Watch How VFX Brings The Multiverse Of Everything Everywhere All At Once To Life
"Everything Everywhere All at Once" has earned rave reviews since it made its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival last month, and the buzz surrounding the movie earned it a strong opening weekend, with a per-theater average second only to Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza," in terms of platform releases during the Covid era (per Deadline). The film is in wide release now, and if you haven't seen it, the official A24 synopsis describes it as "a hilarious and big-hearted sci-fi action adventure about an exhausted Chinese American woman (Michelle Yeoh) who can't seem to finish her taxes."
That only gives the barest hint, however, of the multiversal mayhem that "Everything Everywhere All at Once" holds in store for viewers. This is a film with hot dog hands, bodies that explode into confetti, and a murderers' row of actors. The cast includes Ke Huy Quan (who made his screen debut as Short Round in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"), as well as Stephanie Hsu ("Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), James Hong (veteran of 600+ movies), and Jamie Lee Curtis.
"Everything Everywhere All at Once" hails from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directing duo know collectively as Daniels. Their two previous feature-length films are "Swiss Army Man" and "The Death of Dick Long," but with "Everything Everywhere All at Once," they have exploded into the zeitgeist with a movie that has drawn comparisons to "The Matrix" and "Mad Max: Fury Road" as a once-in-a-generation cinematic event.
In a new video for Wired, Daniels and Zak Stoltz, the visual effects supervisor behind "Everything Everywhere All at Once," run through some of the innovative techniques that they used to bring the film's action to life. Check it out below.
Everything Everywhere All at Once visual effects
In the video, Stoltz explains how a team of just five people pulled off almost 500 visual effects shots in "Everything Everywhere All at Once." This stands in sharp contrast to the long lists of names you will see in the closing credits of most effects-heavy movies. Kwan goes on to explain that "Everything Everywhere All at Once" uses a combination of visual effects and practical effects such as puppets. Scheinert says they did "a lot of wire removal," while both directors relate how they achieved the look of Yeoh's character, Evelyn Wang, jumping between universes by cutting together shots of Yeoh with handheld stock footage that Kwan had filmed on the streets of New York.
It's pretty amazing to hear that they were, in Kwan's words, using "the 99 cents store version" of the LED screens that big-budget tentpoles like the "Star Wars" movies would use. The overall impression is that of a film fashioned out of makeshift materials that nonetheless managed to come together as something special.
"Everything Everywhere All at Once" is in theaters now.