In multidimensional mindbender EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, Michelle Yeoh’s laundrette owner takes a trip into a world of infinite possibilities… and googly eyes. As she and the film’s cast and crew tell us, it was all or nothing

WORDS JOHN NUGENT

Yeoh learning kung fu as one of Evelyn’s variants

WHEN YOU’RE FIGHTING WITH DILDOS, YOU DON’T REHEARSE WITH DILDOS.

There is a scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once in which a multiversal variant of Stephanie Hsu’s character — dressed as Elvis — makes a man’s head explode into confetti, and then summarily beats another guy to death with a pair of rubbery sex toys. “The sack is a good handle, you know!” laughs Hsu (who plays troubled daughter Joy and her dildowielding variant). She and the stunt team practised the fight scene with regular nunchucks before actual dildos were introduced for filming. “The dildos were quite bendable. So it really felt like a nunchuck.”

Hsu shrugs it all off with a chuckle. “It was just another day in the multiverse office.”

Dildo fight scenes are pretty standard fare for directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — known collectively as ‘Daniels’ — who fill their films with so much insanity that the benchmark for ‘sane’ becomes murky. “Every time I set out to do a movie,” Kwan explains, “I have this fear that I’m gonna die or something. Even when we were really young, we were like: ‘This might be the last thing anyone ever lets us make! We better put everything into it!’” He laughs. “The threshold for ‘everything’ has slowly grown to the point where we made this movie.”

This movie, as that title suggests, is a valiant attempt to chuck everything, including the kitchen sink, at the screen. (Plus, infinite multiverse variants of said proverbial sink.)

It’s popping with ideas: about our place in the universe, about our relationships with our parents, about dealing with information overload in the internet age. “It’s wildly inventive and original and outrageous and funny and actionpacked,” says Ke Huy Quan, who plays Joy’s father Waymond… and a number of Waymond variants. “But at the end of the day, it’s about love.” He had faith from watching their previous film. “I saw Swiss Army Man,” he says of Daniels’ 2016 debut feature, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a gassy cadaver whose flatulence could power him across an ocean. “A corpse farts throughout the entire movie. I thought, ‘If they can make me laugh, cry, fall in love, immerse myself in this absolutely outrageous story, I think they can do anything.’”