was that rock and roll gets people pregnant. What if their rock and roll was so good that women just went bramph [he makes a gesture as if his stomach were expanding]? And we were like, “That’s funny, because it’s also sexy music.” And then we were like, “But I hope that-“
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Kwan: There’s something misogynistic about it. It doesn’t feel like…
Scheniert: Yeah, where does that go? And so the insecurity led us to make it the tale of it’s a man’s nightmare. And he’s afraid of being a parent, and he’s —
Kwan: He’s running.
Scheniert: … avoiding his girlfriend who just had a kid. And so it became a horror film about an insecure man. And, we were like, “Oh, man, that rock and roll getting people pregnant joke sure took us to unexpected places.” But it just started —
Kwan: It really solidified when Jezebel, that feminist online publication, they picked it up and they wrote up about it. And the person basically did the play-by-play. And she’s like, “When I first started this video, I was like, ‘Oh hell no. What is this bullshit?’ but it’s pretty funny.” And then, “Am I tearing up at the end?” I was like, “Oh, this is such a powerful, strange thing that we’ve accidentally concocted, this tone. “
And so, with things like the hotdog hands, we knew we needed to create a universe that our main character would reject fully. This is the universe that really makes her say, “I hate the multiverse.” The hotdog hands, she’s in love with her auditor, who is just the worst person in the world, and she has hotdog fingers that squirt out ketchup up and mustard. This is the last universe I want to be in. And then we knew that part of what the magic of this movie would be teaching her how to love that universe. So that to us was when we go, “Oh, this is beautiful. This is worth pursuing now.” Long answer.
No worries!. Now, for the last question, I’ve got a serious question or a goofy one. What would you guys prefer?
Scheniert: Serious. Let’s get in.
Kwan: Serious, but we’ll answer with a goofy question.
Scheniert: You mean answer?
Kwan: Yeah.
Okay. So, goofy answer.
Scheniert: Goofy answer to a serious question.
So, so much of this it’s so lovely genuinely because it feels like such an amazing love letter to the interactions between Asian culture and American cinema. So you’ve got The Matrix represented in some small ways. And you have a lot of the most iconic actors in Hong Kong cinema. You have Kung Fu cinema and its specific stylings. And I think it’s best encapsulated by Ke, who is just absolutely amazing in this film. And I’m just wondering, I read somewhere that he was looking to make a comeback after Crazy Rich Asians came out, and he wanted to do something. What exactly about him appealed to you in this particular role, and what did he bring to this performance from his history on screen, and all of these different characters that are great, and whatnot, but probably not necessarily the best in today’s environment?
Kwan: Yeah, it’s funny that you say that. A lot of that collision was not intentional at first — that blend of Asian cinema, and just American pop culture in general. It just was a product of the fact that we grew up in that, and I happened to be Asian-American and a lot of the stuff I love, comes from Asian cinema.
And I started realizing that so much of my life and my story, intersects with the stereotypes of the problematic things that we used to see in TV all the time, or movies all the time. A lot of that stuff is in my life. One side of my family does own a laundromat. I did do karate and Kung fu all the time. I wasn’t good at math. That was the one stereotype I wasn’t good at.
Scheniert: But your sisters were.
Kwan: My sisters were amazing at math. My dad had a fanny pack. He had the full tourist look, so all those things that were part of my life, I started putting them in the movie and I remember some people being like, “Do we need another Kung fu movie with Asians? Why are we leaning into this? Do we need a family of Chinese people running a laundromat? Don’t you think we should be breaking out of those stereotypes?” And, it really put me in a funny spiral, because I was like, “But that’s my life. Am I going to let the fear of the stereotype not let me express it?” And so the whole movie accidentally becomes this explosion of all these things that have been keeping us down.
So the fanny pack fight is like a turning that on his head. A family owning a laundromat, hopefully anytime you stepped into a laundromat, after watching this movie, you just think about that family completely differently. You realize they’re humans who own this place, who probably live upstairs. That’s how my father grew up.
And so, the same thing goes with Ke. That was not intentional for us to give him a way to reclaim his place in pop culture. He was just the right person for a role. The meta-narrative there wasn’t intentional, but it’s so beautiful now for people to see someone that was really meaningful to a lot of people, but now obviously, as you said, slightly problematic. It’s more so Indiana Jones. I think Goonies is okay. Goonies they did a good job. And for him to now just fully get to come back to acting on his own terms, and just shame everyone for not giving him roles for most of his life.
Scheniert: It’s very much an accidental meta-narrative, because Waymond is overlooked —
Kwan: Yeah, exactly.
Scheniert: … by his wife and the audience. And then has a comeback in the movie. I was reading a post yesterday where someone was gushing about the movie. I just like to read people’s nice compliments. But people are saying so many nice things about Ke, but someone posted, “He’s an absolute, all caps, MOVIE STAR. And now that I know him especially, I got emotional reading it, because I know he doesn’t think of himself that way, and that he has had a hard time auditioning, and I was just like, “Fuck. Yeah, he is.” It made me real proud. Yeah.
When he’s on-screen with Michelle in the bits that are riffing on Wong Kar-wai, it’s just incredible the amount of presence he has. He’s just there. He fits in that suit, and he fits with that cigarette and those glasses. And it’s just like, “God damn. Who invited Tony Leung to this?”
Scheniert: The wild thing is he’s friends with Wong Kar-wai. He used to work for him.
That’s so cool.
Scheniert: He went to China and was a first AD and worked on crews for Wong Kar-wai for years. So he would bring him up in casual conversation. We’d be like, “Okay.”
Kwan: He was the Assistant Director for 2046.
Whoa.
Kwan: Yeah. It’s crazy. His life story is wild.
Seriously.
Kwan: But we’re so excited for the world to see him again. He’s amazing. Hopefully, if they ever do a Short Round reboot, he’s ready.
I hope they do. I hope I see more of him, and way more of you guys in the future. So, thank you so much.
Kwan: Might take us six years. But thank you.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.