Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 193 | Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Every time we make an important decision, it's hard not to wonder how things would have turned out had we chosen differently. The set of all those hypothetical lives is a kind of "multiverse" — not one predicted by quantum mechanics or cosmology, but a space of possibilities that is ripe for contemplation. In their new movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, Daniels (the collective moniker for writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) use this idea to tell the story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who is the "worst" of all her avatars in the multiverse. We talk about philosophy, filmmaking, and how we should all strive to be kind amidst the chaos. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are writers and directors collectively known as Daniels. They met and formed a collaboration while in film school at Emerson College. They have directed a number of music videos for artists such as DJ Snake and Tenacious D. Their first feature film was Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe. Web site IMDb: Kwan, Scheinert Twitter

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smooth. It may be the world's greatest eraser. Find your shade of instant eraser concealer at your local retail. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You may know from listening to Mindscape in general or my AMAs in particular or reading any of my books. There's something out there called the multiverse. Well, what I should say is there's an idea out there called the multiverse. We don't know for absolute certainty whether or not there actually is a multiverse out there. In fact, there are different kinds of multiverse, which I would assign different credences to taking seriously. There's a quantum mechanics. kind of multiverse, which I take very seriously. There is a cosmological kind of multiverse. We're literally just very, very far away. There's different pockets of space time where things behave differently. That I'm kind of indifferent about. Maybe it's there, maybe it's not. There's good reasons to take it seriously, but we honestly just don't know. There's also more philosophical

kinds of multiverse. The philosopher David Lewis famously advocated modal realism, the belief that every possible version of the universe is actually real in some sense. And the question of figuring out which universe we live in is just locating ourselves in the space of all possible worlds. You may also have noticed that the idea of the multiverse has moved beyond science and philosophy to narrative, to movies, TV shows, books, things like that. This is not a completely new move. Fiction writers have used the notion of a multiverse as a device for decades now, but it's gaining in popularity a little bit. Back when we had Scott Derrickson, as the guest here on Mindscape, he had just come off directing Doctor Strange, the Marvel

movie, the new sequel. It will be Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which follows up on the most recent Spider-Man movie, which also investigated the multiverse idea. So it's out there, okay? We're using it. There's a new movie, which I very much encourage you to see, called Everything Everywhere All At Once That just came out, as I'm speaking this, in mid-April 22, and it's by Daniels. Daniels is the collective name for a writing-directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shinerd.

And they've made this movie starring Michelle Yo, which has a multiverse concept in it. I'm not going to give away too much. Don't worry about spoilers here. But they use the multiverse in a very interesting way, because look, as I know from talking about the many worlds of quantum mechanic, which is one version of the multiverse, you can talk about the Schrodinger equation and decoherence all you want. What people really latch on to is the

possibility that there are other versions of yourself. Out there, real, people who are experiencing slightly different or very different realities in some way. It is undeniable that that's a concept that grabs us, that really makes us think about this. Some people contemplate it and reject it, as terrible and dumb and ontologically extravagant. Others are sort of charmed by the romance of it all. Some of us just stick with the equations and try to make sense of them as a physical theory, but all of us are thinking about these ideas.

So in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the idea is that Evelyn, who is played by Michelle Yo, a very famous, wonderful, just about ideal actor for this role, starts out kind of not in trouble, Well, I guess in trouble is okay. But anyway, her life is not going great, okay? There's family issues. There are issues of paying the taxes on her laundromat that she and her husband owned. There's just issues of putting food on the table and so forth. And honestly, owning a laundromat isn't that sexy or exciting. So it's a kind of life that is a little bit gloomy and struggling. And many of us can, in different ways, identify with that kind of struggle when life doesn't go well. It's exactly. rated for cinematic purposes. But we all have some of that in our real lives. And then the multiverse comes in in literally the way that there's different versions of the universe and all of them have a different version of Evelyn. And the gimmick, which again, I'm not spoiling anything,

is that she learns how to take advantage of skills that she, or versions of herself, have picked up in other versions of the universe. And there's sort of different parts of the universe. The multiverse are fighting against each other and she has to do battle and that's all I'm going to tell you about it. But the great thing about this particular version of the multiverse is that it's not just, ooh, look, there's a lot of weird things out there, but it makes us reflect on the real world fact that there are roads not taken, right? That there are things we could have done, decisions we could have made, where things would have turned out differently. We would have become different people. And so this is where, for me personally, the use of,

way out scientific philosophical concepts is at its best in telling the story, making a movie when it's making us think about the real world, okay? It's not just amazing us with how things would have been very different if the world had been a different kind of world. It's making us think about the world we actually live in because we all have regrets or wonder about how things could have been different had we done things differently. So both Daniels are really, really thoughtful people about everything from the philosophy and science of the multiverse to the techniques of writing and making a movie. The movie has been getting rave reviews from people all over. It's not just for us multiverse aficionados. It's something for everyone. I encourage you to

go see it. And I think you're going to like this conversation because we get into a lot of things that you don't normally get to talk about with filmmakers. So it's a different perspective, and I think that it sort of resonated really, really well. Occasional reminders that we have a page at preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast with show notes, links, full transcripts of every episode, completely searchable. And there's also a Mindscape Patreon page. You go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll, where you can support the podcast, get ad-free versions, suggest questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes, and get a feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded mind-scapers. So again, you can do that if you want. You don't have to. It's great if you're

listening to Mindscape, whatever way it is. Tell you your friends, we want everyone in the world listening to Mindscape, everyone in the multiverse, for that matter, even if I do not get donations from elsewhere in the multiverse. At least I haven't figured out a way to do that. Maybe I should start thinking about that. And with that rather down to Earth thought, let's go. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shinerd, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Hello for having this. Yeah. So you have a movie that's just come out, everything everywhere all at once. And there's a lot of things that happen. But let me just start with the obvious thing that where you begin. is very mundane, right? I mean, the concerns of the movie right from the start are food, family, laundry, taxes. These are concerns that we all have. So, I mean, maybe this is just storytelling 101 and it's the obvious thing to do, but a little bit of insight into why you chose to be quite that grounded in things that we could all agree on right from the start, knowing that you're

going to go some crazy places. Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of people expect multiverse movies to exist in, you know, very high concept, high, like superhero type genres. And we wanted to make sure that ours started in the opposite, just because we knew how wild the the rest of the film was going to be and how much we were going to ask the audience to come along for this ride and kind of suspend their disbelief. And so with this movie, we were like, let's, let's spend a decent amount of time at the beginning, just grounding our characters in a very real world that feels relatable and also as you know as many people have been putting it mundane um because in the end we knew we wanted to find a lot of uh small beautiful profound things in that mundane um quality

yeah we we always knew we wanted to juxtapose those things but it did used to start we threw a lot of things at the wall there used to be a different opening scene where she was a physics professor doing like uh like michel yo is teaching the students about like the waveform collapsing yeah The double salute experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm very sad now. You've made me sad that this is not in the movie.

Yeah. So there's a whole deleted scene. And then as she's showing like the wave becomes particles, she's putting dots on the chalkboard. And then her class, her students start giggling. And she's like, why are they giggling? She turns around and all the dots have formed a perfect penis. And then she just and then she mutters, oh, no, she's here. And then Joe Boo walks in.

And it was a whole matrix kind of sci-fi. intro, but, uh, but we kind of, um, class. Yeah. Sorry, one more time. I said it's so embarrassing when that happens in class when you're lecturing on the double slit experiment. Oh, yes. I'm sure.

Yeah. Oh, is that common? Hard to bring the class's attention back to the equations once. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, I mean, that's kind of why I was asking the question because, you know, a superhero movie, whatever, people love these, obviously.

But it's not that we identify with the character. It's that we aspire, we wish we could fly or be bulletproof or whatever. Here, it's much more like these are our problems as well, right? Totally. I mean, I think some people identify with megalomaniac white men. And those people have had plenty of movies, you know, about them. You know, like most, it's mostly about a guy who's like got good intentions but is a little too egotistical. And we were like, we'll make our protagonist a little different.

A little bit different. Are you just talking about us now? I don't want to say anything. But that's what, like, the first seven Marvel movies were. And it's so fun that they're starting to change it up. But it was like, what's Thor's problem? Too confident. What's Dr. Strange's problem?

Too confident. What's Captain America's problem? He's a confident, dude. Yeah. Well, I was, you know, look, I love Dr. Strange. And my friend Scott Derrickson, who also was a previous podcast guest, directed Dr. Strange. He was my guy growing up in the comics. But I always questioned this idea that he was somehow making.

made humble, he was arrogant, then he was humbled. Like he became the sorcerer supreme. That's not exactly a humbling experience. That's kind of a wishful-filment experience. Totally, yeah. But then, okay, you bring, then things do go crazy. It's not mostly a movie about paying your taxes on the laundromat. So there's a lot of places, a lot of movies you could make about paying your taxes in the laundromat,

but you brought in the multiverse, some crazy ideas inspired by science fiction. Why is that a good place to go if you do want to tell a more or less relatable story? Yeah, I mean, we kind of reverse engineered it and we had this concept of a multiverse story where you tap into lives you could have led and borrow their skills. Because the two sides of that coin that's really interesting to us is first you get some powers, which is great for a crowd pleasing action movie. But then on the flip side, every time you tap into a power, the double-edged sword is you suddenly have an existential crisis because you realize, you know, how good your life could have been. And that felt like a really fun, you know, device to throw our character into. Yeah. So then we talked about what character would be the most interesting one to put through the ringer. And the more we talked, the more we got excited about being someone who's older, someone who's maybe our parents' generation, who's had more life lived.

So maybe more regrets. And then we started talking about our parents and started talking about the immigrant experience because Dan's parents immigrated. And that was like even more interesting, like even more kind of color to like the past lives, the alternate lives they could have led. And then and then yeah, the more mundane, the better where we were like, oh, if it's someone who really doesn't feel good about their life right now. then this journey is going to be extra, you know, existential for them. Yeah. But ultimately extra rewarding for them by the end. Right.

And then the goal became, you know, to make a big flashy movie that ultimately is about how beautiful and wonderful that normal life was all along. So, you know, we wanted to make that challenge, which we knew early on was the challenge not too easy and be like, no, no, no, we're going to make you love. the taxes universe. By the end, you're going to be like, I want to stay right here in taxes. Get them right. I mean, I just want to pause for a second to give kudos to the amazing acting in the film, Michelle Yo, most obviously. She was brilliant in this role. Thank you. Yeah. We love taking credit, but we don't deserve any credit. She just killed it. She just came in and was

so prepared and passionate and believed in the movie. Yeah. And I did find online that there are a couple of interesting alternate universes where different people were playing the main character in this movie, right? Yeah, the only two we ever tossed around were very early on, we were like, who are our favorite, you know, Chinese actors, and we were like, what if we could get Jackie Chan and or Michelle Yo in our movie? So early on, they're like, you know, talk about them.

And then when we weren't sure about Michelle Yo, our producers were like, who could you go to, you know, if she's busy? And we couldn't think of anyone because we basically accidentally wrote ourselves into a corner and we're like, this movie kind of lives or dies off of Michelle Yo, which was kind of a terrifying realization because we had been working on the movie for a couple of years at that point. Yeah. But then almost as like a last ditch effort, my brain kind of. of went back and then was like, well, you know, in some ways that this character was inspired by my mom, maybe we could just cut the budget down to like 10% of the original budget. And then the whole movie is like a prank film where these directors drag, literally drag their mom into their movie and surround them with, you know, pedigree actors. And it would be more like a jackass style like meta film.

Yeah. And nobody liked that idea. We never pitched it to his mom. The producers were like, that's not a real idea. Don't. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup, 2026 at the FIFA fan festival of the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream.

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We live with the world we got, and it worked out brilliantly. And not only Michelle Yeo, but everyone in the movie is a fantastic actor, but the movie is, like you just said, it's about thinking about all the roads not taken, right? I mean, that's why it's really, to me, a cool use of the multiverse idea

because it's not just other worlds where weird things are happening, but other worlds where you made different choices, right? It's very, very directly tied to the real world, the fact that we always carry around with us these questions about how things would have gone differently had we done things a little bit differently at crucial moments in our past. Totally. Yeah, I think a lot of people keep asking us this question of why the multiverse, you know, why is it happening, having a moment right now? I think a lot of people can relate to it because there's never been a time where our brains have been allowed to, you know, explore all those paths, you know, all the potential things that our lives could have been and all the potential ways our lives can still go. You know, if I wanted to, I could, you know, pack my bags and move to another city and have a completely different life. And that wasn't the case, you know, 100 years ago. And I think... Or like what's extra different is now you can go on Google Maps. You can go on Zillow, look at real estate in any city in the world. You can go on Instagram, figure out what it would be like to live, you know, in any city, figure out what...

all your friends are doing. There's even like, you know, they talk about like dating app tourism where you literally can just change your location on your phone and suddenly you can see who is single in Malaysia or who is single in Brooklyn. And I know some people who've actually done that and then actually flew to that location just to meet one person. Our producer maybe did that and his fiancee. You're going to call him out on a podcast.

Yeah. And now they're going to get married. He didn't go to Malaysia. for like a mail or bride. No, no, no. He went to New York where he had an apartment. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't.

But the whole idea is that I think this movie is resonating with people and the multiverse in particular is resonating with people because we are living in the existence that already feels like the multiverse. And that's why we wrote this movie. That's a really cool point because, you know, as a physicist, I think of the multiverse as being something that we talk about is maybe scientifically real in a different sense than it would be in this movie. But I had never thought about the fact that in some.

sense, we're closer to the multiverse now in the modern world because the space of possibilities for our lives is bigger than if you grew up as a peasant in the 14th century or something like that. Yeah. It kind of goes back to, I don't know if you've read this or maybe you can even prove me wrong if my research was incorrect. But when we were reading about everything about the multiverse in preparation for writing this movie, one of the things I found really interesting was one of the early.

recordings of the word multiverse being used in the English language actually had nothing to do with science. It had to do with morality and theology. It was actually written by a theologist who was lamenting the fact that he believed that there was one moral universe, like centered to everything, which was God. But then we looked around at the secular world. He was confused by the plurality of morality and the moral multiverse that kind of made him struggle every day. And so that was where he, I mean, that's where the word multiverse came from, which is really interesting because it's kind of moved so far from there. But I feel like that's where we're living right now. We're living in a place where the internet has created so many moral bubbles and different centers of universes.

and what's happening now is we're watching them collide, and we're all kind of terrified to see what's going to happen next. But to me, I think that is, that's one of the more interesting things I came across while we were reading. Well, and am I correct to, well, let me just ask you as a question rather than just saying statements. Did scientific ideas or philosophical ideas about the multiverse inspire you at all, or did you sort of hear them and go, huh, and just run with it yourself? Or did you, like, I think you alluded to reading about multiverse ideas?

Totally. No, we, yeah, that was the other thing I was just thinking is, yeah, we're both really fascinated by science, but, you know, we, we only have enough vocabulary to understand like pop science books, you know? Yeah, we're really big into, like, interdisciplinary study. So, like, it's about everything combining. Yeah. Science is obviously a big part of that.

And I always find, like, I just, I love, like, a big swing of a, of a, of a, of a take on the on science and philosophy or the state of the world and and uh when it makes me start feeling emotional or kind of like sends me on a philosophical tangent and and so reading about like you know huge ideas of physics like reading you know stephen hawkins or reading like stuff about evolution and like is is a huge source of inspiration for us because we'll come we'll come to each other and be like whoa like what if like how did that make you feel when you read that you know article about the, what's it called the brain simulation? Like, what if it's more likely?

The simulation argument. Brain would just form and. Oh, the Boltzman brain? The Boltzman brain. Right. And we'll come to each other and be like, what a crazy article. And it's a and it, and then we're kind of off to the race is kind of tossing around how that could, you know, affect a story, you know. And so in this particular case, yeah, we read a lot about multiverse.

from every angle, because the fun thing about the multiverse is almost every single medium and every single field of study has its own way into it. You know, because like there's the quantum mechanics version of it, which is all about, you know, probabilities and quantum decisions and things like that. But then if you go to cosmology that we're talking about like the infinite scale of an expanding universe that contains a multiverse even within itself, But the way I got into is actually through linguistics, oddly enough, I came across this idea of modal realism about 10 years ago. And I was just so fascinated by this idea of like taking the modality of language and treating every version and every variation as real, as almost as a thought experiment and just went down a rabbit hole down that direction.

But, you know, mathematics has its own version of the multiverse. I'd argue, you know, Joseph Campbell talking about the many faces of God. is another version of just talking about infinity and again talking about the multiverse. And so, to me, the entry point is more, like we're saying, it's more interdisciplinary. It's about this bigger picture idea of us looking at bigness, at scale, and trying to squeeze that into a sci-fi action movie. It was really fun. Well, I mean, this is great because much of what you just said I could easily have said or had said before. I've written a lot about Boltzman brains and about the quantum mechanical moment.

multiverse. The idea of modal realism is still one that even I come up a little bit short. This is usually associated with David Lewis, famous philosopher who thinks that literally every possible world is equally real. And we just happen to live in the one that we find ourselves in. And that's, I think that's a step too far for me, but maybe I'm just, you know, too down to earth. I don't know. Oh, I mean, totally. I, to me, the fun thing about all this stuff is that it reminds me like obviously it's all rooted in some truth but it still reminds me of the way that you know our ancestors all interpreted certain truths in different directions like the way that they would you know the age and Greeks would watch a lightning strike and paint a picture of a god um throwing lightning in anger or

whatever um or the fact that you know there was probably a great flood you know thousands of years ago and every single civilization at the time came up with their own version of a story describing that flood and explaining that flood. And I feel like all of these different things, whether it's modal realism or quantum mechanics or whatever, we're all just pointing at the same thing and we're trying to understand it. And so, like, to me, I believe none of it. And I also believe all of it. It's a very strange thing where it's the closest thing I have to like a spirituality or

to like this idea of like a faith because I will never be able to fully understand any of it. And so like you saying modal realism doesn't make sense is like totally fair. to me it's just fascinating because it's another tool for pointing at the same thing. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I will make one point about quantum mechanics, which I try, because I know that I have my friends and audience listeners out here who will care about this, which is just that, you know, I really do believe that in my body 5,000 times a second, there is a nuclear decay, right? There's a little bit of radioactivity. And there's a universe in which that nucleus decayed and one of which it didn't. So I believe that there's many, many, many copies of me. being made all the time. I actually do believe this. But I also don't, I insist that the versions of me in the other universes are not me. They're like, they share a past with me, but it's like an identical twin, you know, like once we split apart, we're two different people going our own ways. We obviously have a lot in common, but it's not like things that happen to that person affect me in any way. That's the

one thing that I want to make clear about my view of the multiverse. And it's perfectly okay if in the film, it's not how it is. I feel like sometimes in interviews, people have, like, asked us, like, what's interesting about the multiverse and they're coming at it from this, like, pop culture perspective? And I, and I wish I was as articulate as you because part of me wants to be like, well, um, a lot of very smart people for very valid reasons think it's real. Like, it's not just a comic book thing, guys. Like, it's, it's the best explanation we have for, like, these, uh,

you know, tiny physics observations and like, but then it goes both ways. There's a very good chance. There's an infinite number of us. And we are in a, we are living the life of a random one. One of them. And that's mind-blowing to me.

And like that was a huge inspiration for this movie to just be like, I don't know how that makes me feel. And I don't know what to do about it. But I kind of am excited to stare at it for a few years. and see if I can tell a story through that, like mind, like, that just absurd but maybe real premise, you know? Which is why, you know, we push, for those who have seen it, you know, you know, we push our character to the, you know, cognitive limits

and in our audience as well, because we're trying to basically touch upon what it really feels like when we treat that as real. Whatever you just said, this refreshing, of our bodies, like how, how terrifying, how beautiful. Yeah, but kind of how beautiful. It's like, oh, well, it's a miracle that I'm like able to reach over and pick up this object right now, like, and observe just one, you know, thing. And, you know, as you alluded to before, in all this infinity of possible futures that my

past self had, the one that you're focusing on. in the movie from Michelle Zio's character is the one in which she's the worst. She came out the worst of all of that. And it's still not so bad. So, I mean, that's a little bit of hopefulness in there, right? Totally. Yeah. And it's almost, and that's almost from a place of judgment from the alpha universe, which is

sort of, you know, if there are villains in this movie, it's probably them. And so even though they say that, I don't think we actually believe it. And I don't think, I don't think by the end, the character doesn't believe that, obviously. but in that moment is the worst thing that she can hear. And she takes it to heart because I think a lot of people feel that way. You know, I think a lot of people, no matter who you are or where you are in the world, they have this feeling that maybe this is the worst version of me. How did I screw up so many things to get to this point?

And so I think a lot of people like laugh at that moment in the movie when the character says that. But then I've also heard people say that this actually made them tear up because they felt so targeted. It's like, you know, the film was speaking to them. And I love that because I think if it was speaking to them in that moment, then I think by the end of the film, hopefully it really pulls them out of that and makes them believe in the future possibilities. If, you know, if we are constantly fracturing out into, you know, infinite number versions of ourselves every few milliseconds like you're saying,

that also means we are getting resets every moment. Every moment is a new possibility that we get to, choose, which is really, I don't know, it's really thrilling to think about that. Well, let me push on that a little bit. This is a totally unfair set of questions to ask, but one pushback I get when I talk about the quantum mechanical universe is that it makes life meaningless. If everything happens, then who cares about what choices I make? Because there's some other universe in which I made other choices. I try to argue that, you know, not all universes are created equal. This is a feature of the quantum version of things where there's sort of more

of you in some versions of the universe than there are in other ones. But of course, you get to cheat in the movie because you get to access all the universes at once. But what is your stance toward this sort of meaningfulness if all these infinite number of things are happening? Yeah. I mean, I think that we went into the project unsure what our stance was. And that was a lot of times that's what attracts us to a project is like, is that, oh,

we're going to, we're going to chew on a big, scary question for all. while. Because you're right. Well, the multiverse is actually kind of anti-narrative in that way, where if you have a character, make a decision and you know in the back of your head that the other decision was also just as valid and just as realized, then nothing matters because in narrative, the character is only built off of their decisions. Which like, yeah, in real life is like, yeah, so disempowering or it can be so

disempowering. And so we ask ourselves, can we make a multiverse movie where we lean into that and say, I'm want to make you not care. I'm going to make the character not care. I'm going to make the audience not care and basically stare at the meaninglessness of all of their decisions and see if we could pull ourselves out of that because we don't believe that. I think we needed to convince ourselves that even if we are just one tiny speck in a sea of infinite other versions of ourselves, that there's something still worth holding on to in this moment. So yeah, the answer we stumbled upon, so we figured it out, is that

This is going to be a very valuable podcast. I mean, or the answer that we used to get ourselves out of this impossible project. And so we could actually release it was that like too much nihilism is a bad thing. But a little bit's not so bad. And that like a lot of people are so convinced they're right, you know, kind of like Evelyn, our main character, that they, that they're making them so. miserable, they're making the world around them, you know, maybe not a better place. And that like there's something kind of freeing about that scary concept of, you know, this universe is a random one.

And we kind of feel like that most people, if they took a step back and stared at that scary question, and then they asked themselves, do I want to be a nice person or a mean person? the answer just intuitively is like a nice one. Like I guess I want to do good in the world. I guess I want to spend time with the people I love. Like maybe I'll quit like screaming online at people I hate and bake some cookies for my neighbor if I have a little existential crisis, a little healthy one. Yeah, I don't know how deep we want to go down like the road of like morality or. or just like turning this into a morality tale.

But, you know, because I was raised very religious, you know, evangelical, almost fundamentalist Christian. And so now I'm very allergic to, like, objective morality or any kind of, any weight of talking about those kind of things in an objective sense is very scary to me. But I am fascinated about the fact that, like, for so long, the golden rule was sort of like this very strong center to humanity. The idea of like, treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated has been such a big part of human morality, you know, and we're watching that breakdown.

And I think a big reason why is because the definition of neighbor has just been stretched thin. I think that was really useful back when we had communities of, you know, a few hundred people, even a few thousand people. but now when the community and the neighbors are literally in the billions, there's no way for that rule to actually hold true anymore. And so, like, to me, what, you know, what Shiner is talking about, about nihilism allowing us to say nothing matters, throw out everything for a moment,

just hit the reset button so we can take a step back and find a new center or a new, a new, yeah, a new version of morality. Because, you know, I think we constantly have to be updating those kinds of things. things as the world changes. And I think what we discovered on this movie and is being echoed in a lot of art that's being made right now. It's not just our film is this idea. It's like the neighbor concept is, I think, is, is failing us.

And so we have to just look at it instead of saying, how do we want to treat other people? It's it's more about the freedom that we need to be giving everyone. And so I think this new, the new morality that I'm chasing is this idea of not. Nothing matters. There are no rules. Let everyone do whatever they want as long as your kind. As long as it's not hurting anyone, why does it matter? And I feel like that, you know, those things will be up to the debate forever. Like who is, who is every action hurting and to what degree and we will always be struggling with that. But rather than being trapped in this idea of trying to police our neighbors or think of just the individual neighbor,

I like the idea of just freeing ourselves up to say, don't worry about it. Nothing matters. Just be kind. I promise we'll get in a minute to like down to earth questions about screenwriting and movie making. But I have still some deep questions. Deep issues I want to talk about. This is our jam. No, we're excited.

I'm just going to chime in and say, I still think treating your neighbor how you want to be treated checks out for me. I don't know. You know, it's like. No, it checks out, but it's limited now, I think. I think it's breaking down a little bit. He treats his neighbors like garbage. I never want to be like Dan. Maybe he wants to be treated like that.

Maybe he wants to be treated like that. Does that growing dog? shit over the fence all the time. Yeah, I just want to be, yeah, I just want to be shamed and, and, right. Well, the flip side of this is, you know, is when you contemplate these gigantic multiverses, not only do you think about, you know, is it meaningful because I could have done other things. The other worry from the existential side of things is, I notice that I am very small inside this huge collection of infinitely many things happening. Even if it's not other mes out there, there's certainly a lot of other stuff out there.

So I personally kind of, when people bring that up, I kind of lean on a version of the serenity prayer. I'm like, well, yeah, but know the wisdom to understand what you can affect what you can't. And even if it's small, that is what matters to you, right? Yeah, that's great because what you just said is kind of where my brain has been at the past couple weeks, the serenity prayer, just like knowing when the limits of the individual. And that's probably going to go into our next movie. I don't know.

There's something there that is really profound. And our visual effects supervisor, who is a good friend of ours who worked on the movie, this morning he literally just sent me a podcast about that very thing, about the limits. You know, the limitless expectations and limitless imagination that we have versus the limited bodies that we can, that contain them, you know. And like that tension is so awful. Right. And then I feel like in the other side is like, I've recently been like reading more like Alan Watts

like philosophizing. I haven't read much. But like there's something so it's one of the only philosophers I've read where I'm like, oh, this kind of just adds up. It's all just like there's, it's not like super difficult to parse out. I mean, I guess that's what he's known for as being like, hey, I'm going to take Eastern philosophy and make it so Westerners can understand it.

But like his, you know, he talks. about like how it can be a a really upsetting, dangerously upsetting thing to really focus on the self as something 100% separate from the rest of the world and that like and that it's a porous thing, you know, like there's your consciousness. Is that the self? Or there's your body. Is that the self? Like, uh, but the food in your stomach is not the self or maybe, but like maybe it's just this becoming the self. But maybe it's this like more more thing that like you control some, But like you control it less and less the further goes out.

But also like, Dan is a part of me. Like my community is a part of me. And like the universe as huge as it is is me. And that there's something kind of like beautiful about that where it makes you feel less shitty about being so tiny. And then you're like, I love redwood trees. Good thing. Those are a part of me. Yeah.

Because I'm part of Earth. Pretty cool. They get to high five to Redwood Tree and be like, I look good. This is a good. That's my version of Alan Watson. And the great thing about art in general is it can take these lofty ideas from science or philosophy or whatever and bring them down. Like once you have to make it manifest in the plot and characters of the story, then that's sort of what matters. Like philosophers love them. I'm kind of one myself, but you can talk in abstractions all the time.

And it can often be like an extra step that doesn't. get taken to make that real in people's lives. But as filmmakers, you have no choice. You're showing people doing things on the screen. Yeah. I think sometimes we come into a project with some hot takes that we're real confident about, you know? And then when you start having to like illustrate them with human beings and trying

to make them relatable, it's like humbling. And you're like, oh, there's more nuance to this. Like the point I was trying to make is changing because, uh, because I want it to feel real and real people aren't as black and white as, you know, my opinion, you know, like a bumper sticker is easier. And then like, so even while working on this project, you know, like, I think we had to put ourselves in the shoes of these characters that are our parents' generation. And like, I think at first we were a little like, no it allie as we did that. And we were like, and through the process of making it, we were. like, it's not easy to like understand your children who were raised on the internet if you

weren't raised on the internet. It's not easy to like, you know, understand your kids' pronouns when your kids' pronouns change. Like, that's hard. Yeah. And but it's also still important. But anyway, yeah, that's what your comment kind of made me think about is like our bad art is like just propaganda where someone's screaming a hot take.

But I think like, yeah. The good art, which we aspire to make, you know, requires nuance. And you're like, oh, whoa, I'm having to get in the weeds here. Well, you're giving me an idea that maybe it should be required in philosophy courses that all the students write a little bit of a screenplay to illustrate the ideas that they're thinking about. Like, really put it into action somehow. I think it's a great idea. That's amazing.

And vice versa, I think, like, filmmakers should have to take a philosophy course and figure out what on earth they're trying to say. Otherwise, they'll just go out and just, like, have someone shoot a bunch of people in the forehead because it looks cool. and they never think about what it means or why they made that movie. Right. All of this is reminding me of something I read once, and I'm going to attribute it to Kurt Vonnegut, but that might be totally wrong. When in doubt.

When and down. Curvonnegathe said. But basically, it helped me understand our place in the world as storytellers. And basically, the idea is in order for any paradigm shift to happen, and for any big idea to, come into the zeitgeist, you need three types of people. The first one are the, the ones who basically come up with the idea and are treated like heretics or just like crazy people, insane people. They're the ones who have an idea so wild that the world rejects it. Then the second person

you need is someone who basically looks at that crazy person and says, the first one who says, oh wait there's something here this person actually um is on to something and they're the ones who validate it they're the ones who bring them into um into like out out from the outskirts and into society the podcasters exactly yes exactly and then the final the final person that is needed is the storyteller it's the person who can take these very complicated um just they are convoluted complicated, contradictory ideas that the world is not ready for and turning it into something digestible and something scalable for society. And so after I heard that, I was like, okay, I can do that. That sounds like something worthy of my time. I want to chase after

complicated feelings and complicated ideas and try to turn them into something that my mom can understand or, you know, high school kids can understand or at least begin to understand. And And so I do think whether it's for science or philosophy or any of these fields that the person who translates it to the masses is such an important part of all of this. And I think a lot of storytellers forget that that is one of the many hats we can wear. Yeah, there's plenty of movies out there with the shooting in the head. But I like the idea that a little bit of forced reflection might make them into slightly better. I mean, it makes me think about like on the other side of, on the less optimistic side, Dan was, I haven't read this, but you were telling me about, I think Socrates, like, was really anti-playwrights and like anti-storyellers. Oh, it may be Plato.

It might be Plato. But, like, one of them was like, there's nothing factually reliable about a piece of theater. It's just emotionally effective. And then he's like, if you're trying to create like an. educated populace who's trying to figure out how the world really works, the worst thing you can do is just throw art at them that's super persuasive and has no scientific method involved at all, you know? And I love sometimes, you know, it's like such a fun, humbling thought to be like, I'm, yeah, sometimes I'm translate, I could be translating something important for the masses and other

times I could just be throwing misinformation out there that's as, that's as, that's as, as, detrimental is something the Kremlin, you know, is cooking up or, you know, like that. There's a responsibility there. Yeah, one of my recent guests, Peter Dodds is a statistician data scientists, but he studies that, you know, uses big data to study stories and narrative. And his motto is never brings statistics to a story fight. It's just not going to be a fair fight. The stories are always going to win. That's such a bummer. Yeah, because, yeah, I think about that a lot. because we

started off like we've been thinking about it a lot in the last few years that like our work early on was just us dancing with the algorithm like you know what kind of short film can I make that you know YouTube will like and we weren't spending much time thinking about like you know

what the difference that might make in the world you know yeah and then sometimes you look back and you're like oh I accidentally spread misinformation you know Like, even if it's just representation in media, you know, you can do the statistics and you're like, 20% of people look like this, but 100% of people in this movie look like this. But also like, you know, like our obsession with serial killer stories makes us think there's more serial killers than ever when homicides are way down or that there's child predators everywhere, but it's way down. And it's like, oh, that's not, yeah, I love statistics.

And sometimes I have so much guilt about being a filmmaker. Well, you know, as a scientist, as a physicist who lives in Los Angeles, I've consulted on a bunch of films, including a bunch of Marvel films. And, you know, I'm very much of the opinion that I'm not going to object to the laws of physics being broken in the movie. Like, what is the point of that? but there's still a little voice inside of me that sometimes squeals or gets annoyed or something like that. So I'm only going to do one little, I'm going to let you know. I'm going to let you in on the one part of a kind, not just your movie, but movies like this,

that I can't quite stop thinking about just to get your reaction to it, which is just the fact that infinity is very big. When you talk about an infinite number of things that can happen, most of them are either terrible or boring, right? I mean, the vast majority of universes out there don't have us in them at all, not just like other versions of us. And oftentimes when people portray like Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide, right, the infinite improbability drive, they portray other possibilities as kind of cute and fun. And there's an example in your movie where you do this also. And so, I mean, how, I mean, is it just forget about that? We're telling a story. We're going to have fun.

We're going to be cute. or do you contemplate the idea that, you know, in the vastness of infinity, most of it is terrible and boring? Yeah, no, that's my pet peeve too. And it was kind of, yeah, hard to grapple with. And we threw a lot at the wall. We nod to that a bit. You know, there's a universe where life doesn't, the conditions weren't right to form or whatever. And that most of them are like this.

But then it turns out that universe, they're still talking. Yeah. You still made it cute. It was still cute. It was my favorite part of the movie, but it was still adorable. Oh, great. Thank you. But yeah, I mean, you're right.

There was that tension between what is accurate and what is going to help the story. And I think for the most part of the universes that we picked were the ones that would collide with the protagonist, the best. And so a lot of that ended up being the wilder ones, which is kind of interesting. And we kind of always. Maybe we'll do a sequel that's like. like all boring universes. It's just universes that are just like so mundane and nothing's happening. Yeah.

Yes. Nothing's happening forever. Gets the title of the sequel. I think it'd be great. But yeah, I mean, we wanted to start with something extra accessible and cute and be like, oh,

what if there was one other universe? And like from very early on, we're like, we're going to introduce more and more. The audience is going to get a little stressed out. And then we're going to pull the rug out. and we're going to introduce a stupid number of universes to kind of point at infinity, almost like an exponential curve of universes, you know, for our movie,

knowing like there was no logical way we could film, you know, like there would be limitations of what we could film and also what would be, you know, interesting at all to look at. But hopefully, hopefully people leave our movie and they can tell that we were, pointing at even more universes than what we showed, like, and that like, ours is a cute little, is like a cute version of the physics because, and we, yeah, I'd love nothing more if people took that germ of a feeling and went off and actually did some research, read into it more, you know, because it's, it's fascinating.

Yeah. Well, this brings up a filmmaking point because once you granted yourself access to the multiverse, you can be as silly as you want, as weird and bizarre and shocking as you want. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I get the feeling that you enjoy that, that freedom. I mean, how much do you have to pull back and say, no, no, no, that's just too silly or too gross or too off-putting versus,

yes, let's, you know, shock the audience just a little bit. Totally. Yeah, it's a constant debate within ourselves. I think we're always trying to surprise ourselves, because if we surprise ourselves, and we surprise the audience and like what better gift to give an audience. And we get bored easily. So we try to make a movie that would not bore us.

But then we're always, you know, with every new ingredient we add, we're always doing the calculation in our head of like, okay, what percentage of the audience are we going to lose if we include this, this element? That's too far. And like how important is it to the main character's journey and that kind of became the back and forth? Yeah.

But the most shocking thing about all of this is, you know, we're used to our movies cutting out a certain, you know, pushing away certain audience members because it's too much. It's too weird. It's too, you know, aggressively strange. And that's why we're always doing these calculations in our heads. And so we expected certain people to, you know, walk out of this movie being like, that was not for me. But I think something has happened in the time since we started making this movie where the world has just gotten so weird and the world has gotten so chaotic. You know, you read headlines and they feel like a parody website is writing these headlines, but they're real.

You know, these are actually happening. Real life feels absurd. And for some reason, you know, audiences are really embracing this movie way more than we ever expected. The fact that we're even on this podcast right now is very funny to me because this is not what we were imagining when we set out to write this movie. We thought we would find some interesting weirdos like us who would enjoy this. And that would be that. And we would be happy with that. But this is kind of proof that something has shifted and the world is ready for art that reflects life.

And right now, life is absurd. That was, I mean, that ended up being our excuse for keeping a lot of the most shocking stuff in there was that the internet is shocking. And that, like, in a lot of ways, this movie's in conversation with how it feels to live online these days. and even our parents' generation is spending more time online than ever and is more aware than ever of just how, like, you can scroll between something that makes you, like, smile to something that disturbs you so quick. And we wanted to not, we want to do that justice a little

and be like, you know, our generation grew up on the Internet. Like, there's sexual content around every corner on, you know. And so, like, we were like, there should be cussware. words and sex toys in our movie, even though that's going to make our, you know, moms disappointed with how, you know, where our film school tuition went. But it felt, you know, yeah, authentic.

I mean, it's another good funny. Sorry, I haven't really thought about this enough, I guess, but just this is the fact that not only do we have this technology now and it's changed our lives in certain ways, but one of the ways is the whiplash, the rapidity with which we can be pushed from one thing it to another. Like, I don't know about you. I grew up with 10 channels on the TV and, you know, some books that, you know, and you're in any one book for a long time. But with thousands of

channels on TV and literally millions, billions, probably of websites out there, you can get this sort of conceptual, emotional feeling of just being, just chaos at a very, very rapid rate. And I guess that is partly what it's being reflected in the film. Yeah, it's wild. Like, I mean, I think people have always loved camping because you kind of calm down. But, you know, I, you know, I'm not that old. So I can't speak for what camping was like in the 80s. But I feel like when I, when I go somewhere and my phone doesn't work for two days, like, it is wild how different I feel and how my brain feels.

And it's like, it's like only when you get off the drugs. Do you realize just how bad it was? Different life feels when you don't take your drugs. it's like that. But yeah, the movie, I think the people who really click with this movie are the ones who immediately understand that the whiplash that you're feeling is intentional. You know, I think some people watch it and they aren't ready to let go. And it's a lot.

It's almost abusive to the audience, this movie sometimes. Of course, we took a lot of care in making sure that the abuse was rewarding. But once you let go and realize the whiplash is intentional, you are ready for this roller coaster ride. And we use a lot of genre and we use a lot of like really quick snappy filmmaking techniques to make it apparent. But it is fun to be sitting in an audience with a bunch of people. And some people are laughing and some people are crying and some people are screaming all at the same time, watching the same exact scene, but reacting in all these different ways. Because that's what it feels like on the internet. When someone posts like a tragedy online, that's what it's like.

Some people are cheering. Some people are crying. and some people are making jokes. It's a very strange way to exist where you're not allowed to have your own feelings about something anymore because the world is having it first. Let me just take advantage of having you here because you talked about your goals with a movie like this. How does it come together? Is it always the same or is this, or is every movie different?

I mean, do you start with the characters, the plot device, the images? Yeah, I think, um, we start with, like, throwing a lot up in the air, you know, like, even right now as we try to figure out what our next movie might be, we have too many ideas and too many, like, things about the world that are interesting us. And we're kind of always just waiting for a bunch of our favorite ones to coalesce, you know? And it's kind of like this, like, aha moment that's not just one idea. It's, it's that moment where, like, oh, that project. will let me do 10 of the things that interest me right now. I'm not going to get bored with that,

which is the other half of my answer, which is like, we like to do things that we won't be sure if it worked and we won't be done until the very end. You know, like, this was like a, it took us all the way through mixing the movie, you know, to refine what we were saying and, and we're constantly tweaking things because we bit off something hard. Yeah, one thing I'll say is I think we write the wrong way.

I think classically you're supposed to, this is actually a metaphor that our composers used for their process, and I'm stealing it now. So Sunlux, they were the band that composed the score for this film. And they describe their process like this. They say, normally an architect will build a house and you get the structure right. You make sure everything feels safe and sound. And then you go inside and you start to populate the house with furniture and, you know, appliances and things that make sense.

But their process, which feels very similar to ours, is instead of building the house first, they might like be walking down the street and come across this amazing chair, this amazing armchair with like 10 legs and it has leather, but also, you know, there's some, some pokey parts, you know, that stick out if you don't sit in the right. But they love it and say, this chair is incredible. I'm going to build a whole house around this chair. And I'm going to make this chair make sense. This chair doesn't make sense right now.

It doesn't make sense in my mom's house. But I'm going to build a house where this chair makes perfect sense. And to me, I'm like, when I heard them describe that, I was like, yes, that's exactly how we work. We find these weird chairs and when we spend the rest of our time just trying to build a house around it. And I think for this movie, you know, the chaos was the chair. Infinity was the chair. We're like, I want to build an entire thing around infinity. even if it structurally doesn't make sense

or structurally doesn't follow the rules, this is going to be a very hard challenge but a very fulfilling one if we pull it off. I wish I'd done that with my actual house. I just did renovations and my favorite sofa didn't fit in it and I had to get rid of it. Defeats the purpose of a house if your favorite sofa does not really. Yeah, it just didn't make sense in the room.

Well, I mean, maybe this is something worth explaining to people who don't make movies for the things. I think that a lot of people presume that you have a script and then you film it. But there's still a lot of picking and choosing along the way, right? You film things that don't make it in the movie. You end up filming things that maybe weren't in the script. I mean, how, what is the planning versus chaos element in that process?

Totally. Yeah, I think there are filmmakers like the kind of classic Hitchcock style is that like he would perfect his script, perfect his shot lists, have storyboards, and he'd come in and he'd move around his actors like chess pieces and execute exactly what he had planned all along. But that's so hard, like, with live action and also kind of like very unpleasant and like the opposite of why I got into filmmaking, you know, I like the collaboration and the problem solving and the fact that you're learning new things all along. It's also, it's a self-limiting, you know, if you're going to go in there and say, I know exactly

what I want. There's no room for the universe to tell you better things, you know, to show you better ways of making the film that you're making. And I think, I think a film like this would never have worked if we had gone the Hitchcock route. I think we had to be constantly listening, constantly feeling out what our crew members were saying and, and what the locations were telling us and how, you know, just everything down to like, you know, scheduling around different actor schedules. Like, all of that is speaking to you and you have to listen. You have to listen as a filmmaker because otherwise you're just fighting against entropy and you're fighting against just inertia which is like impossible.

Yeah. It's like so for example we get we get all the way into like the final weeks of the edit and there's still things that some audiences aren't latching on to about the logic of the movie and we started we were still rewriting lines of dialogue. to try to and just one line of dialogue could make such a difference that would then help everyone just help a few more people give up and to the absurdity of the bagel, for example. The bagel. And we were tweaking those lines straight up to the end or like there was one shot that we added to the opening of the film that's just the daughter, sad, driving her car. And then like the simplest shot, but it wasn't in the script.

It wasn't in the edit. And something about the daughter's journey felt like it wasn't set up properly. And audiences were like, why is it all about the daughter at the end? And so like we, I think it's a product of how much we were trying to squeeze into our movie and how ambitious our ideas are. But like, we were, we added that really late and it made a huge difference, you know. It's a chemistry set. Yeah. And just got to keep tweaking those, those, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

portions until it feels right. But yeah, to answer your question in another way, he comes from improv. I come from animation. Animation is filmmaking when you have all the control, and improv comes from filmmaking where you have no control. And I think our style and our process is somewhere in the middle, where we plan as much as we possibly can. But knowing that our projects are so ambitious, we have to leave a lot of room for improv.

And also knowing that we have really talented friends and we want to leave room for their ideas, you know, leave room for the actors to come in and surprise us. Well, one of the features of the film is these wonderful Hong Kong cinema fight scenes, right? And presumably those are pretty darn choreographed. But, I mean, how much were you just nodding toward that sort of genre film versus actually using the techniques that they would use to make a fight scene like that? Yeah. Growing up, that was like all we watched in the house because my dad loved watching movies and my mom fell asleep in most movies unless they were in Chinese. And so my dad would just constantly be finding like bootlegged copies of, you know, Hong Kong action movies and things like that. So we watched a lot of that growing up. And both of us, you know, we both connected over the fact that we loved that kind of filmmaking style. And what was great about it for this movie is not only is it so dancefully and satisfying. It's our favorite, but it also happens to be not that expensive compared to the kind of like bombast of like American action.

It's like it's all about like two people fighting over a prop as opposed to, you know, a hundred people with guns as the building falls. It doesn't make it easier. In fact, I think it's as much harder to pull off Hong Kong action because it requires every performer to be incredibly physically able. and then also the camera work has to be very precise. And you have to have a team who's all dedicated to this idea of shooting action kind of unconventionally. I think a lot of things have been changing in American action films,

but for a very long time, the way that we shot action was the same way that we'd shoot coverage of any other dialogue scene, where you get the wide shot of the whole thing. Then you get some close-ups. And then if you need some inserts for clarity, you'd go and get this foot kicking this thing,

which is like way more. efficient because then you're not changing light setups constantly. You're not, you're not turning around and forcing the whole crew to move every single time you do another take. But that ends up, you know, when you cut it together, there's a dryness to it that feels like you're shooting it as if it's a conversation and not like a dance, not like a proper fight. And the way that in Hong Kong, Yun Wuping was the, you know, legendary choreographer that did almost all of that stuff or at least influenced a lot of that stuff. And his way of of shooting would be he would just choose the exact shot for every single move that would best

illustrate the feeling and also narratively the story in that moment. So even if it was just one punch to a face, he would find the perfect shot for it and hit that punch and they cut to a wide and suddenly the fall would have a very specific angle that would make the fall feel very dramatic. And so even if sometimes it cuts fast, it's always very narratively clear. And then there's also, you know, these incredible moments where they just let the performers perform because they're that good. You can just hold on a stationary tripod shot for a decent amount of time and just be impressed by how incredible these athletes are. And then the last thing in our Hong Kong spiel we like to say is that we referenced it so heavily, tried so hard to make something that could stand up to like Michelle. career.

And then we tried to not hurt anyone. And so the difference was when we did our action scenes, we had very thick wires and we just removed them in post. But like classic Hong Kong action movies, they used thin wires that the camera couldn't see. And it's so dangerous. And a lot of people got hurt. And a lot of people would get hurt on those movies.

And so we're happy. We found a safe way, you know, to do that style. because we did not want to hurt Michelle Yo, our hero. And that's compatible with the underlying lesson of the movie, I guess, which maybe makes this a good last question to ask. Is there a lesson to the movie? Is there moral to the story? And should movies have morals?

Or is it just not, I shouldn't say just, but is the goal more to give people a bunch of ideas to think about and come up with their own stories? I mean, how pat should the lesson be at the end versus a little bit of loose thread chaos left hanging there? Totally. Yeah, I think we're always searching for a balance in there. And I'm not sure what the right vocabulary words are. But, like, you know, we have a very concise moral to the story that's so simple.

It sounds like a children's book, you know, which is like it's chaos. be kind. But on top of that, we tried to make every character's journey nuanced and explore things that didn't have super black and white answers and leave room for everyone to kind of see what resonates with them when they leave the theater and not end the movie with someone walking off into the sunset happily ever after so that like hopefully there's things to chew on that are gray and and that you know it's it does feel like the movie's out of our hands now and we read think pieces online and we're like whoa I guess the movie means that like cool

which is such a fun experience I think that's all product of the fact that like we don't go into every movie with the moral we don't know what the moral is going to be you know if there is going to be one at all and hoping and you know we just kind of enter every project hoping that we will find something that we can learn and if If we're learning, again, if we're learning, then the audience is learning, and that's, that's exciting to us. And so I think that's probably why, you know, people have a hard time pinning down what this film means is because it, it grew into its meaning rather than us placing some, like, some seed of meaning at the beginning, which I think is like in my, you know, my experience, those are my favorite kinds of films is where it feels like the filmmaker is searching. the filmmakers is looking for something rather than trying to teach something. Like reflecting him back on a lot of our work,

I feel like oftentimes the characters are, all the worst aspects of our characters are the worst aspects of ourselves as writers and as humans. And we're putting those people into these movies so that we can hopefully see a way to become a better person through the process. And that's, I think hopefully that's something that people feel. it's like a hybrid our filmmaking process is a hybrid of jackass and therapy where like we just want to do things that are fun to do and fun to watch and we also want to like try to grow as people along the way and maybe that'll be valuable for the audience too well and and evelyn has triumph but next year she's still going to have to pay her taxes again right

I mean there's no escape from this yeah exactly it's still chaos yeah she doesn't you know still chaos that is a great that's the moral it's still chaos so be kind to each other so Daniel Kwan and Daniel Shiner. Thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Such a pleasure. Wow. This is, I hope we didn't say anything too stupid. Next time we're going to interview you.

I know. We have more questions for you. I have answers. Some of them will be crazy. Some of them will be wrong, but I'll give them. Great. Maybe we should ask you to consult on our next movie, honestly. Now that we've connected, this is very exciting to us.

You know how to get me. Yeah. Love it. All right. Thanks very much, guys. Cheers. Nice to meet you. My grandmother slept in a food.

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