Daniels, the director duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, first pitched editor Paul Rogers on their expansive vision for Everything Everywhere All At Once in their office. Which is also Kwan’s garage. Their presentation was lo-fi, yet effective.
“They just took two hours and told the story, basically,” Rogers tells MovieMaker.
“They had a big giant whiteboard with ideas,” he continues. “And you can read behind them: ‘hot dog fingers,’ and ‘Raccoonouille’ — just scrawled on the wall. It was all very confusing — this insane diagram with arrows pointing everywhere in all the universes.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a sci-fi epic that follows Evelyn Yang’s (Michelle Yeoh) journey from sad laundromat owner with tax problems to action-hero savior of the metaverse.
When Kwan and Scheinert finished telling Rogers the film’s story, acting it out and doing all the voices, Rogers says he “was in tears.”
He was also “100 percent in” — and told them so right there in the office-garage.
The trio first met years ago at Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale, California. They have collaborated on a number of projects, including the viral “Turn Down for What” music video, and Scheinert’s solo directorial debut, The Death of Dick Long.
Stephanie Hsu stars as Joy Wang and Jobu Tupaki in Everything Everywhere All at Once, from Daniels.
While Rogers did not edit Daniels’ feature debut, 2016’s Swiss Army Man, he did have drinks with the film’s editor, Matthew Hannam.
Hannam offered Rogers this piece of advice: “In the beginning, just take it scene by scene. Just make each scene great. Don’t think about what’s coming before or after.”
Hannam’s advice works as a general editing principle, but was especially practical for Everything Everywhere All at Once, a story stuffed with zany imagery and different worlds.
As those notes on Daniels’ wall suggested, these are worlds where people might have hotdogs for fingers or where a raccoon hides under a chef’s hat to perform the rat’s role in Ratatouille. (Hence “Raccoonouille.”)
“For this movie, if each cut you’re making, you’re thinking about all the other cuts and all the other scenes in the movie, it would destroy you mentally,” Rogers says.
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The goal was to get to a first full cut and then whittle it down from there.
“You’re going to inevitably sacrifice the moment for the benefit of the film,” he says on this refining process.
One sacrifice involved a five-minute scene in which Jamie Lee Curtis’ IRS agent, Deirdre, goes through an existential crisis. “Jamie Lee Curtis just killed it,” Rogers says. But “it was grinding the pace to a halt.” And Deirdre’s emotional journey was distracting from the rest of the scene, which was otherwise kind of scary.
Rogers suggested rotoscoping Curtis’ Deirdre completely out of the scene and restructuring it for a more straightforward scary moment.
“What was like a five-minute scene then turned into a minute and a half, and is one of my favorite scenes in the movie,” Rogers says.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniels and edited by Paul Rogers, is now in theaters.
Main image: Michelle Yeoh is Evelyn Wang in Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once. Photos by Allyson Riggs, courtesy of A24.
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