When they finally sat face-to-face, according to the Everything Everywhere All at Once directors, Yeoh had one immediate question: What did you write?! Says Yeoh, “For me, I have to know where the project is coming from and for two people to have written this insane script, I had to meet them to understand where’s the passion. Is there real passion or is it just a job?” “We wanted to make something that felt so impossibly ambitious, and yet so playful that you can’t fault [the movie] for the chaos of it all,” says Kwan. “And I think we pulled it off in a really surprising way. I think we surprised ourselves, even, that it actually works on an emotional level.” The scope of the movie is enormous, with literally dozens of variations on these characters and our world being seen from every angle, including one universe where Evelyn and Deirdre have hot dogs for fingers. But there is something liberating in its cacophony of crazy. “It’s fun to see our movie come out when people are familiar with the multiverse,” he continues. “I’m very excited to watch people get to react to ours, which is in some ways a critique of multiverse stuff and an exploration of it. But from the get-go, our idea was let’s take this further than it should go. Let’s break the movie with how much multiverse we can do.” As the film ratchets up its insanity, Scheinert promises that in some fast cutting montages you’ll see a different multiverse in every frame. “It reminded me in some ways of the Hong Kong cinema where everything’s thrown at you and you have no chance to understand what’s going on,” says Yeoh. “You just have to do it, do it! ‘Okay, now I’m doing it!’” “I think my job in any role I ever do is to just make sure I know who they are and love them,” Curtis tells us. “That’s my only job. I don’t judge her. I know her. And I know a lot of Deirdres. I know there are a lot of lonely people in the world who wield their jobs as a form of protection. It’s like they’re a superhero, and that desk they work behind—I think we’ve all been to the post office, I think we’ve all been to an IRS office—there’s a power in that role. And that’s who she is, that’s her superpower.” Yet the other performers get to be a bit more fractured in their portrayals. For Hsu’s part, she gets to play both Yeoh’s loving if put upon daughter and her arch-nemesis. But even as Jobu Tupaki, the woman with an apparent bloodlust against all multiverse variations on her mother, there’s something tangible for the performer to grab hold of. And for Quan—the former child actor who starred in generational touchstones like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Goonies (1985) before retiring from acting due to a scarcity of good roles for Asian actors in Hollywood—it was the chance to show a variety of sides of his talent. Says Quan, “I actually hired an acting coach, a voice coach because I wanted each version of Waymond to sound a little bit different and then, most importantly, I hired a body coach… So each version of Waymond would walk and talk differently.” He even developed different animals he would channel for each major version of his character: the “alpha” heroic Waymond was inspired by the eagle; the suave Waymond who partied with movie stars channeled the cunning of a fox; and the one our main Evelyn is married to? The man she followed from China to start a new life above a grimey laundromat? He was a squirrel. Nevertheless, in the finished film it works. You can see Waymond assume one identity and then another in the same shot. And there remains a real connection and humanity between all the variants, even as the weirdness of Everything Everywhere is taken to 11. Even the already vaunted “hot dog hand” universe features a sincere empathy for Yeoh and even Curtis’ characters in that plane of existence. Everything Everywhere All at Once will be released by A24 nationwide on Friday, March 25.
