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The Cult of Daniels

Eleven nominations: It’s too many.”

Daniel Kwan is describing a conversation he had with his mother, June Kwan, on the day the Oscar nods were announced. He and Daniel Scheinert, professionally known as Daniels, are the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2022 sci-fi kung fu family comedy-drama that is the highest-grossing film ever released by its studio, A24. It steadily gained viewers and fans over the spring and summer of 2022, a slow-rolling word-of-mouth indie theatrical phenomenon in an era when such things are supposed to have gone extinct. Its number of nominations, including Best Picture, is more than any other film this year, making it one of the most unlikely awards-season juggernauts in recent memory. It turned its star Michelle Yeoh, a legend of Hong Kong cinema, into a major contender. It revived the career of her co-star Ke Huy Quan (also a nominee), who was an iconic ’80s child star but had drifted away from acting after realizing there were almost no roles available for Asian leading men in Hollywood. It also garnered a nomination for Jamie Lee Curtis — incredibly, her first.

Kwan’s mother happens to be right here. The directors are in New York amid a press tour for their whirlwind Oscars season, and they’re making a pit stop at Spicy Moon, the vegan Szechuan restaurant June owns in the East Village, where she’s plying us with food. On nomination day, June was on the phone with her son. “My mom was very proud but confused by the nominations. She was like, ‘I know people like the film, but can you explain why people love it?’” To be fair, it’s a difficult film to explain, bursting with ideas and images and often digressing in bizarre directions. It centers on Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), a middle-aged Chinese American laundromat owner who, in the middle of a busy day that involves both a Lunar New Year celebration and an IRS appointment, discovers she may be the most powerful being in the metaverse and the only one strong enough to defeat a sinister, nihilistic force named Jobu Tupaki (who happens to be an alternate-universe version of her daughter) that is threatening to consume all of creation. To harness her powers, Evelyn must jump between different universes and iterations of herself.

“For my generation and my language skill, I can’t just open my senses and feel it,” June says. “I have to think, What is this? What is that? I can’t catch up with it. The audience is a different generation, and they perceive it very different from me.”

“I started to explain what our intentions were,” her son says. “She said, ‘Maybe one day a film writer will write something that will make me understand why people love it so much.’”

All eyes turn to me. I make an awkward, verbose stab at it, explaining how the film artfully approximates the texture and pace of life in this day and age when one can be juggling multiple personalities and life threads at once — a world where you may be answering an important email from your boss while arguing with a dozen bozos on Twitter, trying to file your taxes, and dealing with assorted family drama. But of course it’s not just that. It’s also the way the film, through its multiverse story, plays with the idea of might-have-beens, of decisions made in the past that changed the trajectory of our lives. That particular thread perhaps connects to the immigrant experience, to those of us who spend a lot of time pondering how we might have turned out had we not left our home countries behind and often wonder how that me-who-never-left is doing — a kind of multiverse of the mind.

Those who get it really get it. Daniels’ fans don’t just adore them; they feel like they know these two men. “Someone just came up to us and gave us groceries from Chinatown,” says Kwan, referring to a screening they attended the previous night. “He had a dragon pinned to his jacket, and he said, ‘Tomorrow night, I’m bringing three dragons for you.’” At a screening in London, they met a young fan who had flown all the way from Turkey to give them a personal letter presented like a tax form. A lot of people bring their parents, moved by the film’s portrait of generational conflict and reconciliation. The directors recall one young woman who brought her mother and then just started crying, unable to talk. “We’re like these five-minute therapists sometimes,” Scheinert says. At a Q&A after their world premiere at South by Southwest, the directors were surprised to find almost all the audience questions directed at them despite the fact that they were up there with their stars. The first one, Scheinert recalls, was about generational trauma. Then came one about mental illness. Afterward, a friend observed they could probably start a cult if they wanted to.

Photo: Beth Sacca. Styling by Roberto Johnson.

June remembers the days when her son was miserable at UConn. “Walking through the campus, to the store, to class, I can feel you were like a zombie,” she says to him. She was the one who urged him to go to film school. “You can’t do anything,” she recalls telling him. “The only thing you can do is try film.”

“My mom was just being real,” Kwan tells me. “She could tell I can’t do anything.”

A lot of it, it turns out, was undiagnosed ADHD. As a child, Kwan never said no to any assignment or project, June says, but he would sit at his desk for hours and never make any progress. “Just no result, like a dummy,” June says. “It’s executive dysfunction, Mom,” Kwan replies. “People with ADHD have trouble with motivation because we don’t have normal dopamine activation.” Kwan didn’t discover he had it until years later while at an impasse in the edit of Swiss Army Man. The two partners had found themselves at odds over how to handle the first act. They had never done a feature before, and after stress-testing the film, Kwan was dissatisfied with the opening. “Scheinert tends to protect the ideas, and I’m the one who is always wanting to improve or expand the ideas,” Kwan says. Upset, Scheinert walked out of the edit room. “Sometimes, when he’s being hard on the movie or hard on himself, it feels like he’s not noticing he’s also being mean to a movie I co-wrote and being mean to me,” Scheinert says with a chuckle. “Another way of putting it is my ego starts getting hurt.”

The narrative problem was eventually fixed after Kwan and the editor, Matthew Hannam, got high and came up with a new scene. Around the same time, they had begun conceiving of EEAAO and were toying with making it about someone who had such severe ADHD they could tap into another universe. Researching the character, Kwan realized he shared the condition. When he and Scheinert met over a drink to iron out their differences, he told his friend this was probably why he felt like he’d become such a bad collaborator. “It was like, Oh, now we have a word for it,” Scheinert says. Many people with ADHD can hyperfixate when they find something they’re interested in. “To be able to sit down and work on one thing until it’s incredible?” Scheinert says. “I would say that’s Dan’s superpower.”

Curtis describes Scheinert on set as “the actor whisperer,” while Kwan is more “the technical, visual person.” Because of his improv background, Scheinert has a very “yes, and” sensibility, which often prompts Kwan to seriously consider some of the strange ideas they have. (This is, they tell me, how Swiss Army Man started. Kwan threw out a silly thought about riding a farting corpse, and Scheinert “wouldn’t drop it.”) Kwan can come up with a million ideas and then never think of them again, but he also likes to explore them in depth before he abandons them. Scheinert likes to keep things moving. He recalls running around the EEAAO set repeatedly reassuring his cast and crew that they weren’t making an Oscar movie. “We genuinely told people this movie was quantity over quality,” he explains. “To take them out of the mind-set of a lot of filmmaking, of movie directors who are going to scream if they don’t have four options for a sofa in a scene. This isn’t that kind of movie. If you get us a sofa, we’ll roll with it, man.”

The question now is what happens to a partnership that has up until this point succeeded through its casual, collective, no-pressure nature. Last week, the Daniels won the top Directors Guild of America award, a historically reliable predictor of the Best Director Oscar winner. “I’m still the kid in the back of the class,” Kwan says. “This Oscars stuff is horrifying to me.” They’re also keenly aware that they may never again find themselves in a position like this with the ability to be as ambitious as they want.

The directors always have a number of ideas they’re mulling; lately, they’ve been reading and listening to philosophers, futurists, and activists on the subject of the “metacrisis,” which Kwan describes as “the main funnel that causes all the other crises.” In other words, many thinkers believe everything from climate change to political extremism to economic turbulence is part of a more existential crisis around how people view themselves and their world. “As storytellers, so much of our job is to make the illegible legible,” Kwan says. “We’re taking all the information and noise of the world that’s constantly flooded into our receptors and trying to create narratives that sum it all up. That’s why we tried to make EEAAO, because we were so overwhelmed.” They can be critical of their own ideas, and they struggle with the notion of preaching to the choir. “In some ways, one of the problems with EEAAO is we tried too hard to compress it all down to something.”

That tension might not be such a bad thing. The Daniels may conceive on a complex conceptual level, but they execute through instinct and taste — those ineffable qualities that often distinguish the work of artists from that of mere dreamers. “We bring a naïveté to everything we do,” Kwan says. “We don’t know better, and that’s why we do it.”

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the February 27, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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