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Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of the very best films of 2022 so far – an epic, multiversal opus from filmmaking duo Daniels. To celebrate its UK release, revisit Empire's original feature first published in Issue #400.

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When you’re fighting with dildos, you don’t rehearse with dildos.

There is a scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once in which a multiversal variant of Stephanie Hsu’s character — dressed as Elvis — makes a man’s head explode into confetti, and then summarily beats another guy to death with a pair of rubbery sex toys. “The sack is a good handle, you know!” laughs Hsu (who plays troubled daughter Joy and her dildo-wielding variant). She and the stunt team practised the fight scene with regular nunchucks before actual dildos were introduced for filming. “The dildos were quite bendable. So it really felt like a nunchuck.”

Hsu shrugs it all off with a chuckle. “It was just another day in the multiverse office.”

Dildo fight scenes are pretty standard fare for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — known collectively as ‘Daniels’ — who fill their films with so much insanity that the benchmark for ‘sane’ becomes murky. “Every time I set out to do a movie,” Kwan explains, “I have this fear that I’m gonna die or something. Even when we were really young, we were like: ‘This might be the last thing anyone ever lets us make! We better put everything into it!’” He laughs. “The threshold for ‘everything’ has slowly grown to the point where we made this movie.”

This movie, as that title suggests, is a valiant attempt to chuck everything, including the kitchen sink, at the screen. (Plus, infinite multiverse variants of said proverbial sink.)

It’s popping with ideas: about our place in the universe, about our relationships with our parents, about dealing with information overload in the internet age. “It’s wildly inventive and original and outrageous and funny and action-packed,” says Ke Huy Quan, who plays Joy’s father Waymond… and a number of Waymond variants. “But at the end of the day, it’s about love.” He had faith from watching their previous film. “I saw Swiss Army Man,” he says of Daniels’ 2016 debut feature, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a gassy cadaver whose flatulence could power him across an ocean. “A corpse farts throughout the entire movie. I thought, ‘If they can make me laugh, cry, fall in love, immerse myself in this absolutely outrageous story, I think they can do anything.’”

“We’re just trying to fight anything that forces a categorisation" – Daniel Kwan

This is typical of Daniels, who are, according to Hsu, “self-proclaimed maximalists”. They are filmmakers overloaded with inventiveness, and Everything Everywhere All At Once was a story they were able to craft about that. “We got to explore our own ADHD, too-many-ideas problem in a narrative,” Scheinert says.

Here is a partial list of ways you could describe the film: it is a mind-bending multiversal science-fictioner; an energetic martial-arts action film in the Hong Kong tradition; a surreal, farcical and frequently filthy comedy; a heartfelt immigrant-family drama; and an existential, nihilistic exploration of life, the universe, everything. It is about an omniversal being of pure chaos who threatens to destroy all reality, a team of multiverse-jumpers trying to stop it — and, at the centre of it all, an Asian-American laundromat owner named Evelyn (played by Michelle Yeoh) who is just trying to do her taxes.

When the trailer debuted last December, it lit up the internet. Suddenly everyone was asking, “What the hell is this thing?” “We’re just trying to fight anything that forces a categorisation,” says Kwan. A film with literally everything in it defies easy description. But let’s give it a shot, anyway.

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The early clues for who could create such a chaotic, singular film can be found in Daniels’ music videos, where the pair first made their name. Their promo for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s ‘Turn Down For What’, for example — which has over a billion views on YouTube — centres on a man with a magical penis who parties so hard that said dick literally blows the roof off. His killer crotch-thrust dance-moves manage to smash through plant pots, baseball bats and three successive ceilings. The video was a sensation, a huge viral smash and a hit with everyone who saw it. Everyone, that is, except Daniels’ parents. “I called my mother when she first saw ‘Turn Down For What’. She was like, ‘I think you should read more books,’” laughs Kwan. “She didn’t understand it. And then ‘Turn Down For What’ got nominated for a Grammy. She got to come with me to the Grammys. It totally changed the way she thought of the video.”

Daniels — rarely short of ideas — were betting all of their chips on Michelle Yeoh.

This is a recurring theme for the pair. “Our parents are constantly having to deal with the fact that we are their kids,” Kwan continues. “Like, ‘I am the parent of the guy who made the Farting Corpse Movie.’” This idea, of a parent not understanding their kid, bled into what eventually became Everything Everywhere All At Once — the intergenerational pide-turned-multiversal metaphor. “This movie in some weird way is a reflection of that,” says Kwan. “The daughter is this strange creature, and the mother has to go on the journey to basically become a monster herself in order to connect with her. Hopefully it’s a very gracious portrayal of our relationship with our parents.”

Other impulses fuelled that initial spark, too. “There was a sci-fi idea,” explains Scheinert. “And then over time, like, ten other things glommed on.” The key to unlocking it was introducing the concept of an infinite multiverse, which allowed for infinite storytelling possibilities. “We’re like, ‘Ah, great! We can do our existential film that we’ve been wanting to make. It can be a playful sci-fi. It can be an Asian-American story. We can do kung-fu fight scenes like we have always wanted to try…’”

If that sounds like a lot, it was hard for Daniels themselves to make sense of at first. To help, they pored over “pop science” books, researching current theories on the multiverse — branching universe, eternal inflationary cosmology — and then “quickly invented a stupid, film-friendly version” of their on-screen multiverse, according to Scheinert.

The first draft of the script ran to almost 240 pages, including a now-deleted opening scene in which the main character gives a physics lesson while accidentally drawing a penis. It also featured a main character in the form of a middle-aged Asian woman who, through the power of the multiverse, becomes an interdimensional, ass-kicking action-hero. It was written for iconic Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh. “By the time we reached out to her to play the part,” Scheinert recalls, with a smile, “the character’s name in the script was just ‘Michelle’. We literally told our producers, ‘We don’t have a back-up. We really hope she likes it. Because we have zero other ideas.’” Daniels — rarely short of ideas — were betting all of their chips on Michelle Yeoh.

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Halfway through her chat with Empire, Michelle Yeoh disappears. The connection on our Zoom call cuts out. Minutes later, she returns. “Oh my goodness!” she laughs. “I just jumped into another multiverse!”

Clearly, Yeoh is now entirely on board with the idea of branching timelines and cracks in reality, but when she first read the script, she wasn’t sure what to make of it. “I had never read anything so crazy,” she says. “I couldn’t even wrap my head around that whole concept. I’m a dinosaur — I don’t really know how to get online and Google things. They had me going, ‘Maybe I don’t really understand, but you know what? They have intrigued me.’ And I love a challenge.”

She was in good company. Jamie Lee Curtis (who plays Deirdre, the IRS tax agent who butts heads with Evelyn) “couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on” either. “The script was weird,” Curtis says. “But the entire reason that I said yes to this little tiny weird movie was because I was getting to work with Michelle Yeoh. They say, ‘You had me at hello’ — well, they had me at Michelle Yeoh.” Curtis even performed a rap on set in tribute to her co-star (“She is tiny, she is sweet, she will knock you off your feet”).

Daniels were “blown away” by Yeoh, Kwan says. “We grew up on her more playful roles — her Jackie Chan movies like Supercop 2. I think as time went on, she got put in roles where she was very austere and proper. And this character is the opposite of all those things.”

“One of our favourite things in our movies is those days where you get a bunch of really talented people together to do something stupid.” – Daniel Scheinert

In the film, her character Evelyn soon learns to “verse-jump” — to temporarily link her consciousness with another version of herself from across the multiverse, accessing all their memories and skills — and a key variant sees Evelyn become a very Michelle Yeoh-like figure. It directly plays on her cinematic legacy; the film even includes real stock footage of Yeoh on the red carpet for Crazy Rich Asians. “It is very much tied into the DNA of Michelle as a human and as an actress,” Kwan says.

That extended into the action. Rather than use a seasoned Hollywood stunt team, Daniels found their fight choreographers on YouTube, hiring a group who call themselves Martial Club, led by brothers Andy and Brian Le. “They’re just fanboys!” says Scheinert. “The amazing thing about these guys is they never went to a single martial-arts class,” marvels Kwan. “Everything they know is from watching Hong Kong movies.”

When Yeoh arrived on set, she found that her choreographers were, in fact, heavily influenced by her. “They told me: ‘I watched all your movies, I studied all your moves, and I know how to do all of them,’” Yeoh recalls. “So when we choreographed the fight sequences, they knew everything I could do! It was doing the kind of things that I did when I started my career — a bit like Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, all the greats. It was like walking down memory lane. It was fun.”

Still, even a martial-arts legend can have too much fun. Occasionally, the madness of a Daniels shoot got to Yeoh. “She’s a professional,” says Kwan, “but every now and then this movie would break her brain in a way where she just couldn’t work.” One scene — in which two interdimensional soldiers are desperately fighting over a trophy they want to ram into their anuses, for multiversal reasons — had Yeoh “hysterical on the floor”, in her words. Filming had to pause for ten minutes to allow her to collect herself.

“One of our favourite things in our movies,” says Scheinert, “is those days where you get a bunch of really talented people together to do something stupid.”

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There are a lot of talented people doing stupid things in this film. “We were trying to find ways of pushing the multiverse to unexpected places, the further the movie went along,” says Scheinert. “We were trying to find out: how weird should it get?” The answer: pretty freakin’ weird.

For instance, one sequence is set in an alternate universe where humans have evolved to have hot-dog fingers for hands. Stay with us. In this universe, Evelyn and Deirdre are lovers, which meant film legends Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis spent a day on set wearing fake hands while lovingly shoving ketchup into each other’s faces. “I honestly thought it was a big joke,” says Yeoh about reading the scene for the first time. “I wanted to convince the Daniels to write it out of the film.” She found solidarity: “I think the two of us looked at each other and were like, ‘Yeah, I have no idea what the fuck this is,’” recalls Curtis. “But clearly these guys do. And they know it so well. You just surrender.”

Remarkably, for such a ridiculous set-up, there is a genuine emotional pay-off. The actors and directors took it deadly seriously. “We went into the different universes believing: that is the real universe,” says Yeoh. “We have to live that moment and live how they would — even though, yes, they had weird digits.” Curtis goes further. “There’s a part of that sequence that was as moving for me as an actor as anything I’ve ever done,” she says, sincerely. “At the same time, we have hot-dog fingers and I use my feet as my affection tool.”

This was an important distinction for Daniels. It’s not just surrealism for surrealism’s sake. “We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to push the envelope without doing a shock-value movie,” says Scheinert. “Even in the edit, there was a lot of discussion about how much of the dildos to show.” They might chuck all manner of dildos and hot-dog fingers at the screen, but are always “trying to ground it in something real, some sort of true emotion,” says Kwan. Behind all the puerile insanity, Daniels insist, is a genuine philosophical yearning: what does it all mean?

If we are, in fact, specks of nothing in an indifferent universe, we might as well be kind to each other — and chuck in some dildos, for a laugh.

As a concept, “everything” can be quite a lot. For Daniels — filmmakers of a generation raised on the internet — the concept of “everything” has become profound. When you have the sum of all knowledge and existence in your pocket, where do you even go from there? “I think we are struggling with this problem of meaning,” says Kwan. “How do we process all this information that we’re being inundated with every day?”

One possible response is nihilism: that in fact, it’s all meaningless. The film grapples with the idea that nothing matters. “When we first started writing this, we were like: ‘The bad guy is nihilist,’” says Scheinert. “And then the most interesting thing was, we actually related with that. We ended up feeling like, ‘Oh, this movie is about how a good little dose of nihilism can make you a better person.’” He laughs, clarifying: “We’re actually, like, very sweet, hopeful, romantic people.”

If, as it indeed turns out, nothing matters, Daniels seem keen to meet that meaninglessness with absurdity and empathy. If we are, in fact, specks of nothing in an indifferent universe, we might as well be kind to each other — and chuck in some dildos, for a laugh. “The delineation between highbrow and lowbrow, the profound and the profane, the beautiful and the disgusting… Our work is always trying to encapsulate that in a way that feels beautiful and thought-provoking,” says Kwan.

It has left Michelle Yeoh more introspective than she ever expected a film which had her wearing hot-dog fingers could make her. “The philosophy in this chaotic thing!” she says. “The strength of this story is the will to not give in. We have to live in the now. There may be multiverses out there, but we are not out there. We are here. And we have to love it.” And with that, the Zoom call cuts out again.

Originally publish in Empire Issue #400. Everything Everywhere All At Once comes to UK cinemas from Friday 13 May.