These days, filmmaker Daniel Kwan says, much of art is broadly struggling to confront two things: “One is this feeling of everything happening all at once—how can you put that in a story in a way that is meaningful? And the other is climate change.”
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is most obviously Daniels' attempt at trying to encapsulate the first part, but you can sense the latter lurking in the background as well. Of course, in Daniels' language, if climate dread is an inspiration, it takes on a decidedly different look: in Jobu's (Stephanie Hsu) evil plan, everything bagel-void threatens to swallow the multiverse and destroy us all. “This project came out of our own anxieties about living in the modern world, and I think everyone I know is trying to capture that,” Kwan says.
The feeling was already there when they were writing it in 2016, before the Trump Era and the pandemic. “We already felt overwhelmed. And, and as we were writing it, we were like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening? It's getting worse—how could it possibly get worse than this?’” Kwan says. “Everyone is trying to process that feeling, the backdrop of doom, the backdrop of chaos.”
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