Everything Everywhere All At Once has a fantastic secret director’s cameo

Multiverse comedy about martial arts All You Need at One TimeIt takes quite a bit of unpacking. A lot of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s follow-up to Swiss Army ManThe film moves quickly, with many pop-culture references, funny cameos and visual gags driven by effects that call for the home-video freeze frame approach. These gags can be quite obvious. For example, a sequence from pre-history that features ape-like animals fighting for their lives, which was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey’s “discovery of tools” sequence. Other subtleties are more obvious, like how the Daniels design an alternative universe to the one created by Wong Kar Wai. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner, is surrounded by successful film-industry executives. They mourn their lost love, the intense emotions, reserved dialogue and stark lighting that remind them of Wong movies. Love in the Mood Chungking Express.

Chicago screening Everything is Everywhere, the Daniels talked to me about those scenes, and said they aren’t modeled after one specific scene in particular — as Kwan put it, their cinematographer, Larkin Seiple, has bristled a bit about critics specifically citing Love in the Mood as the only inspiration there, and wants people to notice that the lighting and key color schemes don’t match that movie exactly. We talked in passing about several other points of interest in the movie — like how the name of the film’s villain, Jobu Tupaki, came from a list of interesting sounds Kwan and his wife generated when they were looking for a name for their daughter.

Daniel Scheinert has shared this picture, which is undeniably Everything is Everywhere’s greatest Easter egg. Please bear with me.

Longtime fans of Kwan and Scheinert’s work are used to seeing them in their own projects. That’s Kwan leading the beat-crazed, ceiling-smashing dance orgy in the video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down For What.” (I learned in a previous interview that while Scheinert isn’t in that video, he handled the penis-puppetry whenever Kwan’s groin takes on independent, aggressive life.) One of their best and wildest early shorts, “Pockets,” things go very badly for Daniels’ longtime friend Billy Chew when he tries to mug Scheinert. In one of their The most bizarre early shorts, “Interesting Ball,” an inexplicable cosmic event has a variety of surreal effects, including Kwan getting slowly, inexorably sucked into Scheinert’s rectum. And in Scheinert’s solo directorial project, the Southern noir Dick Long’s DeathScheinert portrays the title character. Scheinert’s death is caused by circumstances that leave his closest friends in a state of denial and grief.

So it’s no surprise that Kwan and Scheinert appear in Everything, Everywhere at the Same Time. Was ist das? It is surprising, at least for fans who think they were fast enough to spot their faces, is the fact that they’re in there multiple times — including, as Scheinert puts it, in one cameo no one could possibly catch without assistance.

Scheinert’s most obvious performance in the film is as a character credited as “District Manager” — he’s the guy having a little light S&M play in the secret office closet full of floggers and restraints, and getting led out of that closet on a leash. In the final fight on the stairwell against Evelyn, Scheinert returns as the same actor. He bends and spanks Evelyn.

Kwan, meanwhile, shows up briefly when Jobu Tupaki activates her cosmic Bagel With Everything — he’s the first guy to get sucked into its vortex, the man who has his face pulled off in several layers before his whole body is pulled in as well. He also shows up earlier in the film, though it’s much harder to see his face in that scene — he’s the mugger who tries to steal Evelyn’s purse in the Wong Kar-Wai timeline, where a mysterious white-haired martial artist (Li Jing) saves her, and the attack inspires her to learn kung fu.

Scheinert claims that Scheinert could not catch the cameo. That’s because his face and body are entirely covered by an ape suit. This is how you look. 2001The Daniels show the world how everyone got their hot dog. In that world’s pre-history, the hot-dog-handed strain of pre-human primates won out in the dominance struggle over other species of primates, as represented by a single hot-dog-handed ape beating a normal-fingered ape to death. That’s Scheinert in the hot-dog-ape costume, striking a mortal blow on behalf of his species and his evolutionary descendants.

It gets even better. Scheinert says the production only had two ape suits, so he isn’t just the lead ape in the sequence — he plays almost all of them. At that Chicago Q&A, he described how he “spent the whole day running around that ridge,” making triumphant hot-dog-ape gestures in various positions and from various angles so he and Kwan would have footage they could digitally stitch together to make one ape look like a troupe of them. The idea of one director playing an entire army hot-dog-fingered apes seems a natural part of a film so full of bizarre ideas and special effects trickery at a rapid pace is just ridiculous. Weirder things happen in this movie — but there’s still a peculiar joy in seeing the photographic evidence of Scheinert looking exhausted, overheated, and tired of being every ape everywhere, all at once.