Everything Everywhere All At Once is about losing faith in God

It isn’t hyperbole to say that the directors of You Can Have Everything at Once are out to shatter people’s intellects with their movie. They consider it one of the film’s major goals. Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — often collectively credited as “Daniels” — are aware they’re making movies for a media-savvy audience that will recognize their riffs on The Terminator, The Matrix, and (in the movie’s best cameo) 2001: A Space Odyssey. But while they’re tapping into how familiar some of their images and quotes might seem, they also want to bypass the way familiarity helps an audience predict where a film is going, and maintain distance from it.

This helps to explain why All You NeedIt is a rapid-paced, fast-paced torrent of huge ideas and overpowering images. Michelle Yeoh portrays Evelyn. This is her story about a woman caught in an adventure which pulls her into many possible worlds. The film lays out an entire multiverse and a science fiction technology that lets people access it, but it’s still primarily a personal story about Evelyn, and her connections with her husband, daughter, and father. Polygon recently sat down with the Daniels to talk about the film’s biggest ideas and where they came from, and about that idea that it’s important to break the audience so they have to take in everything, all at once.

This interview was edited to be more concise and clear.

Photo by Allyson Riggs/A24

Both in films and in books, your work. Videos, shorts and other projectsIt has such an individual voice. At the same time, it’s so referential, with this movie drawing from Kurt Vonnegut, Charlie Kaufman, and Douglas Adams, with nodsYou can find more information here everything from Ratatouille to The Matrix. Are you finding it hard to remove all of the elements you wish to include in your stories, from media you enjoy and other stories that are important to you?

Daniel Kwan: We were just reflecting recently — movies are the language that so many people speak and think in these days, and that’s why we end up with these references—

Daniel Scheinert: This is more authentic. When people talk about red-pilling, they’re not even talking about The Matrix anymore. When people say “I feel like I’m in The Truman Show” right now, they’re not even talking about the movie. It’s the vernacular. It has become part of the everyday vocabulary. We feel that the only honest and truthful way to create a movie is to constantly be aware of where we are in the world.

DK: Many times the most important things in our lives aren’t the ones that we put there. Ratatouille 2001These jokes felt right for the characters. It wasn’t like us being really inspired by those films.

DS: Movies like “The Godfather” were the inspiration for this film. Holy MotorsOr Groundhog Day, or Satoshi Kon’s anime. It was such inspiration that the movie’s structure and spirit were born.

There’s a major theme running through your work, especially here and in Swiss Army ManThe way that we relate to one another is what makes it worthwhile living. It’s a very humanistic philosophy, even a sentimental one. From where does this idea come from?

DK: It’s a strong signal coming from my brain. It’s because I was religious as a child. Up until my 20s I was nearly an evangelical Christian. Then, all at once, the faith vanished. And that’s kind of what this movie was trying to re-create. That moment when Evelyn is screaming, and she’s feeling everything, and she’s completely unmoored and lost, that is the experience of losing God. That’s the experience of not having a moral center, and not having a focus of meaning, of purpose. In the second half, she tries to do the same thing as me, that is, crawl in chaos and find something worthwhile living for. Obviously in the movie, she finds that through her husband, but yeah, it’s all in there because of me. [Looks at Daniel Scheinert]I think so, at least partially. I’m sure you have some—

DS: [Very straight-faced] No. I’m just a well-adjusted, normal person who’s not cynical or nihilistic at all. [Laughs]

This sounds like it should be given a sarcasm label.

DS: Yeah, it’s a big sarcastic tag. I think it’s something we bonded over early on. We’re both romantics with a super-high tolerance for cynicism, and staring at the darkness and talking about it. There’s such a relief in talking about that with someone, and not keeping it a secret, and not trying to turn away from it. And then being like, I’m going to make a beautiful breakfast now, and I’m going to enjoy the shit out of it.

DK: That is very Vonnegut. I think we bonded over Vonnegut’s point of view because he’s so cynical. Vonnegut has a God-like view of his characters, which makes them look like ants living in ant farms. Yet, he somehow manages to make them human and offer them beauty. It’s very compelling, because I think the only way we can feel anything is if the person that is trying to tell a story first acknowledges how awful everything is, first acknowledges how dark everything is, how meaningless it all is. Then I can be like, “Okay, now we can have a conversation, convince me why there is still beauty,” or whatever. Because if you just start with the beauty, I can’t fully engage.

Photo by Allyson Riggs/A24

One of Vonnegut’s biggest themes was “Be kind to each other,” which comes up in All You Need. But you’re wrapping humanistic messages within such goofy, over-the-top elements. Do you think it’s easier to get people considering existential philosophy if you pack it in humor?

DS: I think it’s what works on us. Vonnegut is more painful than Camus to me. There’s something about a well-honed joke that’ll take me places without me being able to put up my defenses. Life is sometimes a little absurd. Humans are sometimes a bit ridiculous, which is why humorless art seems difficult to me.

DK: I feel like that extends beyond humor, what we’re trying to do. Humor is one element of it, but I think it’s the barrage of it all. We’re trying to get past our audience’s intellect. Everyone is very well-read right now. They have all the correct labels. Because film structure is embedded in their bones they can always find where they’re in any movie. They have a subconscious timer telling them, “Okay, I have half an hour left, and the hero has to rise out of their lowest point…” There are all these things we’ve built up around ourselves as a shield, and it’s making it impossible for art to penetrate in a true way. Everyone’s going [Lofty connoisseur voice and gesture] “Ah, yes.” It’s like drinking wine, where everyone just has to say things about it, because that’s how we interact with the world now, with this very objective, distanced experience, just so we can feel like we’re in control.

This movie is meant to destroy all those things, so you can’t have that control. You’re not allowed to have intellect. It’s possible to only feel. It’s only as you’re living through your life for the next week, little thoughts will come up, and that’s when you start to think of it through the lens of intellect. While humor can be a part, I believe the entire thing is intended to remove that barrier of intellect and academia that keeps us trapped.

DS: But depending on your audience, you can also just say “You know, it’s a really wild action-comedy.” [Both laugh]

The point where I felt that sense of being broken down most strongly was in the laundromat montage toward the end, where you see what seems like a thousand different versions of Michelle Yeoh’s face. What was your method of assembling this sequence?

DK: This is what I love to call our version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey’s psychedelia. Just the fact that the shot is just a medium shot of a woman’s face—

DS: We came up with the idea of using that as a motif — we knew Michelle would look at the camera and pop through a couple universes pretty early on, so we tried to shoot a bunch of them, but with as little time and resources dedicated to it as possible. Quantity, not quality.

DK: Anytime we were in a different location, anytime we had some downtime, we were like, “Just put the camera over here. Okay, that’s good. Okay, now stand up and don this jacket. Okay, great.” We’d try to sneak in as much practical, real Evelyn in as many locations as possible.

DS: Then we shot Michelle on a green screen. We collected the materials we’d shot on location, the green-screen stuff, and had a little folder for our visual effects team. And we said, “You can do whatever you want. Put her wherever you want, and we might put it in the movie.” So it was sort of an open assignment during the post-production process.

DK: We had it segmented off so we they could choose whatever lighting they wanted, and then we sped that up so fast that it didn’t matter.

DS: So they could go in and pick a still image and be like, “Oooh, a blue Michelle that’s lit from behind. I’m going to put her in Antarctica.” So I took like 50 or 60 of those things, and everything we shot on location, and cut it up. It’s sort of a metaphor for how we pulled off the movie in general. We would give a lot of our department heads creative license—

DK: Especially for the things that didn’t matter. There are a few things that we controlled, like “These have to be just right, and the rest of it, do what you want.”

DS: “Do whatever you can do, whatever you’re good at.” So everybody stepped up and brought it. And it was fun for us, because we’d get surprised.

DK: Son Lux was kind enough to play a solo drum for me. “Start small and ramp up!” And I took that and cut that up, and then we did the first editing pass to the rhythm of it.

DS: Ian Chang of Son Lux made these jazz rhythms, trying to be surprising us. Then we took that guide as our starting point.

DK: It’s kind of like a cosmic gumbo. [Both laugh]

DS: We’re trying to sneak that into as many interviews as we can.

For me, maybe the heaviest idea in a movie full of heavy ideas is the idea that failure is opportunity, that all Evelyn’s dead ends are access points to power. As if you’re saying “Your weaknesses are your strengths.” How did you decide to make that a central conceit?

DK: Because it was a joke that people liked, this is what made the entire concept possible. When we said, “Oh, this is the worst version of Evelyn,” that’s why she connected with so many universes. It didn’t come from like a philosophical place. It just made sense logically — if you had a lot of failures, you’d have a lot of successes, just based on the premise [of the multiple universe connections]. It grew naturally from there.

DS: And similarly, logically, then the project became, “Can we make her love the universe she’s in, and the version of herself that she is, by the end of this movie?” That became a fun challenge — pick the worst Evelyn, but by the end, she has to love who she is. I think that’s something a lot of us think at times, when we have regrets, or are thinking about what-if. So in a lot of ways, that’s the entire movie there. It’s there. It’s a multiverse movie designed to make you appreciate the one universe you’re in.