Everything Everywhere All At Once

Daniels: Everything Everywhere All At Once / 奇異女俠玩救宇宙 (US 2022) starring Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang.

奇異女俠玩救宇宙 (Cantonese) / 媽的多重宇宙 (Taiwan) / Everything Everywhere All At Once [Finnish title] / Everything Everywhere All At Once [Swedish title] / Everything Everywhere All At Once [French title].
    US © 2022 IAC Films / Gozie AGBO / Year of the Rat. In association with: Ley Line Entertainment. Distr: A24.
    A Film from Daniels. / Un film des Daniels.
    Produced by: Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca. Producers: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert. Jonathan Wang.
    D+SC: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinart. DP: Larkin Seiple - 1,85:1 - 1,33:1 (some scenes), 2,00:1 (some scenes), 2,39:1 (some scenes) - colour - source format: CFast 2.0 ARRIRAW 2.8K, 3.4K - released as a DCP Digital Cinema Package. PD: Jason Kisvarday. Cost: Shirley Kurata. VFX: Zak Stoltz. ED: Paul Rogers. M (original score): Son Lux. M supervisors: Laruen Marie Milkus & Bruce Gilbert. Casting: Sarah Halley Finn.
    C: Michelle Yeoh (Evelyn Wang), Stephanie Hsu (Joy Wang / Jobu Tupaki), Ke Huy Quan (Waymond Wang), James Hong (Gong Gong), Jamie Lee Curtis (Deirdre Beaubeirdra), Tallie Medel (Becky Sregor), Jenny Slate (Big Nose), Harry Shum, Jr. (Chad), Biff Wiff (Rick), Sunita Mani (TV Musical Queen), Aaron Lazar (TV Musical Soldier), Brian Le (Alpha Jumper - Trophy), Andy Le (Alpha Jumper - Bigger Trophy), Neravana Cabral, Chelsey Goldsmith, Craig Henningsen (Security Guards), Anthony Molinari (Police - Confetti), Dan Brown (Police - Salsa), Anthony Nanakornpanom (Police - Luchador), Cara Marie Chooljian (Alpha Jumper - Jogger), Randall Archer (Alpha Jumper - Edgelord), Efka Kvaraciejus (Alpha Jumper - SWAT).
    Characters also include: Alpha RV Officers, Kung Fu Master, Maternity Doctor, Laundromat Police and Raccacoonie Puppetereers.
    Loc: 400 National Way, Simi Valley (IRS Building) - Font's Point, Anza-Borrego State Park, CA (universe of rocks) - San Fernando Majers Coin Laundry - East 7th Street and Mateo Street, LA - Elysian Park, LA - The Los Angeles Theatre, 615 S. Broadway, LA.
    Languages: English, Mandarin, Cantonese.
    139 min
    Festival premiere: 11 March 2022 South by Southwest Film Festival.
    US premiere: 25 March 2022 (limited), 8 April 2022 (wide).
    Finnish premiere: 29 April 2022, released by Cinemanse.
    French premiere: 31 Aug 2022, released by Pathé Live.
    Academy Awards: 12 March 2023: won seven awards and is the most awarded film of all time.
    VOSTF, sous-titres français: Louis Brisset.
    Viewed at Pathé Beaugrenelle 5, Paris, 23 March 2023.

Press notes: "Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes."

IMDb: "A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led."

AA: The movie is broken down into three parts: I Everything, II Everywhere and III All At Once.

I thank the Academy for the awards, due to which Everything Everywhere has been rereleased and I get to see it on the screen. The Daniels's film was originally released in Finland soon after the American premiere, but it was impossible for me to catch any of the few screenings in my hometown Lappeenranta.

My first reaction: I am overwhelmed and exhausted. But also impressed by the originality. On the surface Everything Everywhere looks like a hyperactive, ultraviolent action rampage. The Daniels do not respect the classic wisdom of alternating action with contemplation.

Everything Everywhere is a science fiction film about time travel, time reversal, time lapse, multiple reality, alternative universes, and mind fracture. It is also about ADHD, a condition apparently becoming more common and aggravated in an age of digital and virtual existences. Perhaps ADHD is a sign of the times.

The themes are great, and the ways they are dramatized are original: the generation gap (of three generations in a Chinese family in America), the culture shock (of Asians in America), gender identity (the daughter is a Lesbian), existentialism (the sense and authenticity of human existence), the new global pessimism of Generation Z (regarding the survival of humanity in an imminent ecocatastrophe) and a specific Asian pessimism (about Asian American identity).

The film moves hilariously from kitchen sink realism (in the ordinary universe dealing with a laundromat business and a tax declaration) to extraordinary universes in which characters transform into parallel identities and fight each other's superpowers.

The comic sense is unique. A cook's toque hides a raccoon. An image that brings it all together is the Everything Bagel, something in the category of a Black Hole, a threat to the universe.

The range of the imagery is incredible from cosmic visions to videogames, Indian musicals, speaking rocks on a mountain, puppets, Chinese theatre, hot dog fingers, bullet time visions, psychedelia, Jodorowsky, anime and wuxia. Particular movie references include 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ratatouille.

The visionary urge is formidable. The associations are not facile. This is not a cinema of attractions, neither of distractions. There is an underlying sense of urgency and gravity. But the excess of associations leads to a "more is less" experience. It is about being "lost in space" - lost in the space of consciousness and imagination. Endless battles in parallel universes paralyze us from doing something in our regular universe.

The Daniels provide their excellent cast unique challenges in many realities. Michelle Yeoh as the long-suffering matriarch of a multicultural family becomes a subject of visionary blitz montages of transformations.

There is lack of psychological depth and nuance at first. Repetitive and brutal fight sequences follow each other. Towards the end of the second part, the account of the mother-daughter relationship gets more moving, and the whole family romance as well.

DANIEL SCHEINERT: SIGHT & SOUND TOP TEN 2022
Michel Gondry: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (SC: Charlie Kaufman)
Hayao Miyazaki: Princess Mononoke
David Wain & Michael Showalter: Wet Hot American Summer
Chris Smith: American Movie
Juzo Itami: Tampopo
Liu Chia-liang: Drunken Master II (starring Jackie Chan)
Paul Thomas Anderson: Magnolia
Benh Zeitlin: Glory at Sea
Kirsten Lepore: Hi Stranger
Spike Lee: Malcolm X

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: FROM THE PRESS NOTES:

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: FROM THE PRESS NOTES:
 
About the film

Sitting on a wall in director Daniel Kwan's back office in Los Angeles's Highland Park is a framed work by the artist Ikeda Manabu, “History of Rise and Fall,” an elaborate pen-and-ink drawing featuring a maelstrom of pagodas, gnarled cherry branches, and railroad tracks—a fittingly abundant example of Manabu's glorious, almost painfully maximalist style.

“He does these things that hurt your brain when you look at them because they're so intricate, so detailed, so dense,” Kwan explains. “But when you pull back, you're like, oh, that's a tree.”

Kwan and his filmmaking partner, Daniel Scheinert—the auteur duo otherwise known as Daniels—needed to find their tree. This was circa 2016, when they were first outlining what would become Everything Everywhere All At Once, a project that was beginning to increasingly resemble the zoomed-in chaos of a Manabu piece. In a photo they took from that time, a headache-inducing diagram on a wall-sized chalkboard contains over a dozen color-coded storylines, scribbles of percolating ideas, and what may or may not be a phallic doodle (or Chekhov's gun).

At the time, Kwan was worried that the movie he was working on was just too much. It's an entirely predictable issue—one written into the title of the movie—that also happens to be what makes the film feel genuinely singular and even, as its cacophony of elements clarifies into something startlingly simple, rather transcendent. Watching the finished film today, it retains that sense of maximalist, gonzo energy, and even now, having sorted it all out, the directors still chuckle to each other about how to describe exactly what their movie is.

“There's the family drama answer and the sci-fi answer and the philosophy answer,” Scheinert says. Or you could say it's a kung-fu flick that hops around multidimensional universes, with Michelle Yeoh as a reluctant savior figure at its center. There's the answer about generational divides and the internet and the latent dread endemic to living in the modern age. There's also the early logline that Daniels wrote themselves: a movie simply about a woman trying to do her taxes.

It's not exactly wrong—it is, after all, where Everything begins. When the film opens, we meet Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) as a harried laundromat owner, living above her business in a cramped apartment and facing a mountain of paperwork amid an audit from the IRS. She is stressed about her aging father (James Hong) coming to stay and struggles to listen to both her grown daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her tender-hearted husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). But while meeting with an IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), a strange occurrence involving her own husband pulls her into a multidimensional adventure that puts the fate of every universe in her hands—and also forces her to confront who she is to herself and her family.

Arriving at that last part is the moment when Daniels took a step back and finally saw the tree. “We could say a million things about it, but the most simple, honest thing is it's about a mom learning to pay attention to her family in the chaos,” says Kwan.

The film, as with Daniels' previous work (Swiss Army Man, the iconic music video for Lil Jon's “Turn Down for What”), rushes headlong into unruly anarchy: Evelyn is plunged into the metaphysical world of “verse-jumping,” veering from the mundane dreariness of an IRS building to the palatial lair of a nihilistic villain named Jobu Tupaki, from the flashing lights of Hong Kong red carpets to a deserted canyon where sentient rocks manage to have a heart-to-heart. But this sense of an unhinged imagination, of endless mayhem, ultimately serves to transform the universal, or the multi-universal, into something intimate—an earnest meditation on truly seeing those near us in a time when it feels as if the center will not hold.

“The biggest seed that drove us through, that felt like a metaphor for what we're going through right now in society, is just this information overload, this stretching,” Kwan says. “People keep saying ‘empathy fatigue' set in with covid, but I feel like even before covid we were already there—there's too much to care about and everyone's lost the thread. That was the last key, turning this into a movie about empathy in the chaos.”

The film slyly tweaks the ‘hero's journey' story beats that audiences have come to expect, squishing and stretching a three-act structure as if the movie itself were jumping through a fracturing multiverse. That sense of infinity—all of the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, all of the tiny moving pieces underneath it—stayed front of mind for the co-directors as they got a grasp on the nuts-and-bolts of the film's story; it felt crucial that people watching the movie could feel the same sense of vertigo that Evelyn does, that sense of being overwhelmed by the noise and splintering choices of all of her lives. The bold structural gambits were key to creating that experience.

The film's thematic heart helped Daniels to alleviate the somewhat itching contradiction that existed in the early inspirations of Everything, when the duo went to see a ‘90s double feature a few years back. “It was The Matrix and Fight Club, and it was at the New Beverly, and I fell in love again with those movies,” Kwan recalls. “I was like, man, if I could just make something half as fun as The Matrix is, but with our own stamp and our spirits, I would just die happy.”

Kwan remembers being inspired specifically by The Matrix's iconic fighting scenes, which harkened back to Daniels' shared love of kung-fu films. The distinction, Kwan notes, is that “we don’t love violence, but we love action movies.”

“There's something so entertaining and visceral about it, and we wanted to try to take that kind of energy and satisfying filmmaking and point it towards love and understanding,” Kwan continues. “Which was another fun challenge that we were like, we don't know how to do that, but we want to see it on the big screen.”

Inspirations, writing, and development

“I was sitting there going: Nah, no one in their right frame of mine is gonna do something like that with hot dog fingers,” Michelle Yeoh says.

She's remembering the first time she read the script for Everything Everywhere All At Once, an early view into where Daniels would take her on their multiverse fever dream including, indeed, a world in which she would have hot dogs for fingers and use them in decidedly unusual, strangely poignant ways with Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeoh hadn’t seen Swiss Army Man yet, but had heard good things—perhaps if she had watched that movie, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse who provides companionship, survival tools, and a glimpse of transcendence for Paul Dano, she might have had a better sense of what she was getting into.

It was, in fact, on the press tour for Swiss Army Man that the co-directors were really sold on their then-fledgling idea of a sci-fi multiverse movie, after landing on the intriguing concept of going, as Scheinert puts it, “existential nihilism nightmare town” on it. But in between would be the hot dog fingers, along with the colorful tangle of ideas and locales that would come with a Daniels film that explored the infinitude of possible lives. “We wrote a draft and everybody was like, this sounds like a $100 million movie, you're gonna have to rewrite this, guys,” Scheinert says.

Nevertheless, thanks to their experience in music videos, a field where they learned to create immersive worlds on tight budgets and on computers in their bedrooms, the duo, along with the help of a small, trustworthy crew of friends they’ve worked with for years made a work that doesn’t sacrifice the expansiveness or wildness of a nine-figure idea.

“The creative tension in our partnership usually comes from me being way too ambitious and him being very cautious of efficiency and cost effectiveness,” Kwan says. “And that struggle and that tension focuses us so that we spend the money where it really matters, and everywhere else we try to skim, skim, skim and compromise.”

Or, put another way: “Dan has a maximalist aesthetic,” Scheinert says. “Sometimes his ideas will be these kind of run-on sentence ideas. Like, they say this! And then this happens! And then my job is to just cheerlead.” And together the duo find a way to make the run-on sentences into feasible creations.
For both of them, the balls-to-the-walls ethos that is a hallmark of their work comes from their early days of creating stuff during the initial waves of Internet content. While Everything offers a treasure hunt of eclectic cinematic references—from 2001: A Space Odyssey to In the Mood For Love to Ratatouille—Kwan insists their voice is far from that of a cinephile, but was honed rather through things like YouTube videos, “Tim and Eric” sketches, and the form-breaking anarchy of Japanese anime movies.

“We would put our stuff online, and the algorithm would push it because it was so insane, and then we’d get attention and that positive reinforcement,” Kwan recalls. “We were like, oh, I guess we should be more insane.”

That feedback, though, threatened at one point to pull them down a rabbit hole of making films that were starting to feel emptily unhinged. “That self-consciousness that we felt, this feeling of wasting our lives, forced us to try to cram something personal into our work, just to see what would happen,” Kwan said. “It was this really weird synergy of us collaborating with the algorithm. The algorithm told us: go big, poke through, make weird stuff. And then our hearts were like, but I want to share something that is meaningful—how do we do that?”

The high-wire achievement of Everything is precisely in embodying this unwieldy tone. The almost schizophrenic imagination that Evelyn falls into causes the film to builds towards a conclusion that is surprisingly cathartic; Evelyn's journey through all of her possible lives helps her understand what matters most in her own. “One of our favorite things to do is make people feel emotional while looking at something that is absurd,” Scheinert says. “Whenever we can pull that off it's just like, oh, what a fun feeling! We feel emotion, but we also feel this kind of mischievous joke has been pulled.”

(That would include scenes that required Curtis and Yeoh having ketchup and mustard squirted into their mouths and down their faces. “We kept saying, ‘it's going to be like a beautiful, emotional part of the movie,' and they were like, ‘what on earth are you talking about?’” Scheinert recalls. “And when we finally edited that together, I was like, ‘yes, we were right!’”)

In Everything, the personal, human core was partly borne out of Daniels' conversations about their own mothers and the difficulty of generational divides, a universal experience that has been dramatically enhanced by the onrush of the digital age.

Kwan explains, “In the end, this character resembles my mom more—the kind of flustered, overwhelmed mother who is doing a million things at once, and never really doing any of them with full focus.”

The pair initially conceptualized Evelyn as a woman with undiagnosed ADHD, a condition that in a way makes her uniquely equipped to tap into other universes. But, worried about treating the diagnosis reductively, Kwan started looking into it more deeply and was led to a startling revelation: “I basically stayed up until like four in the morning just researching. I was like ‘Oh no, oh no, what the hell,’” Kwan says. “Because it never crossed my mind that I could have ADHD.”

He would eventually be officially diagnosed after spending a year with a therapist, suddenly giving him, in his 30s, a new understanding of his brain and his struggles as a child. It also offered a new way of seeing both his own mother and Evelyn.

“That is a big part of what makes Evelyn feel so unique and alive, the fact that she has this thing—that I relate to and that I felt for most of my life—this overwhelming feeling of wanting to do so much, but then not being able to do any of it,” Kwan says.

In the film, Evelyn becomes a Neo-like chosen one specifically because she is the single-most failed version of all her potential selves. “That gives her superpowers to be able to defeat the bad guy,” Kwan says. “But,” Scheinert notes, “mostly she gets distracted by all these lives that she wished she had led.”

It is also possible to see Evelyn's many lives as an allegory for the immigrant mother: appealing paths suddenly walled off, like alternate selves, when you leave your home—the new roads you’ve been promised in a land ostensibly rife with opportunity reveal themselves to be largely inaccessible. “For her, the journey has not been easy,” Yeoh says. “She made a choice to leave her own family in China and set up a new life with a man that she loves, and wants to have a fresh start, but things do not always go according to plan.”

That experience makes the feelings of the next generation, who grow up and live a life of relative stability in a country they feel is innately their home, practically illegible to a mother like her. “Both my parents immigrated here,” Kwan says. “When you’re just integrating here, you don't have the time or the luxury to think about anything other than survival.” He references a line from Mike Mills' Beginners: “Our good fortune allowed us to feel a sadness that our parents didn’t have time for, and a happiness that I never saw with them.”

When you add in the internet and its seismic cultural shifts, a daughter whose life as a queer person is incomprehensible to her parents, and an aging father, the generational divides in the family further splinter and spread.

In this sense, it is perfectly apt that Evelyn's daughter, Joy, is also the multiverse's villain, Jobu Tupaki—an agent of chaos that is both the thing to defeat and perhaps to save. “Jobu is a manifestation of that kind of weird generation gap, and the multiverse can play as a really funny metaphor for just the Internet,” Kwan says. “The emergence of the Internet was something we grew up on, and it totally affected us and fucked us all up and now we are the way we are, and our parents are trying to play catch up.”

In 2022, in an era of information overload, extreme polarization, and mass existential dread, the struggle to connect between parents and children might feel less like a banal, everyday experience, and more of an increasingly confounding battle between a loved companion and a mortal enemy. “In a lot of ways, the movie is just a family drama,” Scheinert says, “and then we came up with some of the most insane, enormous, overcomplicated hyperbolic metaphors for generational gaps, along with communication errors and ideological differences within a family.

Casting

In one of their alternate universes, Daniels would have made a version of this movie with Jackie Chan as its star. That was one of the early, somewhat cockeyed schemes the co-directors had for what became Everything Everywhere All At Once. For various reasons that one might expect when it comes to pinning down Jackie Chan, that dream was dashed, but, as they returned to the script, something clicked—it allowed Everything to become something entirely new, making way for a late-career revelation for Michelle Yeoh.

“It really felt like the script came alive when it became about the mom and it was Michelle as the lead,” says Scheinert. “That got real scary because we literally couldn’t think of anyone else if she said no. Or if we found out that Michelle Yeoh is a terrible person, then the movie dies.”

That fear was readily apparent to Yeoh, who it turned out, was not a terrible person, but more of a lovingly exacting mother who refers to the co-directors as “the boys.” “I remember meeting them—they can be very over-the-top when you get to know them better—but at the beginning, they're kind of shy,” Yeoh recalls of their first encounter. “They were maybe a little intimidated. I seem to be such an intimidating figure. I'm like Eleanor Young walking around, saying, ‘You’ll never be enough!’”

She's jokingly referencing her character, the imperious matriarch from Crazy Rich Asians, which would become a smash hit just months after Yeoh first met Daniels (and helped ease Daniels' anxiety about Hollywood's willingness to make a film centered on a Chinese family). And indeed, that is perhaps how the industry itself has seen her for years.

“I’m always sort of cast into the more serious role,” Yeoh says. “You know, the one that brings the sanity back into your life and makes you understand what is important, what's deep and wonderful, and blah, blah, blah.”

“I think it's one of the things where no one has asked her to do anything but that, because a person gets typecast or whatever,” Kwan says.

It's hard for anyone to shake off the idea of Yeoh as this sort of towering, regal figure. “Her assistant with whom she's worked for years and years was very upset the first few days of shooting,” Kwan recalls. “She was like, ‘You can't make her look like that. That's not what Michelle looks like. Don't do that! Take that wig off her head, she doesn't have gray hairs!’”

In Everything, Yeoh is unkempt, emotionally flayed, and put through the multiversal ringer in a role that is entirely singular within a prolific, decades-long international career. And she knows it. “On Friday nights we'd all go back to her hotel room because she loves to party and Ke [Huy Quan, who plays Evelyn's husband, Waymond] loves to party,” Kwan recollects. “They just want to drink and talk—like, all night—and one of the things she said to me that I was really moved by was: ‘I wonder what my career would have looked like if I had done this movie a long time ago.’”

Daniels offered Yeoh a new way to see herself on-screen. “I love working with younger directors because they don't see you in the conventional way,” Yeoh says. “They want to peel that onion and see what other layers there are, and then start throwing crazy things at you.”

It helps, also, to shed your esteemed facade and lean in when you’re joined by a star like Jamie Lee Curtis doing a similar thing. Curtis, who also fully engaged in a shabby, strippeddown part as a glowering, sometimes unhinged IRS agent, became a bit of a gang with Yeoh. Curtis remarks, “The truth of the matter is, had they just said, ‘There's a Michelle Yeoh movie that they would like you to be in,' I would’ve said, ‘Okay.’”

“The first thing she said to me was, ‘If you don't like the boys, we can run away. We can elope together,’” Yeoh says with a laugh. Together, the pair would playfully tease Daniels, and entered spaces of vulnerability at times hand-in-hand. “Sometimes, Michelle, as brave as she was, had some hesitancy, and when Jamie was there, she would do anything,” Kwan says. “It was this really beautiful thing where they were like, I don't know what we're doing, but we're doing it together.”

Yet, while Curtis and Yeoh—along with the 92-year-old legend, James Hong, who was so perfect for the role of Evelyn's father that nobody else even auditioned—made for a pair of veterans embarking on new horizons, their co-stars came from entirely different acting histories. The role of Waymond—a distinct part that ping-pongs between a soft-hearted husband and, in his multiverse persona, heroic action star—marks the show-stopping return of Ke Huy Quan, who nostalgic viewers might remember as the man who was once Short-Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies.

Even after portraying two of the most iconic roles of the ‘80s, Quan struggled to find work as a young Asian actor. He eventually went to film school at USC and largely stayed behind the camera—doing fight choreography and even working as an assistant director on Wong Kar-wai's 2046—but ultimately left Hollywood for decades. It wasn’t, ironically, until he watched Crazy Rich Asians that he considered the possibility of a return.

“I saw that movie and I told myself, if you ever wanted to get back into acting, now would be the time, because times have changed,” Quan recalls. Soon after, he asked his friend to be his agent, and “a week later we got a call to audition for this,” he says. “The timing was just impeccable. And I was super nervous because I haven’t auditioned for over 25 years.”

The audition came, as unlikely as it sounds, from Kwan stumbling across a reference to Quan on the internet, wondering where the kid from Temple of Doom and The Goonies had gone, and sending out an ask almost on a lark. When he auditioned, he was “this ball of sweet energy,” Scheinert says, a perfect mold of Waymond. It also helped that he floored them with his acting, looked the right age, was bilingual, and knew martial arts. But, Scheinert notes, he also earned the part with the hard work that is required of his intense, shape-shifting, and stunt-heavy role. (In a rather charming full-circle moment, Jeff Cohen—a lawyer who, in middle school, played Chunk in The Goonies—did Quan's deal for the film.)

Yet, if Quan was just returning to the spotlight, Everything provided the first big one for Stephanie Hsu in the role of Evelyn's daughter, Joy. Daniels met Hsu on an episode they directed of “Awkwafina is Nora From Queens,” and Hsu developed a particular and immediate kinship with the them, inspiring them to mold the part for her.

“We rewrote it based on her sense of humor and just how weird she is, which is always such a gift, as a filmmaker—to just be like, oh, you're going to inspire me now,” Scheinert says. Kwan adds, “She just has so much range, and I think she's going to be huge.”

Hsu was able to tap into the role partly because the specific dynamic of the central Wang trio—a global star in Yeoh, a former child actor in Quan, and a breakout newcomer in Hsu—contained a kind of chemistry that mirrored their own characters. “Evelyn is really strong, determined, and the sort of mother who is keeping the ship afloat—or so she thinks— and offscreen Michelle is steadfast, but also so silly and loving and just a complete joy and blast to be around,” Hsu says. “My experience of Waymond is always dad, and Ke is similar in that way where I don't think I've ever met someone as sweet as him.”

Most of all, though, the cast were enabled by the loving, open on-set environment created by the filmmakers, who aim to run their productions like “summer camps” (which includes a morning circle that involves a new improvised game every day, like Hsu's own “Hug Tackle”). “It's very intentional the way that everyone is cultivating a workspace and a creative environment that is full of joy and kindness,” Hsu said.

Daniels point to two instances that established the familial ethos for the production, one involving a bonding experience from a script breakdown, in which Yeoh and Quan, baffled by the stiff translations of the Chinese dialogue, helped retranslate lines. The other was an early cast and crew Korean BBQ night. “Ke was like ‘I’ve never done sake-bombs, let's do sake bombs!’” Scheinert says. “He bullied James Hong into doing sake-bombs.

“A 90-year old man!” Kwan says. “And he was down.”

Behind the scenes

“You know the two guys who have the trophies up their butts? They're the choreographers,” Daniel Kwan explains. That would be Andy and Brian Le, brothers and fight choreographers for the film who make brief, sometimes painful cameos as henchmen, and who helped shape the distinct fighting style that the Daniels wanted from the action scenes in Everything: less of the bruising grit of most Hollywood action, more of the loose, playful ethos of Hong Kong-style fighting, in which Yeoh first made a name.

“For this type of movie, with its wackiness, the realism of modern-day action wouldn’t fit too well,” Andy Le says. “With Hong Kong action, you can go as wild as you want and it will fit the tone of the movie, it will push the story forward. You see all these cool moves, but at the same time it enhances the flavor of the movie.”

As CGI has gotten cheaper and more accessible over the last two decades, and superhero movies have proliferated, it has become something of a cliché to destroy a major American city in the course of a fight scene. Which makes the grounded, relentlessly surprising fights in Everything all the more distinctive: the environment and props feel as much a part of the action as fists and feet, with a fanny pack and a perverse range of office supplies recruited as weapons.

The scope of Everything, though, feels no more limited as a result. This is partially a credit to the small crew of visual effects superstars that the Daniels worked alongside of, but also due to the film's distinct look and style: while blockbusters require hundreds of people on an effects team to create a highly photorealistic look, Kwan and Scheinert relied on a team of about eight to create a vision that is goofy, singular, and uniquely immersive.

The expansive quality also comes back in part to the conceit of the film itself—the act of verse-jumping meant being able to play with a pastiche of genres, visual palettes and even cinematic odes (like what the Daniels call the “Wong Kar-wai universe”). The film often straps the audience into a rollercoaster ride of sorts, with sequences and montages that race through universes that can each feel like their own movie.

“When we would jump from thriller to action film to comedy and back to family drama with a quick stop in 40s noir, we had to make sure that the audience was sure-footed in each experience,” says the film's editor Paul Rogers. “So knowing the tropes and tones that we were aiming for helped us to really land the audience in each world with confidence. I don't think it would have been successful if the film felt like a mushy mashup of genres.”

Perhaps the biggest boon to crafting a tangible multiverse was the production's primary shooting location: an old office building in Simi Valley, formerly the home of a predatory loan mega-corporation that had been turned into a massive, rentable shooting warehouse where the production team built most of the sets and created what production designer Jason Kisvarday refers to as a cost-effective “playground” for their movie.

“There was a lot of weird energy in there. It's a sprawling building—lots of corridors, basement spaces, conference rooms, a giant open cafeteria, and that atrium in the middle. It's incredible,” Kisvarday says. “It was big enough that we could wreck one part of the building, then walk away and just go somewhere else in the complex to continue filming while our team restored the initial part of the building.”

There, Kivarsday was able to create a carousel of sets that could feel grounded, such as the Wang family apartment, before what he calls “magical realism” suddenly transformed the visual space (such as when a drab, open-office IRS workspace becomes an intergalactic battleground). Working in the distinct office warehouse, though, also helped inspire the birth of completely new universes.

“Entire sequences were written around the unique geography and architecture in that building,” Kivarsday says. “Sometimes we really wanted to get weird and create a vibe from scratch. Example: Hot Dog Universe.”

The other crucial through-line for the multiverse would be the film's maximalist score, by the shapeshifting Los Angeles-based band Son Lux, composed of keyboardist and vocalist Ryan Lott, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang. Tasked by the directors, according to Lott, to “do all the things, but make it feel like one thing,” the trio was brought on before production to begin a collaborative, freewheeling process to find the sound of the multiverse.

“We sent a ton of musical ideas and other sonic materials before they started shooting, like examples of customized instruments we built virtually with the film and its many universes in mind,” Bhatia explains. As the movie was coming together in the edit—much of it cut with temp music sourced from earlier Son Lux recordings and band members' solo projects—they were able to have a unique back-and-forth with Daniels, Bhatia continues, “between the music and the edit, in such a way that each aspect could build on—and up the ante for—the other.”

Tapping into the film's eclectic visual references, the band pulled inspiration from everything from Don Davis' score for The Matrix to Randy Newman's Toy Story classic “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” But it was their restless, very Daniels approach to experimenting in the studio that led to some of the score's most memorable sounds and textures. “Before we had written anything for the score,” Chang says, “we spent a day in the studio experimenting with a variety of Chinese drums (排鼓) and tuned gongs,” tweaking and warping them into virtual instruments, the percussive and melodic bones of the film.

André Benjamin, better known as Outkast's André 3000, also came in for a score session with the band, arriving with “fifteen flutes and a very open mind,” according to Chang. The enigmatic rapper and actor went through a similar process that the band had started with the drums and gongs, as they layered flute improvisations and distortions into the architecture of the score—“an enormous trove of incredible textures and phrases.”

For the band, concludes Lott, one thing that Kwan and Scheinert said early on stuck with them: the “the key to making it all make sense was, in every moment, whether tragic or absurd, hilarious or heartbreaking, the music had to be earnest and come from an entirely honest place.”

Kindness in the chaos

These days, Kwan says, much of art is broadly struggling to confront two things: “One is this feeling of everything happening all at once—how can you put that in a story in a way that is meaningful? And the other is climate change.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once is most obviously Daniels' attempt at trying to encapsulate the first part, but you can sense the latter lurking in background as well. Of course, in Daniels' language, if climate dread is an inspiration, it takes on a decidedly different look: in Jobu's evil plan, an everything bagel-void threatens to swallow the multiverse and destroy us all. “This project came out of our own anxieties about living in the modern world, and I think everyone I know is trying to capture that,” Kwan says.

The feeling was already there when they were writing it in 2016, before the Trump Era and the pandemic. “We already felt overwhelmed. And, and as we were writing it, we were like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening? It's getting worse—how could it possibly get worse than this?’” Kwan says. “Everyone is trying to process that feeling, the backdrop of doom, the backdrop of chaos.”

Daniels don’t have a grand answer to a radical new path, but Everything at the very least offers a simple hope in response to the chaos. “One of the most powerful things you can do for someone is to pay attention to them,” Kwan says.

For Evelyn, she has to confront a multiverse on the brink of collapse—an extreme manifestation of the sensory overload that the modern world is increasingly defined by—to see the family that has always been there. “You have to go to the end of the world to find out what really matters to you: your daughter, your husband—would you make another choice?” Yeoh ponders.

It's a question and a reminder of sorts for the audience, too: to see what's in front of you, to reach out, to be kind. That's what the film became in part for the Daniels themselves. “I would love if audience members take away the idea that kindness can be a powerful way to fight. I think telling this story definitely made us reflect on the idea that,” Scheinert says, slipping into a Bill and Ted voice, “like, ‘Oh yeah, kindness— sick!”
 
Michelle Yeoh    

Michelle Yeoh is recognized as one of the greatest and the most successful actresses from the East. Michelle can recently be seen as 'Emperor Philippa Georgiou' in CBS's Star Trek: Discovery, in Destin Daniel Cretton's Shang-Chi for Marvel and in Navot Papushado's action-thriller Gunpowder Milkshake.

The former Bond girl is best known for her roles in John M. Chu's romantic comedy, Crazy Rich Asians, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 1 & 2, Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Spottiswoode's Tomorrow Never Dies and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. Other notable performances include starring in Luc Besson's critically acclaimed biographical film The Lady and voicing a role in the Dreamworks animated hit, Kung Fu Panda 2.

Next, Michelle will be seen starring in the Daniels' science fiction film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, for A24 (opening SXSW). Other upcoming credits include Netflix's prequel series, The Witcher: Blood Origin, James Cameron's Avatar sequels and Paul Feig's The School For Good and Evil.

James Hong    

With over 500 acting credits, and counting, it's no wonder James Hong thinks that one day “They might put me in The Book Of Guinness (sic) as the actor with the most roles ever.' Born 1929 in Minneapolis, Hong originally moved to Southern California in the 1950s to work as a civil engineer. He began to dabble in acting and a 1954 appearance on Groucho Marx's “You Bet Your Life,” doing impressions of Jimmy Stewart, Peter Lorre and Marx himself, jump-started his career. For the next 65 years, the character actor would work with some of the industry's most distinguished film directors, including John Carpenter, Edward Dmytryk, Sam Fuller, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Ridley Scott, Roman Polanski and William Wellman. A few of Hong's more memorable movie roles include David Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Hannibal Chew in Blade Runner (1982), Kahn in Chinatown (1974), Chi Fu in Mulan (1998), and Ping in the Kung Fu Panda film and television series, for which he was nominated for three Annie Awards, winning in 2011. Among his selfprofessed favorite film parts are Shin in Black Widow (1987) and the little-known French film Idol (2002), which gave Hong a rare opportunity to play the lead. Hong co-founded the Los Angeles-based East West Players in 1965, along with Mako, Rae Creevey, Beulah Quo, Soon-Tek Oh, Pat Li, June Kim, Guy Lee, and Yet Lock. The organization has grown to become the nation's leading Asian American theater troupe and continues to work for diverse representations of the Asian-American experience across all media.

Jamie Lee Curtis    

Jamie Lee Curtis has demonstrated her versatility as a film actress, starring in acclaimed films such as the blockbuster True Lies, for which she won a Golden Globe Award; Trading Places, for which she earned a BAFTA (British Film Academy Award) for Best Supporting Actress; A Fish Called Wanda, for which she received duel Best Actress nominations from BAFTA and the Golden Globes; and the Disney feature film Freaky Friday, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. It was her portrayal of ‘Laurie Strode' in Halloween, which was her film debut and brought her to the attention of audiences worldwide. 40 years later, in 2018, Curtis reprieved that signature role in David Gordon Green's record-breaking horror feature, Halloween, produced by horror guru Jason Blum. Halloween's opening weekend was the biggest debut ever, for any movie in any genre, to feature a female lead character over 55 years of age. The second film in the trilogy Halloween Kills was released in October of 2021 and Halloween Ends, which is the final film in the trilogy will be out October 2022. In 2019 Curtis appeared alongside an incredible cast including Daniel Craig, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas in the smash hit Knives Out, a murder mystery with a modern take on the classic detective genre as written and directed by Rian Johnson. Most recently she worked alongside Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart on the feature film Borderlands, which is based on the popular videogame of the same name.

Additional film credits include: Spare Parts; You Again with Sigourney Weaver, Kristen
Bell and Betty White; Beverly Hills Chihuahua; Christmas with the Kranks, opposite
Tim Allen; The Tailor of Panama along with Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush; Fierce Creatures; Virus; Dominick and Eugene; Blue Steel; My Girl; My Girl II; Forever Young; Mother's Boys; House Arrest and Love Letters.

In 2016, Curtis returned to her horror roots, starring in two seasons of the Ryan Murphy-created TV series, “Scream Queens” for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. She also co-starred opposite Richard Lewis in the acclaimed sitcom “Anything But Love” which earned her both a Golden Globe and People's Choice Award, as well as TNT's adaptation of the Wendy Wasserstein play “The Heidi Chronicles” which also earned her a Golden Globe nomination. In 1998, Curtis starred in the CBS television film “Nicholas' Gift” for which she received an Emmy nomination. Other episodic work includes “New Girl” and “NCIS.”

Curtis is also a New York Times best-selling children's book author. Her 12th book, Me, MySelfie & I: A Cautionary Tale, was released in 2018. Her 11th book, This Is Me: A Story of Who We Are and Where We Came From, was released on September 20, 2016 and became an instant New York Times best-seller. Her other titles include, When I Was Little: A Four-Year Old's Memoir of Her Youth, Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born, Today I Feel Silly and Other Moods That Make My Day, I’m Gonna Like Me, Where Do Balloons Go?, It's Hard To Be Five, Is There Really a Human Race, Big Words for Little People, My Mommy Hung the Moon and My Brave Year of Firsts.

Curtis is an AIDS activist and has a deep and active connection to many children's charities. In 2020 she launched the website www.myhandinyours.com which offers items of comfort where 100% of proceeds from sales benefits Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In addition, Jamie produced and appears in “Letters From Camp,” a podcast from Audible that debuted in September 2020 and returned for a second season in June 2021 and will return for a third this year. In July iHeart Radio released the “Good Friend” podcast, which Jamie hosts and delves into the many phases of friendship through unscripted conversations with new and old friends.

Stephanie Hsu   

Stephanie Hsu can be seen in the upcoming, highly-anticipated A24 film from Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Everything Everywhere All At Once. In this independent feature, Stephanie and Michelle Yeoh star as universe-jumping, mother-daughter rivals. The film is scheduled to be released on March 25, 2022.
 
Stephanie recently wrapped on season four of Amazon's hit show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” as Mei, the provocative love-interest to Joel Maisel. The cast won a SAG Award in 2020 for best ensemble in a comedy series.

Additionally, Stephanie recently completed production in a lead role on the Lionsgate Untitled Adele Lim Comedy alongside Ashley Park, Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu. The film, produced for Lionsgate by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's company, Point Grey, follows the epic journey of four Asian-American women traveling through Asia in search of one of their birth mothers. Along the way, their experience will become one of bonding, friendship, belonging and no-holds-barred debauchery that reveals the universal truth of what it means to know and love who you are.

Stephanie originated the role of Christine Canigula in the audience favorite Broadway sensation, Be More Chill. For this performance Stephanie received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award Nomination. She has performed all over NYC from downtown to uptown making her Broadway debut as Karen The Computer in SpongeBob Squarepants The Musical. 

Her past television and film credits include a recurring role on “The Path,” “Awkwafina is Nora from Queens,” “Femme,” “Set It Up,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Girl Code."

Ke Huy Quan   

Born in Saigon to Chinese immigrants, Ke is the seventh of nine children. When Ke was just seven years old, his parents made the difficult decision of splitting up their family to escape a tumultuous post-war Vietnam. After a failed attempt, in 1978 the family succeeded in making it out, albeit divided. Ke, along with his father and five other siblings, ended up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. They were there for one year before being reunited with the rest of the family and granted asylum in the United States. In 1979, they settled in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, Ke spoke little English but soon acclimated himself to life in America. In 1983, while Ke was busy being a kid, unbeknownst to him, the search was on for a Chinese boy to star alongside Harrison Ford in a sequel to the highly successful film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Unable to find who they were looking for, an open casting call was held at an elementary school in a place none other than Chinatown, Los Angeles. Ke tagged along with his little brother to the audition with no intention of trying out himself. A casting director noticed him and invited him to read for the part. He would later read again, but this time for Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford. Despite having no acting experience, he walked into the room and came back out, landing the role of a lifetime as Short Round. Ke's next destination—Sri Lanka, to film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Bitten by the acting bug, in his follow up movie, Ke joined an enviable group of young misfits still beloved by generations today, known as The Goonies.

He continued acting, globe-trotting from Taiwan to Japan. He starred in the Taiwanese film It Takes a Thief and the Japanese film Passengers, opposite singer Honda Minako. Ke's other notable credits include Encino Man, Breathing Fire, and television shows “Nothing is Easy” with Elliott Gould and “Head of the Class.” Working since he was eleven, opportunities for Asian actors became limited as Ke got older. He decided to press pause and return to the real-life classrooms of USC, where he studied film and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduating from USC, Ke began working again, but this time behind the camera. He worked as an Assistant Action Choreographer collaborating with Action Director Corey Yuen on X-Men and The One with Jet Li. He later went on to work for one of Asia's most influential filmmakers Wong Kar Wai, assisting in project developments and even as an Assistant Director on Wong's film, 2046.

Ke's love for acting did not wane; however, jobs for Asian Actors in Hollywood remained few and far between. This all changed in 2018 when Crazy Rich Asians, featuring an all-Asian cast took the box office by storm, opening new doors for Asian actors. Ke, recognizing Hollywood's acknowledgement of the importance of Asian representation took this as his cue to return to his roots. He decided to step back in front of the camera, auditioning for the Russo Brothers/A24 feature, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Ke will star opposite Michelle Yeoh in the highly anticipated film, marking his return to acting in a major role in 20 years. The film, written and directed by the Daniels will premiere at SXSW on March 11th and be released on March 25th.

Harry Shum Jr.   

Harry Shum Jr. has proven himself to be a dynamic force in Hollywood. While he
is perhaps best known for his role as Mike Chang on the hit series “Glee,” Shum has consistently embodied complex and meaningful characters, bringing depth and magnetic energy to the screen.
Shum leads the technological thriller, Broadcast Signal Intrusion, opposite Chris Sullivan and Kelley Mack, and also serves as an executive producer on the film.

Inspired by actual broadcast interruptions that occurred in the Windy City in the late 1980s, and remain unsolved to this day, the film is an unsettling journey into our collective technological nightmares. The film premiered at SXSW and had a domestic theatrical/VOD release in Fall 2021.

He was also recently seen as the lead in Universal's romantic drama All My Life, starring opposite Jessica Rothe. Inspired by real events, the film follows a couple whose wedding plans are thrown off course when the groom is diagnosed with liver cancer. All My Life released in theaters/VOD on Friday, December 4th, 2020.

Premiering as a WorldWide #1 on Netflix on November 5th, 2021, Shum was most recently seen alongside Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Yang in McG's production Love Hard. This romantic comedy follows an LA girl, unlucky in love, who falls for an East Coast guy on a dating app and decides to surprise him for Christmas, only to discover that she's been catfished.

Making it's debut at SXSW 2022, Harry will soon be seen in A24's feature, Everything Everywhere All At Once, starring opposite Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis, with the cryptic synopsis: It's about a 55 year old Chinese woman trying to finish her taxes.
His previous film credits include Warner Bros' massive hit Crazy Rich Asians. The film, which features a historic all-Asian cast, was nominated for 2 Golden Globes, won Best Comedy at the Critics' Choice Awards, and was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the 2019 SAG awards. He also starred in the Netflix Original feature Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Ii – The Green Destiny, the sequel to the Academy Award-winning martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, set 20 years later.

Other notable projects on the silver screen include Escape Plan 3: Devil's Station opposite Sylvester Stallone; Burn opposite Suki Waterhouse and Josh Hutcherson; Harry Shum Jr. (cont.)    Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword Of Destiny, Revenge Of The Green Dragons, Moms' Night Out; Step Up 2: The Streets, and White Frog.

Shum has numerous TV credits as well, including the fan favorite “Shadowhunters” on Freeform, in which he starred as the eccentric warlock Magnus Bane, for which he won the People's Choice Awards Male TV Star in 2018. The series is based on the bestselling YA fantasy series “The Mortal Instruments” by Cassandra Clare and follows a teenage girl who discovers on her 18th birthday that she comes from a long line of Shadowhunters, a group of human-angel hybrids who hunt down demons.

In addition, Shum starred in, produced and co-choreographed “The LXD (Legion Of Extraordinary Dancers),” an online dance adventure created by director Jon M. Chu (Step Up 3D).

Passionate about children, Shum has partnered with The Conscious Kid, an organization which focuses on education, research, and policy dedicated to equality and promoting healthy racial identity development in youth while supporting organizations, families, and educators in taking action to disrupt racism in young children. Shum's heart also lies in working with the Anti-Racist Children's Book Education Fund initiative through this organization.

Born in San Jose, Costa Rica and raised in both Northern and Southern California, Shum began dancing in high school and soon after discovered acting. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
 
Daniels
Writers/ Directors/ Producers   

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as DANIELS, have been writing and directing together for over a decade, initially with a slew of viral music videos, commercials, and short films, then with feature films and TV directing.

They've developed a reputation for combining absurdity with heartfelt personal stories. Oftentimes they incorporate a unique brand of visual effects, and visceral practical effects into their genre blending projects.

They have directed music videos for Manchester Orchestra, Foster the People, and won a VMA for their video for “Turn Down For What,” which Scheinert bullied Kwan into being the lead actor in. Kwan is a really good dancer.

They wrote and directed the feature film Swiss Army Man starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe, which went on to win the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, received multiple nominations, and gained a large cult following.

While they were writing & developing their new movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, a kung fu sci-fi dramedy starring Michelle Yeoh, Scheinert went and directed a small redneck dramedy called The Death of Dick Long, also released by A24.

They both live in Los Angeles. One of them has a son. The other has a goofy dog.

But to be honest Daniel does most of the work.

Jonathan Wang
Producer   

Jonathan Wang is the long-time producer and collaborator with the directing-duo Daniels. Beginning in music video production, Wang produced several award-winning music videos, including projects for Bob Dylan, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Wang then pivoted to feature films in 2015 with Daniel's Swiss Army Man, which premiered at Sundance 2016 where it won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award. Wang has since produced five other films with A24, including the forthcoming Everything Everywhere All At Once.
 
Anthony & Joe Russo
Producers

Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Directors-Producers) have been absorbing classic movies since growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s. By high school, the brothers were immersing themselves in every genre, as well as catching every classic they could at their local arthouse theater. They each went on to study English and Film— Anthony at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, Joe at the University of Iowa and UCLA—and the result is a contribution to worldwide moviegoing that mixes storytelling craft, filmmaking skill, and a deep understanding of how great characters can connect us all.

Through a quartet of movies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Russos raised the bar for blockbuster filmmaking in artistry, scope, and box office: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019), which in addition to concluding the “Avengers saga” racked up numerous industry records, including Biggest Single-Day Gross, Highest-Grossing Opening Weekend, and Highest-Grossing Film of All Time.

While working on the Marvel films with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, director of photography Trent Opalach, composers Henry Jackman and Alan Silvestri, amazing below-the-line and FX crews and the most extraordinary roster of actors ever assembled, the Russos have always stood by their belief that strong teamwork brings stratospheric results. Rejecting the label of “auteurs,” the Russos subscribe to the “collective theory,” noting that collaboration is crucial. It's a philosophy that can be felt in their debut feature, Welcome to Collinwood (2002), and underscores their work on TV's critically-acclaimed “Arrested Development” (for which they won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing of a Comedy Series), “Community,” and “Happy Endings"—for all of which the Russos directed the pilot episodes as well as numerous beloved signature episodes.

Similarly, the Russos are committed to helping young storytellers gain a foothold in the film industry. Just as their own careers received an early boost from producers including Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, the Russos now lend their skills to producing films that spotlight fresh talent and ideas and are eager to help filmmakers they believe deserve membership in the Directors Guild of America. Beyond their sponsorship, the Russos try to personally mentor aspiring directors as they strive to grow as filmmakers, and they regularly host internships to help educate and guide them.
 
In addition to the film community, the Russo Brothers—whose family back home are longtime members of Cleveland's Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA) organization, which is defined by a strong belief in “Tradition, History, Family, and Philanthropy”—believe in giving back to the community they grew up in. Toward that end, they founded a forum with The National Italian-American Foundation (NIAF) that encourages and advises filmmakers who are eager to tell stories unique to the Italian-American experience.

In early 2018, the Russo Brothers were pleased to announce the formation of their studio, AGBO, an energetic, artist-led collective focusing on creating global content for film, television, and digital platforms. Headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, AGBO aims to nurture talent and create best-in-class family and prestige content, with the goal of working in a wide gamut of genres and bringing original ideas to the screen. Among the company's first films were Brian Kirk's crime drama 21 Bridges, starring Chadwick Boseman; Sam Hargrave's thriller Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth, which broke records for Netflix as the biggest premiere in the platform's history with over 100 million views during its first month of release; Natalie Erika James' horror thriller Relic, starring Emily Mortimer, acquired out of Sundance and released by IFC Midnight; the fact-based Middle East-set drama Mosul, written and directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan and distributed by Netflix; and Cherry, from the best-selling novel, starring Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo directed by the Russos' was an Apple Original Films. The Russo's are producers on the upcoming global television event series “Citadel” for Amazon Studios currently in production.

Their next directorial endeavor, The Gray Man, will star Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in a film from Mark Greaney's novel, which the Russos plan to turn into a franchise. Netflix has committed its largest budget to date on the project.

In addition to their film and television successes, the Russos are also co-founders— along with almost two-dozen fellow directors and artists—of BULLITT, a filmmaker's collective and creative studio that is centered on the creation of brand-integrated entertainment and advertising content, and which utilizes state-of-the-art technology to break down barriers between advertisers and audiences.

Mike Larocca
Producers   

Mike Larocca is a Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of AGBO focused on creative development and production. At AGBO, among other film and TV projects, Mike was a Producer on Netflix mega-hit Extraction starring Chris Hemsworth, AGBO's first independent drama, Mosul; the horror-thriller Relic; Cherry, directed by the Russo Brothers and starring Tom Holland; and 21 Bridges starring Chadwick Boseman. Mike is a Producer on Netflix's upcoming film The Gray Man, starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling, an Executive Producer on the upcoming global television event series “Citadel” for Amazon Studios. Previously, Mike was SVP of Production at Chernin Entertainment. There, he was an Executive Producer on Spy, the Melissa McCarthy action-comedy; The Drop, starring James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy; and was a Co-Producer on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Mike was previously a VP at Spyglass Entertainment.

Larkin Seiple
Director of Photography   

Larkin Seiple is an award-winning Director of Photography with one of the most memorable portfolios of work. Larkin was featured in Variety's 2016 “Below-The-Line Impact Report: Up Next” and is the youngest filmmaker to be included in Variety's 2018 Artisans Elite Report.

Having started in music videos, Larkin has collaborated with artists such as FKA Twigs, A Tribe Called Quest, Benny Blanco, Gary Clark Jr., David Guetta, Chet Faker, Rhianna, and Foster the People. He won an MTV VMA for ‘Best Cinematography' for Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar's Never Catch Me and a Camerimage Award for ‘Best Music Video' for DJ Snake & Lil Jon's Turn Down for What. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Foster the People's Houdini and a World Music Award for Taylor Swift's 22. In 2018 he won countless awards including Best Cinematography at UKMVA and Camerimage for his impressive work in Childish Gambino's widely acclaimed cultural touchstone “This is America,” starring Donald Glover and directed by Hiro Murai. Since its debut, the video has been viewed more than 800 million times on YouTube. Shot on 3-perf 35 mm film on 400-foot rolls, Seiple had only one hour of total footage on which to shoot, dramatically limiting what he could shoot and the length of each take.

On the narrative side, Larkin transitioned to features with the 2015 Kevin Bacon comedy-thriller Cop Car produced by Park Pictures, followed by Sony/Open Road Films' Bleed for This starring Miles Teller. He went on to lense A24's Swiss Army Man directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe, which screened in the U.S. Dramatic Section of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Netflix's I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore starring Elijah Wood and Melanie Lynskey, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and the Julius Onah-directed Luce starring Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer, which premiered at 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

In the TV space, Larkin lensed the pilot episode for Hulu's revenge thriller “Reprisal,” produced by Warren Littlefield, and most recently lensed the upcoming drama Gaslist with director Matt Ross, starring Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, and Patton Oswalt.

ature film The Death of Dick Long, which premiered at Sundance in 2018. He dipped back into documentary in 2020 with You Cannot Kill David Arquette, an official SXSW selection and winner of the Adobe Editing Award. He recently completed editing DANIELS' newest feature film Everything Everywhere All At Once and is currently at work on Isaiah Saxon's debut feature The Legend of Ochi.
Along with feature films, he has edited for the “Eric Andre Show,” Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Haim, and Thundercat among others.

Paul has also collaborated extensively with director and business partner Kahlil Joseph on projects such as ‘Lemonade' for Beyonce, ‘Process' for Sampha, and Joseph's most recent work BLK NWS.
Paul is a partner in the editorial company PARALLAX located in NE Los Angeles.

Shirley Kurata
Costume Designer   

Shirley Kurata's work as a Costume Designer includes “Generation” for HBO Max which follows a group of public high school students in Anaheim that push against their conservative community and Seoul Searching set in the 80s directed by Benson Lee.

Shirley rose in the industry first studying at Studio Bercot in Paris for 3 years in the 90s and since then has designed for Tierra Whack, Billie Eilish, Pharrell, Mindy Kaling, and Lena Dunham. She's worked personally with designers such as Rodarte, Kenzo, and Miu Miu, and regularly styles for editorial in magazines such as Vogue. She also curates the store Virgil Normal in Silverlake which has had articles written on its success.

Further design work includes the upcoming Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Son Lux
Composer   

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a sonic test kitchen.

The band strives to question deeply held assumptions about how music is made and re-construct it from a molecular level. What began as a solo project for founder Ryan Lott expanded in 2014, thanks to a kinship with Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The trio strengthened their chemistry and honed their collective intuition while creating, releasing, and touring six recordings, including Brighter Wounds (2018) and triple album Tomorrows (2021). A carefully cultivated musical language rooted in curiosity and balancing opposites largely eschews genre and structural conventions. And yet, the band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward. Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions.
 
Lauren Marie Mikus & Bruce Gilbert
Music Supervisors

Lauren Marie Mikus and Bruce Gilbert are partners in Charming Music Supervision, based in LA. Lauren started working with the Daniels on Swiss Army Man and has
 
been lucky enough to collaborate with them ever since. Lauren Marie Mikus is a Music Supervisor and musician living in Los Angeles, California. A Texan by birth, Lauren honed her interest in music supervision while working in Austin, before setting out for the work and rewards of the West. She spends her free time as a singer and guitarist in her band Gal Pals, also based in Los Angeles. Bruce Gilbert is a four-time Guild of Music Supervisors nominee for his work on “Weeds,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “GLOW,” and “I Love Dick.” He was featured on Billboard's first-ever TV's Top Music Power Players List. Bruce lives and works in Los Angeles, California where he splits his time between the 5, 10 and 101 freeways.

Sarah Finn
Casting Director   

Sarah Finn is a uniquely innovative and ground-breaking Casting Director. Many of her films have left an enduring cultural imprint, as well as broken box office records.

With well over 100 feature films and multiple awards to her credit, she is perhaps best known for casting the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe beginning with Iron Man in 2008. She has also been recognized for the Oscar-winning films Black Panther; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and Crash. Those films all won the prestigious SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture and earned her the Casting Society of America's highest honor, the Artios Award for Outstanding Achievement in Casting.

This past year, she received two Emmy Nominations for “WandaVision and “The Mandalorian."
Sarah's collaboration with the MCU includes 26 films to date, with Spider-Man: No Way Home currently breaking records worldwide. Over the last decade, some of those films include originals and sequels for Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Guardians of The Galaxy, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther and Captain Marvel. Along the way, she has been responsible for finding and assembling casts with some of today's biggest stars. She is now engaged in launching the next phase of films including the recently released Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals, plus the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
In addition, she is in charge of Casting and serves as a Consulting Producer on Marvel's entire slate of Streaming projects for Disney+. This includes 2021 releases “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “Loki,” “What If…?,” and “Hawkeye,” and the upcoming projects including Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Secret Invasion.

She cast the breakout Star Wars hit series, “The Mandalorian,” created by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, as well as the recently released “The Book of Boba Fett.”

Also a Consulting Producer, Sarah is currently casting the third season of “The Mandalorian” and prepping their other projects with LucasFilm for Disney+ including Ahsoka Tano and more.

Sarah's other upcoming projects include Everything Everywhere All at Once from the Daniels which will premiere as the Opening Night Film for the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. She recently completed casting on Extraction 2 and The Gray Man from the Russo brothers; and the Lionsgate/Showtime series “The First Lady,” being directed by Susanne Bier, for which she is also a Co-Producer. Sarah is a Producer and Casting Director for the independent film One True Loves, currently in postproduction, based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Sarah's past credits include a wide range of film genres: Jon Favreau's comedy, Chef; Oliver Stone's drama, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; indie favorites such as Martin McDonough's Seven Psychopaths and Shane Black's The Nice Guys; sports films Miracle, Coach Carter and She's the Man; animated classics The Little Prince, and The Jungle Book; and action favorites such as Fast & Furious and Kick-Ass.

A graduate of Yale University and member of AMPAS (Executive Committee, Casting Branch), Sarah has served on the Executive Board of Women in Film and is on the Board of Advisors for the highly acclaimed Master Class educational series.

She is married to musician and educator Mike Finn, and they have three children.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Publicity
New York/ Los Angeles Kate Fassl kate@a24films.com    140 minutes
Rated R
USA
English
Color
+1 646 568 6015
Regional Lisa Richie lisa@a24films.com +1 646 568 6015
International Jaime Panoff jaime@a24films.com +1 646 568 6015
 
Synopsis
Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel
Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes. 

 
About the film
Sitting on a wall in director Daniel Kwan's back office in Los Angeles's Highland Park is a framed work by the artist Ikeda Manabu, “History of Rise and Fall,” an elaborate pen-and-ink drawing featuring a maelstrom of pagodas, gnarled cherry branches, and railroad tracks—a fittingly abundant example of Manabu's glorious, almost painfully maximalist style.
“He does these things that hurt your brain when you look at them because they're so intricate, so detailed, so dense,” Kwan explains. “But when you pull back, you're like, oh, that's a tree.”
Kwan and his filmmaking partner, Daniel Scheinert—the auteur duo otherwise known as Daniels—needed to find their tree. This was circa 2016, when they were first outlining what would become Everything Everywhere All At Once, a project that was beginning to increasingly resemble the zoomed-in chaos of a Manabu piece. In a photo they took from that time, a headache-inducing diagram on a wall-sized chalkboard contains over a dozen color-coded storylines, scribbles of percolating ideas, and what may or may not be a phallic doodle (or Chekhov's gun).
At the time, Kwan was worried that the movie he was working on was just too much. It's an entirely predictable issue—one written into the title of the movie—that also happens to be what makes the film feel genuinely singular and even, as its cacophony of elements clarifies into something startlingly simple, rather transcendent. Watching the finished film today, it retains that sense of maximalist, gonzo energy, and even now, having sorted it all out, the directors still chuckle to each other about how to describe exactly what their movie is.
“There's the family drama answer and the sci-fi answer and the philosophy answer,” Scheinert says. Or you could say it's a kung-fu flick that hops around multidimensional universes, with Michelle Yeoh as a reluctant savior figure at its center. There's the answer about generational divides and the internet and the latent dread endemic to living in the modern age. There's also the early logline that Daniels wrote themselves: a movie simply about a woman trying to do her taxes.
It's not exactly wrong—it is, after all, where Everything begins. When the film opens, we meet Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) as a harried laundromat owner, living above her business in a cramped apartment and facing a mountain of paperwork amid an audit from the IRS. She is stressed about her aging father (James Hong) coming to stay and struggles to listen to both her grown daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her tender-hearted husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). But while meeting with an IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), a strange occurrence involving her own husband pulls her into a multidimensional adventure that puts the fate of every universe in her hands—and also forces her to confront who she is to herself and her family.
Arriving at that last part is the moment when Daniels took a step back and finally saw the tree. “We could say a million things about it, but the most simple, honest thing is it's about a mom learning to pay attention to her family in the chaos,” says Kwan.
The film, as with Daniels' previous work (Swiss Army Man, the iconic music video for Lil Jon's “Turn Down for What”), rushes headlong into unruly anarchy: Evelyn is plunged into the metaphysical world of “verse-jumping,” veering from the mundane dreariness of an IRS building to the palatial lair of a nihilistic villain named Jobu Tupaki, from the flashing lights of Hong Kong red carpets to a deserted canyon where sentient rocks manage to have a heart-to-heart. But this sense of an unhinged imagination, of endless mayhem, ultimately serves to transform the universal, or the multi-universal, into something intimate—an earnest meditation on truly seeing those near us in a time when it feels as if the center will not hold.
“The biggest seed that drove us through, that felt like a metaphor for what we're going through right now in society, is just this information overload, this stretching,” Kwan says. “People keep saying ‘empathy fatigue' set in with covid, but I feel like even before covid we were already there—there's too much to care about and everyone's lost the thread. That was the last key, turning this into a movie about empathy in the chaos.”
The film slyly tweaks the ‘hero's journey' story beats that audiences have come to expect, squishing and stretching a three-act structure as if the movie itself were jumping through a fracturing multiverse. That sense of infinity—all of the possible worlds, the depthless rabbit holes, all of the tiny moving pieces underneath it—stayed front of mind for the co-directors as they got a grasp on the nuts-and-bolts of the film's story; it felt crucial that people watching the movie could feel the same sense of vertigo that Evelyn does, that sense of being overwhelmed by the noise and splintering choices of all of her lives. The bold structural gambits were key to creating that experience.
The film's thematic heart helped Daniels to alleviate the somewhat itching contradiction that existed in the early inspirations of Everything, when the duo went to see a ‘90s double feature a few years back. “It was The Matrix and Fight Club, and it was at the New Beverly, and I fell in love again with those movies,” Kwan recalls. “I was like, man, if I could just make something half as fun as The Matrix is, but with our own stamp and our spirits, I would just die happy.”
Kwan remembers being inspired specifically by The Matrix's iconic fighting scenes, which harkened back to Daniels' shared love of kung-fu films. The distinction, Kwan notes, is that “we don’t love violence, but we love action movies.”
“There's something so entertaining and visceral about it, and we wanted to try to take that kind of energy and satisfying filmmaking and point it towards love and understanding,” Kwan continues. “Which was another fun challenge that we were like, we don't know how to do that, but we want to see it on the big screen.”
Inspirations, writing, and development
“I was sitting there going: Nah, no one in their right frame of mine is gonna do something like that with hot dog fingers,” Michelle Yeoh says.
She's remembering the first time she read the script for Everything Everywhere All At Once, an early view into where Daniels would take her on their multiverse fever dream including, indeed, a world in which she would have hot dogs for fingers and use them in decidedly unusual, strangely poignant ways with Jamie Lee Curtis. Yeoh hadn’t seen Swiss Army Man yet, but had heard good things—perhaps if she had watched that movie, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse who provides companionship, survival tools, and a glimpse of transcendence for Paul Dano, she might have had a better sense of what she was getting into.
It was, in fact, on the press tour for Swiss Army Man that the co-directors were really sold on their then-fledgling idea of a sci-fi multiverse movie, after landing on the intriguing concept of going, as Scheinert puts it, “existential nihilism nightmare town” on it. But in between would be the hot dog fingers, along with the colorful tangle of ideas and locales that would come with a Daniels film that explored the infinitude of possible lives. “We wrote a draft and everybody was like, this sounds like a $100 million movie, you're gonna have to rewrite this, guys,” Scheinert says.
Nevertheless, thanks to their experience in music videos, a field where they learned to create immersive worlds on tight budgets and on computers in their bedrooms, the duo, along with the help of a small, trustworthy crew of friends they’ve worked with for years made a work that doesn’t sacrifice the expansiveness or wildness of a nine-figure idea.
“The creative tension in our partnership usually comes from me being way too ambitious and him being very cautious of efficiency and cost effectiveness,” Kwan says. “And that struggle and that tension focuses us so that we spend the money where it really matters, and everywhere else we try to skim, skim, skim and compromise.”
Or, put another way: “Dan has a maximalist aesthetic,” Scheinert says. “Sometimes his ideas will be these kind of run-on sentence ideas. Like, they say this! And then this happens! And then my job is to just cheerlead.” And together the duo find a way to make the run-on sentences into feasible creations.
For both of them, the balls-to-the-walls ethos that is a hallmark of their work comes from their early days of creating stuff during the initial waves of Internet content. While Everything offers a treasure hunt of eclectic cinematic references—from 2001: A Space Odyssey to In the Mood For Love to Ratatouille—Kwan insists their voice is far from that of a cinephile, but was honed rather through things like YouTube videos, “Tim and Eric” sketches, and the form-breaking anarchy of Japanese anime movies.
“We would put our stuff online, and the algorithm would push it because it was so insane, and then we’d get attention and that positive reinforcement,” Kwan recalls. “We were like, oh, I guess we should be more insane.”
That feedback, though, threatened at one point to pull them down a rabbit hole of making films that were starting to feel emptily unhinged. “That self-consciousness that we felt, this feeling of wasting our lives, forced us to try to cram something personal into our work, just to see what would happen,” Kwan said. “It was this really weird synergy of us collaborating with the algorithm. The algorithm told us: go big, poke through, make weird stuff. And then our hearts were like, but I want to share something that is meaningful—how do we do that?”
The high-wire achievement of Everything is precisely in embodying this unwieldy tone. The almost schizophrenic imagination that Evelyn falls into causes the film to builds towards a conclusion that is surprisingly cathartic; Evelyn's journey through all of her possible lives helps her understand what matters most in her own. “One of our favorite things to do is make people feel emotional while looking at something that is absurd,” Scheinert says. “Whenever we can pull that off it's just like, oh, what a fun feeling! We feel emotion, but we also feel this kind of mischievous joke has been pulled.”
(That would include scenes that required Curtis and Yeoh having ketchup and mustard squirted into their mouths and down their faces. “We kept saying, ‘it's going to be like a beautiful, emotional part of the movie,' and they were like, ‘what on earth are you talking about?’” Scheinert recalls. “And when we finally edited that together, I was like, ‘yes, we were right!’”)
In Everything, the personal, human core was partly borne out of Daniels' conversations about their own mothers and the difficulty of generational divides, a universal experience that has been dramatically enhanced by the onrush of the digital age.
Kwan explains, “In the end, this character resembles my mom more—the kind of flustered, overwhelmed mother who is doing a million things at once, and never really doing any of them with full focus.”
The pair initially conceptualized Evelyn as a woman with undiagnosed ADHD, a condition that in a way makes her uniquely equipped to tap into other universes. But, worried about treating the diagnosis reductively, Kwan started looking into it more deeply and was led to a startling revelation: “I basically stayed up until like four in the morning just researching. I was like ‘Oh no, oh no, what the hell,’” Kwan says. “Because it never crossed my mind that I could have ADHD.”
He would eventually be officially diagnosed after spending a year with a therapist, suddenly giving him, in his 30s, a new understanding of his brain and his struggles as a child. It also offered a new way of seeing both his own mother and Evelyn.
“That is a big part of what makes Evelyn feel so unique and alive, the fact that she has this thing—that I relate to and that I felt for most of my life—this overwhelming feeling of wanting to do so much, but then not being able to do any of it,” Kwan says.
In the film, Evelyn becomes a Neo-like chosen one specifically because she is the single-most failed version of all her potential selves. “That gives her superpowers to be able to defeat the bad guy,” Kwan says. “But,” Scheinert notes, “mostly she gets distracted by all these lives that she wished she had led.”
It is also possible to see Evelyn's many lives as an allegory for the immigrant mother: appealing paths suddenly walled off, like alternate selves, when you leave your home—the new roads you’ve been promised in a land ostensibly rife with opportunity reveal themselves to be largely inaccessible. “For her, the journey has not been easy,” Yeoh says. “She made a choice to leave her own family in China and set up a new life with a man that she loves, and wants to have a fresh start, but things do not always go according to plan.”
That experience makes the feelings of the next generation, who grow up and live a life of relative stability in a country they feel is innately their home, practically illegible to a mother like her. “Both my parents immigrated here,” Kwan says. “When you’re just integrating here, you don't have the time or the luxury to think about anything other than survival.” He references a line from Mike Mills' Beginners: “Our good fortune allowed us to feel a sadness that our parents didn’t have time for, and a happiness that I never saw with them.”
When you add in the internet and its seismic cultural shifts, a daughter whose life as a queer person is incomprehensible to her parents, and an aging father, the generational divides in the family further splinter and spread.
In this sense, it is perfectly apt that Evelyn's daughter, Joy, is also the multiverse's villain, Jobu Tupaki—an agent of chaos that is both the thing to defeat and perhaps to save. “Jobu is a manifestation of that kind of weird generation gap, and the multiverse can play as a really funny metaphor for just the Internet,” Kwan says. “The emergence of the Internet was something we grew up on, and it totally affected us and fucked us all up and now we are the way we are, and our parents are trying to play catch up.”
In 2022, in an era of information overload, extreme polarization, and mass existential dread, the struggle to connect between parents and children might feel less like a banal, everyday experience, and more of an increasingly confounding battle between a loved companion and a mortal enemy. “In a lot of ways, the movie is just a family drama,” Scheinert says, “and then we came up with some of the most insane, enormous, overcomplicated hyperbolic metaphors for generational gaps, along with communication errors and ideological differences within a family.
Casting
In one of their alternate universes, Daniels would have made a version of this movie with Jackie Chan as its star. That was one of the early, somewhat cockeyed schemes the co-directors had for what became Everything Everywhere All At Once. For various reasons that one might expect when it comes to pinning down Jackie Chan, that dream was dashed, but, as they returned to the script, something clicked—it allowed Everything to become something entirely new, making way for a late-career revelation for Michelle Yeoh.
“It really felt like the script came alive when it became about the mom and it was Michelle as the lead,” says Scheinert. “That got real scary because we literally couldn’t think of anyone else if she said no. Or if we found out that Michelle Yeoh is a terrible person, then the movie dies.”
That fear was readily apparent to Yeoh, who it turned out, was not a terrible person, but more of a lovingly exacting mother who refers to the co-directors as “the boys.” “I remember meeting them—they can be very over-the-top when you get to know them better—but at the beginning, they're kind of shy,” Yeoh recalls of their first encounter. “They were maybe a little intimidated. I seem to be such an intimidating figure. I'm like Eleanor Young walking around, saying, ‘You’ll never be enough!’”
She's jokingly referencing her character, the imperious matriarch from Crazy Rich Asians, which would become a smash hit just months after Yeoh first met Daniels (and helped ease Daniels' anxiety about Hollywood's willingness to make a film centered on a Chinese family). And indeed, that is perhaps how the industry itself has seen her for years.
“I’m always sort of cast into the more serious role,” Yeoh says. “You know, the one that brings the sanity back into your life and makes you understand what is important, what's deep and wonderful, and blah, blah, blah.”
“I think it's one of the things where no one has asked her to do anything but that, because a person gets typecast or whatever,” Kwan says.
It's hard for anyone to shake off the idea of Yeoh as this sort of towering, regal figure. “Her assistant with whom she's worked for years and years was very upset the first few days of shooting,” Kwan recalls. “She was like, ‘You can't make her look like that. That's not what Michelle looks like. Don't do that! Take that wig off her head, she doesn't have gray hairs!’”
In Everything, Yeoh is unkempt, emotionally flayed, and put through the multiversal ringer in a role that is entirely singular within a prolific, decades-long international career. And she knows it. “On Friday nights we'd all go back to her hotel room because she loves to party and Ke [Huy Quan, who plays Evelyn's husband, Waymond] loves to party,” Kwan recollects. “They just want to drink and talk—like, all night—and one of the things she said to me that I was really moved by was: ‘I wonder what my career would have looked like if I had done this movie a long time ago.’”
Daniels offered Yeoh a new way to see herself on-screen. “I love working with younger directors because they don't see you in the conventional way,” Yeoh says. “They want to peel that onion and see what other layers there are, and then start throwing crazy things at you.”
It helps, also, to shed your esteemed facade and lean in when you’re joined by a star like Jamie Lee Curtis doing a similar thing. Curtis, who also fully engaged in a shabby, strippeddown part as a glowering, sometimes unhinged IRS agent, became a bit of a gang with Yeoh. Curtis remarks, “The truth of the matter is, had they just said, ‘There's a Michelle Yeoh movie that they would like you to be in,' I would’ve said, ‘Okay.’”
“The first thing she said to me was, ‘If you don't like the boys, we can run away. We can elope together,’” Yeoh says with a laugh. Together, the pair would playfully tease Daniels, and entered spaces of vulnerability at times hand-in-hand. “Sometimes, Michelle, as brave as she was, had some hesitancy, and when Jamie was there, she would do anything,” Kwan says. “It was this really beautiful thing where they were like, I don't know what we're doing, but we're doing it together.”
Yet, while Curtis and Yeoh—along with the 92-year-old legend, James Hong, who was so perfect for the role of Evelyn's father that nobody else even auditioned—made for a pair of veterans embarking on new horizons, their co-stars came from entirely different acting histories. The role of Waymond—a distinct part that ping-pongs between a soft-hearted husband and, in his multiverse persona, heroic action star—marks the show-stopping return of Ke Huy Quan, who nostalgic viewers might remember as the man who was once Short-Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies.
Even after portraying two of the most iconic roles of the ‘80s, Quan struggled to find work as a young Asian actor. He eventually went to film school at USC and largely stayed behind the camera—doing fight choreography and even working as an assistant director on Wong Kar-wai's 2046—but ultimately left Hollywood for decades. It wasn’t, ironically, until he watched Crazy Rich Asians that he considered the possibility of a return.
“I saw that movie and I told myself, if you ever wanted to get back into acting, now would be the time, because times have changed,” Quan recalls. Soon after, he asked his friend to be his agent, and “a week later we got a call to audition for this,” he says. “The timing was just impeccable. And I was super nervous because I haven’t auditioned for over 25 years.”
The audition came, as unlikely as it sounds, from Kwan stumbling across a reference to Quan on the internet, wondering where the kid from Temple of Doom and The Goonies had gone, and sending out an ask almost on a lark. When he auditioned, he was “this ball of sweet energy,” Scheinert says, a perfect mold of Waymond. It also helped that he floored them with his acting, looked the right age, was bilingual, and knew martial arts. But, Scheinert notes, he also earned the part with the hard work that is required of his intense, shape-shifting, and stunt-heavy role. (In a rather charming full-circle moment, Jeff Cohen—a lawyer who, in middle school, played Chunk in
The Goonies—did Quan's deal for the film.)
Yet, if Quan was just returning to the spotlight, Everything provided the first big one for Stephanie Hsu in the role of Evelyn's daughter, Joy. Daniels met Hsu on an episode they directed of “Awkwafina is Nora From Queens,” and Hsu developed a particular and immediate kinship with the them, inspiring them to mold the part for her.
“We rewrote it based on her sense of humor and just how weird she is, which is always such a gift, as a filmmaker—to just be like, oh, you're going to inspire me now,” Scheinert says. Kwan adds, “She just has so much range, and I think she's going to be huge.”
Hsu was able to tap into the role partly because the specific dynamic of the central Wang trio—a global star in Yeoh, a former child actor in Quan, and a breakout newcomer in Hsu—contained a kind of chemistry that mirrored their own characters. “Evelyn is really strong, determined, and the sort of mother who is keeping the ship afloat—or so she thinks— and offscreen Michelle is steadfast, but also so silly and loving and just a complete joy and blast to be around,” Hsu says. “My experience of Waymond is always dad, and Ke is similar in that way where I don't think I've ever met someone as sweet as him.”
Most of all, though, the cast were enabled by the loving, open on-set environment created by the filmmakers, who aim to run their productions like “summer camps” (which includes a morning circle that involves a new improvised game every day, like Hsu's own “Hug Tackle”). “It's very intentional the way that everyone is cultivating a workspace and a creative environment that is full of joy and kindness,” Hsu said.
Daniels point to two instances that established the familial ethos for the production, one involving a bonding experience from a script breakdown, in which Yeoh and Quan, baffled by the stiff translations of the Chinese dialogue, helped retranslate lines. The other was an early cast and crew Korean BBQ night. “Ke was like ‘I’ve never done sake-bombs, let's do sake bombs!’” Scheinert says. “He bullied James Hong into doing sake-bombs.
“A 90-year old man!” Kwan says. “And he was down.”
Behind the scenes
“You know the two guys who have the trophies up their butts? They're the choreographers,” Daniel Kwan explains. That would be Andy and Brian Le, brothers and fight choreographers for the film who make brief, sometimes painful cameos as henchmen, and who helped shape the distinct fighting style that the Daniels wanted from the action scenes in Everything: less of the bruising grit of most Hollywood action, more of the loose, playful ethos of Hong Kong-style fighting, in which Yeoh first made a name.
“For this type of movie, with its wackiness, the realism of modern-day action wouldn’t fit too well,” Andy Le says. “With Hong Kong action, you can go as wild as you want and it will fit the tone of the movie, it will push the story forward. You see all these cool moves, but at the same time it enhances the flavor of the movie.”
As CGI has gotten cheaper and more accessible over the last two decades, and superhero movies have proliferated, it has become something of a cliché to destroy a major American city in the course of a fight scene. Which makes the grounded, relentlessly surprising fights in Everything all the more distinctive: the environment and props feel as much a part of the action as fists and feet, with a fanny pack and a perverse range of office supplies recruited as weapons.
The scope of Everything, though, feels no more limited as a result. This is partially a credit to the small crew of visual effects superstars that the Daniels worked alongside of, but also due to the film's distinct look and style: while blockbusters require hundreds of people on an effects team to create a highly photorealistic look, Kwan and Scheinert relied on a team of about eight to create a vision that is goofy, singular, and uniquely immersive.
The expansive quality also comes back in part to the conceit of the film itself—the act of verse-jumping meant being able to play with a pastiche of genres, visual palettes and even cinematic odes (like what the Daniels call the “Wong Kar-wai universe”). The film often straps the audience into a rollercoaster ride of sorts, with sequences and montages that race through universes that can each feel like their own movie.
“When we would jump from thriller to action film to comedy and back to family drama with a quick stop in 40s noir, we had to make sure that the audience was sure-footed in each experience,” says the film's editor Paul Rogers. “So knowing the tropes and tones that we were aiming for helped us to really land the audience in each world with confidence. I don't think it would have been successful if the film felt like a mushy mashup of genres.”
Perhaps the biggest boon to crafting a tangible multiverse was the production's primary shooting location: an old office building in Simi Valley, formerly the home of a predatory loan mega-corporation that had been turned into a massive, rentable shooting warehouse where the production team built most of the sets and created what production designer Jason Kisvarday refers to as a cost-effective “playground” for their movie.
“There was a lot of weird energy in there. It's a sprawling building—lots of corridors, basement spaces, conference rooms, a giant open cafeteria, and that atrium in the middle. It's incredible,” Kisvarday says. “It was big enough that we could wreck one part of the building, then walk away and just go somewhere else in the complex to continue filming while our team restored the initial part of the building.”
There, Kivarsday was able to create a carousel of sets that could feel grounded, such as the Wang family apartment, before what he calls “magical realism” suddenly transformed the visual space (such as when a drab, open-office IRS workspace becomes an intergalactic battleground). Working in the distinct office warehouse, though, also helped inspire the birth of completely new universes.
“Entire sequences were written around the unique geography and architecture in that building,” Kivarsday says. “Sometimes we really wanted to get weird and create a vibe from scratch. Example: Hot Dog Universe.”
The other crucial through-line for the multiverse would be the film's maximalist score, by the shapeshifting Los Angeles-based band Son Lux, composed of keyboardist and vocalist Ryan Lott, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang. Tasked by the directors, according to Lott, to “do all the things, but make it feel like one thing,” the trio was brought on before production to begin a collaborative, freewheeling process to find the sound of the multiverse.
“We sent a ton of musical ideas and other sonic materials before they started shooting, like examples of customized instruments we built virtually with the film and its many universes in mind,” Bhatia explains. As the movie was coming together in the edit—much of it cut with temp music sourced from earlier Son Lux recordings and band members' solo projects—they were able to have a unique back-and-forth with Daniels, Bhatia continues, “between the music and the edit, in such a way that each aspect could build on—and up the ante for—the other.”
Tapping into the film's eclectic visual references, the band pulled inspiration from everything from Don Davis' score for The Matrix to Randy Newman's Toy Story classic “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” But it was their restless, very Daniels approach to experimenting in the studio that led to some of the score's most memorable sounds and textures. “Before we had written anything for the score,” Chang says, “we spent a day in the studio experimenting with a variety of Chinese drums (排鼓) and tuned gongs,” tweaking and warping them into virtual instruments, the percussive and melodic bones of the film.
André Benjamin, better known as Outkast's André 3000, also came in for a score session with the band, arriving with “fifteen flutes and a very open mind,” according to Chang. The enigmatic rapper and actor went through a similar process that the band had started with the drums and gongs, as they layered flute improvisations and distortions into the architecture of the score—“an enormous trove of incredible textures and phrases.”
For the band, concludes Lott, one thing that Kwan and Scheinert said early on stuck with them: the “the key to making it all make sense was, in every moment, whether tragic or absurd, hilarious or heartbreaking, the music had to be earnest and come from an entirely honest place.”
Kindness in the chaos
These days, Kwan says, much of art is broadly struggling to confront two things: “One is this feeling of everything happening all at once—how can you put that in a story in a way that is meaningful? And the other is climate change.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once is most obviously Daniels' attempt at trying to encapsulate the first part, but you can sense the latter lurking in background as well. Of course, in Daniels' language, if climate dread is an inspiration, it takes on a decidedly different look: in Jobu's evil plan, an everything bagel-void threatens to swallow the multiverse and destroy us all. “This project came out of our own anxieties about living in the modern world, and I think everyone I know is trying to capture that,” Kwan says.
The feeling was already there when they were writing it in 2016, before the Trump Era and the pandemic. “We already felt overwhelmed. And, and as we were writing it, we were like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening? It's getting worse—how could it possibly get worse than this?’” Kwan says. “Everyone is trying to process that feeling, the backdrop of doom, the backdrop of chaos.”
Daniels don’t have a grand answer to a radical new path, but Everything at the very least offers a simple hope in response to the chaos. “One of the most powerful things you can do for someone is to pay attention to them,” Kwan says.
For Evelyn, she has to confront a multiverse on the brink of collapse—an extreme manifestation of the sensory overload that the modern world is increasingly defined by—to see the family that has always been there. “You have to go to the end of the world to find out what really matters to you: your daughter, your husband—would you make another choice?” Yeoh ponders.
It's a question and a reminder of sorts for the audience, too: to see what's in front of you, to reach out, to be kind. That's what the film became in part for the Daniels themselves. “I would love if audience members take away the idea that kindness can be a powerful way to fight. I think telling this story definitely made us reflect on the idea that,” Scheinert says, slipping into a Bill and Ted voice, “like, ‘Oh yeah, kindness— sick!”
 
 
Michelle Yeoh     Michelle Yeoh is recognized as one of the greatest and the most successful actresses from the East. Michelle can recently be seen as 'Emperor Philippa Georgiou' in CBS's Star Trek: Discovery, in Destin Daniel Cretton's Shang-Chi for Marvel and in Navot Papushado's action-thriller Gunpowder Milkshake.
The former Bond girl is best known for her roles in John M. Chu's romantic comedy,
Crazy Rich Asians, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 1 & 2, Rob Marshall's
Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Spottiswoode's Tomorrow Never Dies and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. Other notable performances include starring in Luc Besson's critically acclaimed biographical film The Lady and voicing a role in the Dreamworks animated hit, Kung Fu Panda 2.
Next, Michelle will be seen starring in the Daniels' science fiction film, Everything
Everywhere All At Once, for A24 (opening SXSW). Other upcoming credits include Netflix's prequel series, The Witcher: Blood Origin, James Cameron's Avatar sequels and Paul Feig's The School For Good and Evil.
James Hong     With over 500 acting credits, and counting, it's no wonder James Hong thinks that
one day “They might put me in The Book Of Guinness (sic) as the actor with the most roles ever.' Born 1929 in Minneapolis, Hong originally moved to Southern California in the 1950s to work as a civil engineer. He began to dabble in acting and a 1954 appearance on Groucho Marx's “You Bet Your Life,” doing impressions of Jimmy Stewart, Peter Lorre and Marx himself, jump-started his career. For the next 65 years, the character actor would work with some of the industry's most distinguished film directors, including John Carpenter, Edward Dmytryk, Sam Fuller, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Ridley Scott, Ro- man Polanski and William Wellman. A few of
Hong's more memorable movie roles include David Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little
China (1986), Hannibal Chew in Blade Runner (1982), Kahn in Chinatown (1974), Chi Fu in Mulan (1998), and Ping in the Kung Fu Panda film and television series, for which he was nominated for three Annie Awards, winning in 2011. Among his selfprofessed favorite film parts are Shin in Black Widow (1987) and the little-known French film Idol (2002), which gave Hong a rare opportunity to play the lead. Hong
James Hong (cont.)    co-founded the Los Angeles-based East West Players in 1965, along with Mako, Rae Creevey, Beulah Quo, Soon-Tek Oh, Pat Li, June Kim, Guy Lee, and Yet Lock. The organization has grown to become the nation's leading Asian American theater troupe and continues to work for diverse representations of the Asian-American experience across all media.
Jamie Lee Curtis     Jamie Lee Curtis has demonstrated her versatility as a film actress, starring in
acclaimed films such as the blockbuster True Lies, for which she won a Golden Globe Award; Trading Places, for which she earned a BAFTA (British Film Academy Award) for Best Supporting Actress; A Fish Called Wanda, for which she received duel Best Actress nominations from BAFTA and the Golden Globes; and the Disney feature film Freaky Friday, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. It was her portrayal of ‘Laurie Strode' in Halloween, which was her film debut and brought her to the attention of audiences worldwide. 40 years later, in 2018, Curtis reprieved that signature role in David Gordon Green's record-breaking horror feature,
Halloween, produced by horror guru Jason Blum. Halloween's opening weekend was the biggest debut ever, for any movie in any genre, to feature a female lead character over 55 years of age. The second film in the trilogy Halloween Kills was released in October of 2021 and Halloween Ends, which is the final film in the trilogy will be out October 2022. In 2019 Curtis appeared alongside an incredible cast including Daniel Craig, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas in the smash hit Knives Out, a murder mystery with a modern take on the classic detective genre as written and directed by Rian Johnson. Most recently she worked alongside Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart on the feature film Borderlands, which is based on the popular videogame of the same name.
Additional film credits include: Spare Parts; You Again with Sigourney Weaver, Kristen
Bell and Betty White; Beverly Hills Chihuahua; Christmas with the Kranks, opposite
Tim Allen; The Tailor of Panama along with Pierce Brosnan and Geoffrey Rush; Fierce Creatures; Virus; Dominick and Eugene; Blue Steel; My Girl; My Girl II; Forever Young; Mother's Boys; House Arrest and Love Letters.
Jamie Lee Curtis (cont.)    In 2016, Curtis returned to her horror roots, starring in two seasons of the Ryan
Murphy-created TV series, “Scream Queens” for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. She also co-starred opposite Richard Lewis in the acclaimed sitcom “Anything But Love” which earned her both a Golden Globe and People's
Choice Award, as well as TNT's adaptation of the Wendy Wasserstein play “The Heidi Chronicles” which also earned her a Golden Globe nomination. In 1998, Curtis starred in the CBS television film “Nicholas' Gift” for which she received an Emmy nomination. Other episodic work includes “New Girl” and “NCIS.”
Curtis is also a New York Times best-selling children's book author. Her 12th book,
Me, MySelfie & I: A Cautionary Tale, was released in 2018. Her 11th book, This Is Me: A Story of Who We Are and Where We Came From, was released on September 20,
2016 and became an instant New York Times best-seller. Her other titles include,
When I Was Little: A Four-Year Old's Memoir of Her Youth, Tell Me Again About the
Night I Was Born, Today I Feel Silly and Other Moods That Make My Day, I’m Gonna
Like Me, Where Do Balloons Go?, It's Hard To Be Five, Is There Really a Human Race, Big Words for Little People, My Mommy Hung the Moon and My Brave Year of Firsts.
Curtis is an AIDS activist and has a deep and active connection to many children's charities. In 2020 she launched the website www.myhandinyours.com which offers items of comfort where 100% of proceeds from sales benefits Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In addition, Jamie produced and appears in “Letters From Camp,” a podcast from Audible that debuted in September 2020 and returned for a second season in June 2021 and will return for a third this year. In July iHeart Radio released the “Good Friend” podcast, which Jamie hosts and delves into the many phases of friendship through unscripted conversations with new and old friends.
Stephanie Hsu    Stephanie Hsu can be seen in the upcoming, highly-anticipated A24 film from
Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Everything Everywhere All At Once. In this independent feature, Stephanie and Michelle Yeoh star as universe-jumping, mother-daughter rivals. The film is scheduled to be released on March 25, 2022.
 
Stephanie Hsu (cont.)    Stephanie recently wrapped on season four of Amazon's hit show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” as Mei, the provocative love-interest to Joel Maisel. The cast won a SAG Award in 2020 for best ensemble in a comedy series.
Additionally, Stephanie recently completed production in a lead role on the Lionsgate Untitled Adele Lim Comedy alongside Ashley Park, Sherry Cola and Sabrina Wu. The film, produced for Lionsgate by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's company, Point Grey, follows the epic journey of four Asian-American women traveling through Asia in search of one of their birth mothers. Along the way, their experience will become one of bonding, friendship, belonging and no-holds-barred debauchery that reveals the universal truth of what it means to know and love who you are.
Stephanie originated the role of Christine Canigula in the audience favorite
Broadway sensation, Be More Chill. For this performance Stephanie received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award Nomination. She has performed all over NYC from downtown to uptown making her Broadway debut as Karen The Computer in SpongeBob Squarepants The Musical.
Her past television and film credits include a recurring role on “The Path,” “Awkwafina is Nora from Queens,” “Femme,” “Set It Up,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Girl
Code."
Ke Huy Quan    Born in Saigon to Chinese immigrants, Ke is the seventh of nine children. When Ke
was just seven years old, his parents made the difficult decision of splitting up their family to escape a tumultuous post-war Vietnam. After a failed attempt, in 1978 the family succeeded in making it out, albeit divided. Ke, along with his father and five other siblings, ended up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong. They were there for one year before being reunited with the rest of the family and granted asylum in the United States. In 1979, they settled in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
Fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, Ke spoke little English but soon acclimated himself to life in America. In 1983, while Ke was busy being a kid, unbeknownst to him, the search was on for a Chinese boy to star alongside Harrison Ford in a sequel to the highly successful film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Unable to find who they were looking for, an open casting call was held at an elementary school in a place none other than Chinatown, Los Angeles. Ke tagged along with his little brother to the
Ke Huy Quan (cont.)    audition with no intention of trying out himself. A casting director noticed him and
invited him to read for the part. He would later read again, but this time for Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford. Despite having no acting experience, he walked into the room and came back out, landing the role of a lifetime as Short Round. Ke's next destination—Sri Lanka, to film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Bitten by the acting bug, in his follow up movie, Ke joined an enviable group of young misfits still beloved by generations today, known as The Goonies.
He continued acting, globe-trotting from Taiwan to Japan. He starred in the
Taiwanese film It Takes a Thief and the Japanese film Passengers, opposite singer Honda Minako. Ke's other notable credits include Encino Man, Breathing Fire, and television shows “Nothing is Easy” with Elliott Gould and “Head of the Class.” Working since he was eleven, opportunities for Asian actors became limited as Ke got older. He decided to press pause and return to the real-life classrooms of USC, where he studied film and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduating from USC, Ke began working again, but this time behind the camera. He worked as an Assistant Action Choreographer collaborating with Action Director Corey Yuen on X-Men and The One with Jet Li. He later went on to work for one of Asia's most influential filmmakers Wong Kar Wai, assisting in project developments and even as an Assistant Director on Wong's film, 2046.
Ke's love for acting did not wane; however, jobs for Asian Actors in Hollywood remained few and far between. This all changed in 2018 when Crazy Rich Asians, featuring an all-Asian cast took the box office by storm, opening new doors for Asian actors. Ke, recognizing Hollywood's acknowledgement of the importance of Asian representation took this as his cue to return to his roots. He decided to step back in front of the camera, auditioning for the Russo Brothers/A24 feature, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Ke will star opposite Michelle Yeoh in the highly anticipated film, marking his return to acting in a major role in 20 years. The film, written and directed by the Daniels will premiere at SXSW on March 11th and be released on March 25th.
Harry Shum Jr.    Harry Shum Jr. has proven himself to be a dynamic force in Hollywood. While he
is perhaps best known for his role as Mike Chang on the hit series “Glee,” Shum has consistently embodied complex and meaningful characters, bringing depth and magnetic energy to the screen.
Shum leads the technological thriller, Broadcast Signal Intrusion, opposite Chris
Sullivan and Kelley Mack, and also serves as an executive producer on the film.
Inspired by actual broadcast interruptions that occurred in the Windy City in the late 1980s, and remain unsolved to this day, the film is an unsettling journey into our collective technological nightmares. The film premiered at SXSW and had a domestic theatrical/VOD release in Fall 2021.
He was also recently seen as the lead in Universal's romantic drama All My Life, starring opposite Jessica Rothe. Inspired by real events, the film follows a couple whose wedding plans are thrown off course when the groom is diagnosed with liver cancer. All My Life released in theaters/VOD on Friday, December 4th, 2020.
Premiering as a WorldWide #1 on Netflix on November 5th, 2021, Shum was most recently seen alongside Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Yang in McG's production Love Hard. This romantic comedy follows an LA girl, unlucky in love, who falls for an East Coast guy on a dating app and decides to surprise him for Christmas, only to discover that she's been catfished.
Making it's debut at SXSW 2022, Harry will soon be seen in A24's feature, Everything
Everywhere All At Once, starring opposite Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong,
Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis, with the cryptic synopsis: It's about a 55 year old Chinese woman trying to finish her taxes.
His previous film credits include Warner Bros' massive hit Crazy Rich Asians. The film, which features a historic all-Asian cast, was nominated for 2 Golden Globes, won Best Comedy at the Critics' Choice Awards, and was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the 2019 SAG awards. He also starred in the Netflix Original feature Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Ii – The Green Destiny, the sequel to the Academy Award-winning martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, set 20 years later.
Other notable projects on the silver screen include Escape Plan 3: Devil's Station opposite Sylvester Stallone; Burn opposite Suki Waterhouse and Josh Hutcherson; Harry Shum Jr. (cont.)    Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword Of Destiny, Revenge Of The Green Dragons,
Moms' Night Out; Step Up 2: The Streets, and White Frog.
Shum has numerous TV credits as well, including the fan favorite “Shadowhunters” on Freeform, in which he starred as the eccentric warlock Magnus Bane, for which he won the People's Choice Awards Male TV Star in 2018. The series is based on the bestselling YA fantasy series “The Mortal Instruments” by Cassandra Clare and follows a teenage girl who discovers on her 18th birthday that she comes from a long line of Shadowhunters, a group of human-angel hybrids who hunt down demons.
In addition, Shum starred in, produced and co-choreographed “The LXD (Legion Of Extraordinary Dancers),” an online dance adventure created by director Jon M. Chu (Step Up 3D).
Passionate about children, Shum has partnered with The Conscious Kid, an organization which focuses on education, research, and policy dedicated to equality and promoting healthy racial identity development in youth while supporting organizations, families, and educators in taking action to disrupt racism in young children. Shum's heart also lies in working with the Anti-Racist Children's Book Education Fund initiative through this organization.
Born in San Jose, Costa Rica and raised in both Northern and Southern California, Shum began dancing in high school and soon after discovered acting. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
 
 
Daniels
Writers/ Directors/ Producers    Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as DANIELS, have been writing and directing together for over a decade, initially with a slew of viral music videos, commercials, and short films, then with feature films and TV directing.
They've developed a reputation for combining absurdity with heartfelt personal stories. Oftentimes they incorporate a unique brand of visual effects, and visceral practical effects into their genre blending projects.
They have directed music videos for Manchester Orchestra, Foster the People, and won a VMA for their video for “Turn Down For What,” which Scheinert bullied Kwan into being the lead actor in. Kwan is a really good dancer.
They wrote and directed the feature film Swiss Army Man starring Paul Dano and
Daniel Radcliffe, which went on to win the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, received multiple nominations, and gained a large cult following.
While they were writing & developing their new movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, a kung fu sci-fi dramedy starring Michelle Yeoh, Scheinert went and directed a small redneck dramedy called The Death of Dick Long, also released by A24.
They both live in Los Angeles. One of them has a son. The other has a goofy dog.
But to be honest Daniel does most of the work.
Jonathan Wang
Producer    Jonathan Wang is the long-time producer and collaborator with the directing-duo
Daniels. Beginning in music video production, Wang produced several award-winning
music videos, including projects for Bob Dylan, Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Wang then pivoted to feature films in 2015 with Daniel's Swiss Army Man, which premiered at Sundance 2016 where it won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award. Wang has since produced five other films with A24, including the forthcoming Everything Everywhere All At Once.
 
Anthony & Joe Russo
Producers
Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Directors-Producers) have been absorbing classic movies since growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s. By high school, the brothers were immersing themselves in every genre, as well as catching every classic they could at their local arthouse theater. They each went on to study English and Film— Anthony at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, Joe at the University of Iowa and UCLA—and the result is a contribution to worldwide moviegoing that mixes storytelling craft, filmmaking skill, and a deep understanding of how great characters can connect us all.
Through a quartet of movies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Russos raised the bar for blockbuster filmmaking in artistry, scope, and box office: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019), which in addition to concluding the “Avengers saga” racked up numerous industry records, including Biggest Single-Day Gross, Highest-Grossing Opening Weekend, and Highest-Grossing Film of All Time.
While working on the Marvel films with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, director of photography Trent Opalach, composers Henry Jackman and Alan Silvestri, amazing below-the-line and FX crews and the most extraordinary roster of actors ever assembled, the Russos have always stood by their belief that strong teamwork brings stratospheric results. Rejecting the label of “auteurs,” the Russos subscribe to the “collective theory,” noting that collaboration is crucial. It's a philosophy that can be felt in their debut feature, Welcome to Collinwood (2002), and underscores their work on TV's critically-acclaimed “Arrested Development” (for which they won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing of a Comedy Series), “Community,” and “Happy Endings"—for all of which the Russos directed the pilot episodes as well as numerous beloved signature episodes.
Similarly, the Russos are committed to helping young storytellers gain a foothold in the film industry. Just as their own careers received an early boost from producers including Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, the Russos now lend their skills to producing films that spotlight fresh talent and ideas and are eager to help filmmakers they believe deserve membership in the Directors Guild of America. Beyond their sponsorship, the Russos try to personally mentor aspiring directors as they strive to grow as filmmakers, and they regularly host internships to help educate and guide them.
 
Anthony & Joe Russo (cont.)    In addition to the film community, the Russo Brothers—whose family back home are
longtime members of Cleveland's Italian Sons and Daughters of America (ISDA) organization, which is defined by a strong belief in “Tradition, History, Family, and Philanthropy”—believe in giving back to the community they grew up in. Toward that end, they founded a forum with The National Italian-American Foundation (NIAF) that encourages and advises filmmakers who are eager to tell stories unique to the Italian-American experience.
In early 2018, the Russo Brothers were pleased to announce the formation of their studio, AGBO, an energetic, artist-led collective focusing on creating global content for film, television, and digital platforms. Headquartered in downtown Los Angeles, AGBO aims to nurture talent and create best-in-class family and prestige content, with the goal of working in a wide gamut of genres and bringing original ideas to the screen. Among the company's first films were Brian Kirk's crime drama 21 Bridges, starring Chadwick Boseman; Sam Hargrave's thriller Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth, which broke records for Netflix as the biggest premiere in the platform's history with over 100 million views during its first month of release; Natalie Erika James' horror thriller Relic, starring Emily Mortimer, acquired out of Sundance and released by IFC Midnight; the fact-based Middle East-set drama Mosul, written and directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan and distributed by Netflix; and Cherry, from the best-selling novel, starring Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo directed by the Russos' was an Apple Original Films. The Russo's are producers on the upcoming global television event series “Citadel” for Amazon Studios currently in production.
Their next directorial endeavor, The Gray Man, will star Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in a film from Mark Greaney's novel, which the Russos plan to turn into a franchise. Netflix has committed its largest budget to date on the project.
In addition to their film and television successes, the Russos are also co-founders— along with almost two-dozen fellow directors and artists—of BULLITT, a filmmaker's collective and creative studio that is centered on the creation of brand-integrated entertainment and advertising content, and which utilizes state-of-the-art technology to break down barriers between advertisers and audiences.
Mike Larocca
Producers    Mike Larocca is a Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of AGBO focused on creative development and production. At AGBO, among other film and TV projects, Mike was a Producer on Netflix mega-hit Extraction starring Chris Hemsworth, AGBO's first independent drama, Mosul; the horror-thriller Relic; Cherry, directed by the Russo Brothers and starring Tom Holland; and 21 Bridges starring Chadwick Boseman. Mike is a Producer on Netflix's upcoming film The Gray Man, starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling, an Executive Producer on the upcoming global television event series “Citadel” for Amazon Studios. Previously, Mike was SVP of Production at Chernin Entertainment. There, he was an Executive Producer on Spy, the Melissa McCarthy action-comedy; The Drop, starring James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy; and was a Co-Producer on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Mike was previously a VP at Spyglass Entertainment.
Larkin Seiple
Director of Photography    Larkin Seiple is an award-winning Director of Photography with one of the most memorable portfolios of work. Larkin was featured in Variety's 2016 “Below-The-Line
Impact Report: Up Next” and is the youngest filmmaker to be included in Variety's 2018 Artisans Elite Report.
Having started in music videos, Larkin has collaborated with artists such as FKA
Twigs, A Tribe Called Quest, Benny Blanco, Gary Clark Jr., David Guetta, Chet Faker,
Rhianna,and Foster the People. He won an MTV VMA for ‘Best Cinematography' for Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar's Never Catch Me and a Camerimage Award for ‘Best Music Video' for DJ Snake & Lil Jon's Turn Down for What. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Foster the People's Houdini and a World Music Award for Taylor Swift's 22. In 2018 he won countless awards including Best Cinematography at UKMVA and Camerimage for his impressive work in Childish Gambino's widely acclaimed cultural touchstone “This is America,” starring Donald Glover and directed by Hiro Murai. Since its debut, the video has been viewed more than 800 million times on YouTube. Shot on 3-perf 35mm film on 400-foot rolls, Seiple had only one hour of total footage on which to shoot, dramatically limiting what he could shoot and the length of each take.
On the narrative side, Larkin transitioned to features with the 2015 Kevin Bacon comedy-thriller Cop Car produced by Park Pictures, followed by Sony/Open Road Films' Bleed for This starring Miles Teller. He went on to lense A24's Swiss Army
Larkin Seiple (cont.)     Man directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, starring Paul Dano and Daniel
Radcliffe, which screened in the U.S. Dramatic Section of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, Netflix's I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore starring Elijah Wood and Melanie Lynskey, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and the Julius Onah-directed Luce starring Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer, which premiered at 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
In the TV space, Larkin lensed the pilot episode for Hulu's revenge thriller “Reprisal,” produced by Warren Littlefield, and most recently lensed the upcoming drama Gaslist with director Matt Ross, starring Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, and Patton Oswalt.
Larkin most recently wrapped Everything Everywhere All At Once, collaborating again with directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and A24. The film is set to premiere at the 2022 SXSW in March.
Jason Kisvarday
Production Designer    Award-winning Production Designer, Jason Kisvarday, is known for his work on eclectic and surreal movies like Swiss Army Man, The Greasy Strangler, Sorry To Bother You, and Palm Springs. Jason has been collaborating with the Daniels for over a decade on everything from music videos, to short films, commercials, and movies.
Paul Rogers
Editor    Paul Rogers began his professional career in 2007 editing documentary films for public television in Alabama, winning 4 Emmy Awards. He made the jump to Los
Angeles in 2013 and kicked off a career in music videos with the DANIELS' directed
'Turn Down For What' and further collaborated with DANIELS on the short films ‘Interesting Ball' and ‘Boat Dad' as well as one half of the duo, Daniel Scheinert, on the A24 feature film The Death of Dick Long, which premiered at Sundance in 2018. He dipped back into documentary in 2020 with You Cannot Kill David Arquette, an official SXSW selection and winner of the Adobe Editing Award. He recently completed editing DANIELS' newest feature film Everything Everywhere All At Once and is currently at work on Isaiah Saxon's debut feature The Legend of Ochi.
Along with feature films, he has edited for the “Eric Andre Show,” Kendrick Lamar, Flying Lotus, Haim, and Thundercat among others.
Paul has also collaborated extensively with director and business partner Kahlil
Paul Rogers (cont.)     Joseph on projects such as ‘Lemonade' for Beyonce, ‘Process' for Sampha, and Joseph's most recent work BLK NWS.
Paul is a partner in the editorial company PARALLAX located in NE Los Angeles.
Shirley Kurata
Costume Designer    Shirley Kurata's work as a Costume Designer includes “Generation” for HBO Max which follows a group of public high school students in Anaheim that push against their conservative community and Seoul Searching set in the 80s directed by Benson Lee.
Shirley rose in the industry first studying at Studio Bercot in Paris for 3 years in the 90s and since then has designed for Tierra Whack, Billie Eilish, Pharrell, Mindy Kaling, and Lena Dunham. She's worked personally with designers such as Rodarte, Kenzo, and Miu Miu, and regularly styles for editorial in magazines such as Vogue. She also curates the store Virgil Normal in Silverlake which has had articles written on its success.
Further design work includes the upcoming Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Son Lux
Composer   

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a sonic test kitchen.
The band strives to question deeply held assumptions about how music is made and re-construct it from a molecular level. What began as a solo project for founder Ryan Lott expanded in 2014, thanks to a kinship with Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The trio strengthened their chemistry and honed their collective intuition while creating, releasing, and touring six recordings, including Brighter Wounds (2018) and triple album Tomorrows (2021). A carefully cultivated musical language rooted in curiosity and balancing opposites largely eschews genre and structural conventions. And yet, the band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward. Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions.
 
Lauren Marie Mikus & Bruce Gilbert
Music Supervisors

Lauren Marie Mikus and Bruce Gilbert are partners in Charming Music Supervision, based in LA. Lauren started working with the Daniels on Swiss Army Man and has been lucky enough to collaborate with them ever since. Lauren Marie Mikus is a Music Supervisor and musician living in Los Angeles, California. A Texan by birth, Lauren honed her interest in music supervision while working in Austin, before setting out for the work and rewards of the West. She spends her free time as a singer and guitarist in her band Gal Pals, also based in Los Angeles. Bruce Gilbert is a four-time Guild of Music Supervisors nominee for his work on “Weeds,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “GLOW,” and “I Love Dick.” He was featured on Billboard's first-ever TV's Top Music Power Players List. Bruce lives and works in Los Angeles, California where he splits his time between the 5, 10 and 101 freeways.

Sarah Finn
Casting Director   

Sarah Finn is a uniquely innovative and ground-breaking Casting Director. Many of her films have left an enduring cultural imprint, as well as broken box office records.

With well over 100 feature films and multiple awards to her credit, she is perhaps best known for casting the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe beginning with Iron Man in 2008. She has also been recognized for the Oscar-winning films Black Panther; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and Crash. Those films all won the prestigious SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture and earned her the Casting Society of America's highest honor, the Artios Award for Outstanding Achievement in Casting.

This past year, she received two Emmy Nominations for “WandaVision and “The Mandalorian."
Sarah's collaboration with the MCU includes 26 films to date, with Spider-Man: No Way Home currently breaking records worldwide. Over the last decade, some of those films include originals and sequels for Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Guardians of The Galaxy, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther and Captain Marvel. Along the way, she has been responsible for finding and assembling casts with some of today's biggest stars. She is now engaged in launching the next phase of films including the recently released Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Eternals, plus the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

In addition, she is in charge of Casting and serves as a Consulting Producer on Marvel's entire slate of Streaming projects for Disney+. This includes 2021 releases “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “Loki,” “What If…?,” and “Hawkeye,” and the upcoming projects including Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Secret Invasion.

She cast the breakout Star Wars hit series, “The Mandalorian,” created by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, as well as the recently released “The Book of Boba Fett.”

Also a Consulting Producer, Sarah is currently casting the third season of “The Mandalorian” and prepping their other projects with LucasFilm for Disney+ including Ahsoka Tano and more.
Sarah's other upcoming projects include Everything Everywhere All at Once from the Daniels which will premiere as the Opening Night Film for the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. She recently completed casting on Extraction 2 and The Gray Man from the Russo brothers; and the Lionsgate/Showtime series “The First Lady,” being directed by Susanne Bier, for which she is also a Co-Producer. Sarah is a Producer and Casting Director for the independent film One True Loves, currently in postproduction, based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Sarah's past credits include a wide range of film genres: Jon Favreau's comedy, Chef; Oliver Stone's drama, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; indie favorites such as Martin McDonough's Seven Psychopaths and Shane Black's The Nice Guys; sports films Miracle, Coach Carter and She's the Man; animated classics The Little Prince, and The Jungle Book; and action favorites such as Fast & Furious and Kick-Ass.

A graduate of Yale University and member of AMPAS (Executive Committee, Casting
Branch), Sarah has served on the Executive Board of Women in Film and is on the Board of Advisors for the highly acclaimed Master Class educational series.

She is married to musician and educator Mike Finn, and they have three children.