Everything Everywhere All At Once: Evelyn’s Journey is the Screenwriter’s Journey

Everything Everywhere All At Once: Evelyn’s Journey is the Screenwriter’s Journey Pt.1 In this episode, I'm going to try to do the impossible, and help you understand how the screenplay Everything Everywhere All at Once was built. The truth is, to fully break down the structure of Everything Everywhere All at Once would take me a full day. In fact, it did! Back when the movie first came out, I taught a Master Class during which I broke down the full structure of the movie over an entire Sunday.  I’m not going to try to do that in this podcast. What we're going to do today, in Part 1 of this podcast, is compress some of the incredibly complicated ideas in this film into some useful concepts that you can use as you're trying to do what’s probably the hardest thing for all screenwriters: to balance the art, the craft, and the business of screenwriting as you find your way through the multiverse of possibilities for your own writing.  Then, in Part 2, we’ll do a detailed breakdown of the opening sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once and look at the ways it sets up everything to come in this remarkably ambitious, Academy Award-winning script. Building a screenplay, even one far less ambitious than Everything Everything Everywhere All at Once, can feel overwhelming. We often feel caught, as writers, between three competing challenges: what we want the screenplay to be, what we believe the market is telling us a screenplay needs to be, and how to develop the craft we need to solve the screenplay and make it do those two other things at once.  There are so many possibilities for who the characters could be, for what could happen. We are adrift in a sea of good and terrible ideas. As writers, we are actually experiencing everything, everywhere, all at once: every possibility in the multiverse, all at the same time.  We feel overwhelmed, just like Evelyn, the main character of Everything Everywhere All at Once, feels sitting at her desk covered with papers.  And when we feel overwhelmed, we tend to fall back onto some tropes that we probably know aren't true, but seem easier and safer than the discomfort of the unknown.  We convince ourselves to let go of our own dreams for the project, often both the art and the craft of writing our dream script, and instead just try to focus on the business side: What should I do? What should I write? What is selling right now? What is hot? We lie to ourselves, looking for a formula that's going to solve the script for us. Then we ask that formula (or that guru) “Tell me what happens in this act!”  We're looking for a simple model to solve the problem of structure for us, because like Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, we feel overwhelmed. And like Evelyn, we are finding all the wrong answers, because our real problem usually stems from not listening to our characters.  When we get overwhelmed, instead of listening to our characters, instead of listening to that simple voice within ourselves, just like Evelyn, we get distracted by the chatter.  Instead of seeing the beauty that is in front of us, we get distracted by what we, or our writing, or our characters, are supposed to be.  There is a beautiful line, in Everything Everywhere all at Once. It's really the seminal line of the movie. Joy says to Evelyn, “You could be anything, anywhere. Why not go somewhere your daughter is more than just this? Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.” And Evelyn responds with maybe one of the most beautiful lines in cinema: “Then I will cherish these few specks of time.”  What I'd like to suggest to you is that your job as a screenwriter is to cherish these few specks of time when your movie makes sense, and to recognize,