Everything Everywhere All at Once PART 2: The Opening Sequence

Welcome to Part 2 of my Everything Everywhere All at Once podcast. In Part 1, we talked about how Everything Everywhere All at Once was built, the link between Evelyn’s journey in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the writer’s journey in finding the structure of a screenplay, and the character driven elements that underlie the structure of nearly every screenplay or TV show, regardless of the genre. In today’s episode, we’ll do a detailed breakdown and script analysis of the opening sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once, to show you how this scene lays the groundwork for everything to come in this remarkably ambitious, Academy Award-winning script. As you can see if you take a look at this early draft of Everything Everywhere All, the Daniels did not begin with a perfect understanding of all the elements of the simple character driven drama that would hold together their crazy Kung Fu concept.  What the Daniels began with was a twist on The Matrix, a question about the immigrant experience, some personal experiences with Daniel Kwan’s own immigrant family, a love for Kung Fu movies, the insane desire to tell a Kung Fu movie about empathy, and a curiosity about the multiverse and the idea that there might be multiple universes happening at the same time. And by pushing on all those ideas, they eventually figured out the character driven drama that would tie it all together, and created the incredible introductory scene that we are about to watch and analyze together. I'm going to show you how all the magic of Everything Everywhere All at Once actually builds out of the simple twelve minute scene that begins the movie.This is the very first sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once.We begin with this image in the mirror of this family all together. It's doubtful whether a scene ever actually existed in these characters’ lives, but what we know is that this is Evelyn's dream of what her family was supposed to be, if she had been living the best version of herself.  What's important to understand is this is not the family that we end up with at the end.  Just like your screenplay is not going to be the vision that you have at the beginning, this image is the false belief driving Evelyn of what it is supposed to be, rather than the acceptance of what it is that she (and we) will arrive at by the end of the movie. We push in, and suddenly that mirror is blank.  If you look at the early draft above, you won’t see this image in it, because the Daniels didn’t know this image yet. This image is something they found, when they realized that we need to know what Evelyn's vision was, so that we can understand what’s been lost.  What follows is the movie in a microcosm. We push in through that mirror and we find Evelyn at– to speak metaphorically– her “writer’s desk,” completely overwhelmed.  Waymond’s face is reflected in the mirror behind her, but Evelyn doesn’t see it, because she is buried in her paperwork– all those piles of different possibilities of what her life could have been or was supposed to be.  Behind her, on the security camera, there are all these different views of the room. All these different camera angles, these fractured little universes.  As we push in, you may also notice the googly eyes on the laundry, but that’s just a sweet little detail. Really, we're seeing an overwhelming room, one that already has everything happening, everywhere, all at once. Waymond’s first action in Everything Everywhere All at Once  is to grab the piece of paper from his wife. He is trying to get her out of her head, to get her to simply pay attention to him for a moment. And what Evelyn says to Waymond is what every writer probably thinks when I t...