The Bizarre Randy Newman Cameo You May Have Missed In Everything Everywhere All At Once
Beware: mild spoilers for "Everything Everywhere All At Once" are referenced in this article.
The Daniels directing duo of Daniel "Dan" Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are no strangers to making weird yet brilliant films, with "Swiss Army Man" showing audiences that there is beauty to be found in a world where Danielle Radcliffe plays a farting corpse. Their latest venture is the brilliant "Everything Everywhere All At Once," featuring an unraveling multiverse surrounding multiple versions of Michelle Yeoh tasked with saving the world. Our unlikely hero discovers she possesses incredible powers, and interacts with a variety of mystifying universes ...like giant swinging dildos or developing hot dog hands.
One moment in particular is sure to resonate with fans of the 2007 Pixar film "Ratatouille" (yes, the one about Remy the rat chef voiced by Patton Oswalt). At one point, Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn tries to recall the film, but mistakenly calls it "Raccaccoonie," and remembers it being about a raccoon hiding under a chef's hat and controlling his cooking by pulling his hair, not unlike a puppeteer controlling a marionette. The moment seems like a random gag, but after Evelyn winds up in a multiverse where she's a knife wielding hibachi chef, she shares a glare at a young, smug chef played by Harry Shum Jr. and notices a raccoon tail hanging out of the back of his chef's hat. This universe is, as composer and member of Son Lux Ryan Lott describes it, "like a jump into a version of a Pixar universe that isn't animated." In order to fully realize this universe as Daniels envisioned it, they needed to get Randy Newman.
You've got a friend in Randy
It seemed like a long shot, but Daniels hoped they would be able to get Randy Newman to cameo as the voice of Raccaccoonie. As Lott tells it, they sent the film to Newman who watched it with his family and said, "His wife had not laughed so hard the entire pandemic and that he was up for it." Rather than go the route of animation, the Raccaccoonie is animatronic, and sings a song with the chef. Only a small amount of the song is shown on screen, but Lott ended up writing an entire song for Newman which was recorded as an exclusive for the soundtrack. "I never, in a million years, would've dreamt that I would somehow wind up singing a duet with Randy Newman, a song that I wrote in the style of Randy Newman," said Lott.
Fellow Son Lux member Rafiq Bhatia echoed the sentiments, and added that Randy Newman also did a bit of ad-libbing while on set. "If you're not really paying very close attention, you'll easily miss them," he said. Bhatia recommends that anytime the raccoon is on screen, that we zone in on what he's saying, because there's a good chance we'll miss the joke under the roar of audience laughter. "That was some of the later stuff that we were doing on the film, placing his ad-libs in different spots," he continued. "We were just laughing so hard." There were of course moments that didn't end up in the final cut, but Lott assured us that they will be treasured forever. "I'm never going to be able to use any of them, but I will also never delete them."