Everything Everywhere All At Once’s original script was even weirder

In Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s wild, universe-hopping movie Everything Everywhere All At OnceThe plot centers mainly around where the people make significant decisions. Every choice creates a new timeline. You will also find a companion book with a lot of art. There is a vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to be able to occur creates its own set of what-ifs — particularly in the script for a scene the Daniels cut from the film. This sequence suggests a completely different timeline with new characters and a totally different tone.

In this early version of the movie, Kwan tells Polygon, the Wang family — Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), and her father, husband, and daughter — were briefly introduced at the beginning, before an unseen narrator took over the story. “It used to tie in more with the family,” Kwan says. “It started with a video of the family, and then the narrator would be like, ‘Anyways, let’s continue!’ and we leap into this other thing.”

“This whole other thing” is a sequence that feels like something out of Douglas Adams’ classic tongue-in-cheek sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — particularly the radio-play version and the 1981 BBC TV version, which frame the story with narration from the titular hitchhiker’s guide.

In the narration, All You Need’s deleted scene starts out by introducing the story in cosmic terms: “Here we are, in this moment, at the beginning. Because most beginnings often end in a climax, I feel it is wrong to not mention that we’re also at the ending. Because every moment is impossible without the one before it and rendered ineffective without it, it could be said that everything has been and will continue to happen because of the existence and existence of the single moment. It is all. It is all. Let us begin.”

The narrator goes on to introduce two men who illustrate the movie’s infinite-multiverse principles. W.T. Warren is a 20 year old football helmet tester from 1912 Pennsylvania. The job involves him running headfirst through a farmhouse wall while wearing the helmets. When a quantum accident causes him to pass completely through the wall during one test — an unlikely event that’s bound to happen at least once in a universe of infinite possibilities — he gets drunk and decides God wants him to inspire people with miracles. So he confronts three armed robbers, who fatally stab him — though, as the narrator notes, in a small subset of universes, the knife passes through him as well, and he goes on to marry the love of his life, who he was trying to impress when he stood up to the thieves.

“And if you think all of this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works, then I’m afraid your opinion of infinity, my friend, may be too small for this story,” the narrator says.

Another character appears in the scene, an American high school football player from 1957. If he can catch the right football during a game, he will become a cult leader. If he misses it, he’s injured and becomes a lonely carpenter who’s only happy in universes where tables can talk. This narration is a great way to present the concept of a multiverse that’s as accidental as it is by design. However, the movie ends up focusing more on Evelyn, her family, and this seems like an extreme departure.

Scheinert says that Kwan and he discarded the scene early from their original script. “I don’t think it was ever in a draft we sent to anyone,” he says. “It was like, draft zero-point-eight. “Before we sent [the script]To any producer, we will make the cut [this sequence], because the script was 255 pages long.”

Kwan and Scheinert say the narration was all meant to set up a specific alternate universe that also doesn’t appear in the final film. The narrator was meant to have what Kwan describes as “a very eloquent, maybe Southern voice.” “Someone like Susan Sarandon,” Scheinert adds. Eventually, as Evelyn is crossing into different multiverses, she’d enter one where her voice was provided by the narrator as well.

“So she would have the voice of Susan Sarandon,” Kwan says, “and you would realize, ‘Oh, in this universe, she was adopted by a white family who brought her over from AsiaAnd she grew up as an adoptee, and she has perfect English, and she became a writer.’ So that was one big, long part of the story.”

Scheinert says the entire framing concept was meant to equally evoke Douglas Adams and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. But it also sprung from the Daniels’ admiration of Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche, New York.

“I think that’s one of the biggest tangents we went down,” Scheinert says. “We love Charlie Kaufman, and there was a very Kaufman-esque quality to the initial idea, which was like, ‘Let’s make a very accessible sci-fi action film that falls apart, because the multiverse is crazy.’ It took us a while to realize that we didn’t have to go postmodern to achieve that.”

Both Daniels say the movie’s entire concept was inherently so postmodern that it didn’t need recursive characters or framing. “It was in the fabric of it,” Scheinert says. “So we stripped a lot of that away. But we were playing with that for a long time, like, ‘Should we show up as characters in our own movie? Should the movie be a book being written by this alternate Evelyn?’ I’m glad we went down these tangents, because it helped us develop the themes, but these ideas weren’t necessary.”

There is a vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to be able to occur The A24 merch shop has it. In addition to the deleted scene, it includes original art, short stories, an interview about the multiverse between the Daniels and “their favorite neuroscientist, David Eagleman,” and an essay by Carl Sagan’s daughter, author Sasha Sagan.