Short Wave - Everything On A Bagel: A Conversation With Daniels

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Directing Duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, (collectively: Daniels) are known for their first feature film Swiss Army Man and DJ Snake's and Lil Jon's music video "Turn Down For What." This year, they've taken their directing to a whole different universe. Host Emily Kwong chats with the Daniels about their new film Everything Everywhere All At Once and how their indie film about laundry and taxes melds the arts with sciences. You can follow Emily on Twitter @EmilyKwong1234. Email Short Wave at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Can you introduce yourself the way that you would like to? Ine, meeny, itsy, bidsy. Yellowpoka. Can you see that in the background? Yeah, that's how I like to be introduced. Hi, guys, my name's Daniel Kwan with Daniel Shiner here, and we are the directing duo Daniels.

Yeah, hello. This is my voice, other Daniel. The Daniel's first feature, Swiss Army Man, swept Sundance with fart jokes. This year, they took us to an entirely different universe, many universes, in fact, in everything everywhere all at once. Starring Michelle Yo. Very busy today. A long time to help you. Stephanie Shue, Kiwi Kuan, James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Thousands of evidence. You can access all the memories. This movie is a Kung Fu action film, a sci-fi flick, a romance, a family drama, even a little bit coming-of-age story, a multiverse of genres and possibilities. The thing about the multiverse that fascinated and scared us was the idea of infinity, and we wanted to make a movie that went to too many.

We're borrowing heavily from Vonnegut and Douglas Adams in the way that they take science, and they just take the absurdity and dial it up to like 100 and try to apply that to the multiverse just because it just felt like a really good metaphor for what it feels like to be alive right now, to exist in an infinite number of different stories and narratives kind of colliding constantly in contradictions and emotional whiplash. Today on the show, how an indie film about laundry and taxes confronts infinity and our place in it. We talked to the directing duo Daniels about how science and real life inspired the world building in everything, everywhere, all at once.

I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shorewave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. Listen, both Daniels are nerds, but in different ways. For Daniels, Shinerd, a self-proclaimed overachiever and teacher's pet, math was his thing. On math team, they give you 25 questions, one hour, and you get rewarded if you get any of them right. Yeah. And there's no right way to answer the questions. So it's a creative way to solve problems. A lot of times, you'll end up with a score of 20 out of 100.

and you can be proud of yourself. Whereas Daniel Kwan fell in love with science because of his mom. In second grade, they moved to a new school system, and Dan struggled to keep up, something he attributes to undiagnosed ADHD. His mom was worried his creativity was being stifled in a big class. So she pulled him out and homeschooled him for two years. We would do so many science experiments.

And so if I was into animals, I remember we got like a cow's, brain and owl pellets and a sheep's eyeball and we dissected them because my mom had like a catalog like for homeschool kids to buy science experiments at home. So that was a big part of me realizing that I actually do love learning just not school, which I think is a distinction that obviously we're all realizing is very very specific now. Yeah. Your movie is just punctuated with science facts. Like the alternate universe where there is an ape with hot dog fingers that want a fist fight and that's the reason how most

champions died out and I'm wondering like when did you decide to include science a little bit like just a nugget and when do you decide to just go for other things? I mean I think this movie from the like more than anything we were made

right from the get go it was inspired by some science stuff we'd read and it just felt like oh it's going to be in there and then there was like a pruning process that like we were constantly like second guessing what to include what not to include. I think it was important to us that like the pseudoscience make believe stuff be funny and narratively useful, then it's okay as long as it's not dangerously misleading.

You know, like I do think that like science facts like sometimes can evoke like a real intense emotional reaction or philosophical reaction. And like for me and that's so fun. and like from very early on that was kind of part of this was like oh let's let's talk about how the multiverse makes us feel like we've been reading all this climate apocalypse stuff because apparently global warming's pretty real and we're like how do you tell like the stories that we're telling don't quite capture how this makes me feel and as a filmmaker that's like a fun you know it's part of our job you know you just made me realize something which i've never thought about simply that when scientists are going out there pursuing information about how things

things work, their job is not to then help us process how we feel about what they find. And that's where I think artists, teachers, storytellers, communicators, folks like you, you play that role in helping people deal with what's true about our universe. Or we play the role of making you, like, giving you permission to be willfully ignorant and not worry about it, you know. We're actually distracting the public from these important conversations sometimes. And other times we're, like, able to help us process them. Oh, I think you nailed it. Your creative process seems kind of scientific to me in that it's very question-based.

Like, you know how in school you learn about the scientific method and you, like, develop a question? And it's coming from a place of curiosity. And then that question eventually leads to theory. And just to like take this metaphor all the way, your movies are basically spaces for you to test your theories. The making part. And I'm wondering what movie making theory were you most proud of putting to test on this film? Totally. Wow.

I love that. Yeah. That description very much resonates. Because like a lot of times people will be like, what drugs were you on when you wrote this? And you're like, no, it's more my math brain. know that that inspired the movie like we found out early on that like um our favorite projects were ones we weren't sure if we could figure out or pull off and we knew we're going to be engaged and trying to crack this straight through the very last day of working on it as opposed to like

oh we know exactly how to do this um a hypothesis is what inspires us to make a movie not a moral of the story or um clear cut story that we're totally confident in yeah um it's I think you're definitely tapping into something that even maybe we weren't aware of until recently. But I want to talk one little bit about this idea of the scientific method and when we learned it in school and how in sixth grade we were supposed to choose a science project to basically do the scientific method, test out your hypothesis and see what the conclusion is. and, you know, being the person who is very afraid of failure and wanting to check the box again A-plus, I was like, okay, I'm going to do an experiment on plants and the effect that different colored lights have them. So I had, you know, the control group of white light and then blue light, red light, green light, whatever, all these different plants, just to see how it affected the growth. Yeah. But then my friend, I remember my friend came up with an experiment that I was, like, terrified for him.

I was like, but you're going to get a bad grade. And his experiment was basically, it's a classic, you know, philosophical conundrum, which is the color green that I see and perceive, the same color green that you see and perceive. But like, what a fun, bold question. Exactly. But, like, he had a bad grade, even though he was searching for something that was actually meaningful to him. And, like, what lesson are we teaching our kids when things like that are possible? And so now, as an adult, I feel like I'm toning for my sins or a touch.

toning for the fact that I wasn't brave enough to actually chase after things I don't know how to do. Because that process is how, I think, on the individual level, like, I grow. Right. Yeah. You mentioned earlier, Daniel, Kwan, just how Evelyn as a character, one of the possibilities for her is she has undiagnosed ADHD, and she was imagined kind of that way. Can you tell us just more about that facet of her and how you put it into the filmmaking and representing that authentically?

Yeah. For this movie, we were trying to, yeah, tell a story about someone who basically dissociates all the time. It's constantly in another world in their mind, which is, you know, honestly just came from my own experience. Like my wife has constantly been like, hey, hey, hello, hello. I asked you a question. And then, like, you know, finally I snap out and like, oh.

Dan, what are you thinking about? And then what do you say to her? What do you say? I always say everything, which is the truth. Like, whenever she asks, what are you thinking about? I say everything, mostly because I don't want to go through the process of, you know, talking her through all the things that went through my brain to get to the thought that I was chewing on. And so I was like, okay, this is a great start for the character.

And in some ways, also it's inspired by my mother who was like that growing up as well. And so we were like, I guess we should do some research and make sure we kind of explore this, in a very empathetic and accurate way. And then, you know, I started reading about it online. I started taking some ADHD tests. I started realizing that like, you know, through tears, you know, as tears were falling down my face, I was like, oh, no, maybe this is who I am. Maybe this is why I had such a hard time in school and still have such a hard time

in my day-to-day life. And then it just became like obvious that, you know, even without trying to put in ADHD, this movie was going to be infused with it from the very beginning. The DNA of it was all going to be there. And there's even the line at the end when she says, like, you know, I prayed that my daughter would not end up like me. But unfortunately, she ended up like a mess, just like, you know, just like me. Which is something like my mom used to say to me as a kid, you know, I remember just sitting in her office and just papers, stacks of receipts everywhere. And she would say, like, Daniel, don't be like me.

Don't become like me because it's really hard to exist as an adult like this. My partner has ADHD and we were watching it together and you can just imagine the two of us. Like, I'm Asian American, was very depressed as a teenage girl. Jobu is like, my girl. I'm like just destroyed. And then Duncan's over here destroyed over a totally connected but ultimately separate set of experiences. and um but you don't name any of it like you said you didn't name it and i'm wondering why why is that a value i was just thinking about this the other day that like uh uh maybe dan has a good answer for

why but like i'm so glad we didn't because so many people connect with it for their on their own terms and in their own way it felt like a private thing between me and joy like i'm like this person struggling with depression and i know that Yeah. And I feel like if we named too much of it, then we might have skewed the movie a little more towards you or your partner. One journalist wrote an essay about feeling seen as a menopausal woman. Wow. And we were like, hell yeah.

I'm glad we didn't like name everything because then she might have watched it and been like, oh, never mind. It's not about me. Yeah. You know? Yeah. The last thing I want to ask you is in this moment in the film when Evelyn and are in the rock verse where they're both rocks. There's no speaking, just words on the screen and like wind sounds, which I thought was really

funny for some reason. And one rock says every new discovery is just a reminder that we're all small and stupid. So, Daniels, I have a question for you. In the process of making this film, what have you discovered that's made you feel small and stupid? You know, my movie's a hit, so I feel huge. huge and smart that I don't relate to my movie anymore. It's a classic Shiner answer.

That deserves some recognition, though. Huge it. No. It's not. I mean, it's a danger. It's very weird. Every time we tried to put the science into the movie, it was very humbling because it's hard, hard to get right and complicated and, but inspiring.

Yeah. This is a hard answer for me because I don't need science. to feel small and stupid. In fact, me and my therapist spend most of our time working on how do I feel, you know, okay with myself. And I think that's a very personal journey for me. Like, how can I reflect back to humanity

that we are okay, that we are awesome, that we are... Because my predisposition is to say we suck, we're miserable, we're selfish, we're going, we're, you know, we're self-terminating. And, you know, so it's... I don't know,

it's not a fun answer to your question. But it's like everything. Everything is always pushing us away from the center. And I feel like storytellers like us are just trying to reclaim ourselves in that story somehow. Thank you for making this movie and running that experiment. I think it's changing a lot of lives in very, very, very subtle ways and maybe some very obvious ways. But I'm so glad that we could talk to you. Oh, my gosh.

Thank you. We're honored to be here. Yeah, we're big into interdisciplinary studies. I love mixing the arts with the sciences. So this has been real fun. You can watch everything everywhere all at once, at home, and in theaters right now. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Liu, additional editing from Giselle Grayson, who is our senior supervising editor, and it was fact-checked by Rachel Carlson.

The audio engineer for this episode was Hannah Glovena. Special thanks to Ryan Collins and Rachel Goldfinger. for helping us coordinate this interview. I'm Emily Kwong. Keep it weird, fam, and tune in tomorrow for more Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.