Everything Everywhere All At Once Editor Shares Multiverse Secrets

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a triumph of creativity, as well as a masterclass in keeping ambitious ideas grounded and emotionally impactful. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as "Daniels"), Everything Everywhere All At Once quickly became production company A24's highest-grossing film after its release in April 2022. Not only does the film feature top-notch writing and directing, but it is a success story on behalf of every department, with big swings evident in costumes, sound, music, and more.

Given that the Daniels have discussed how their initial ideas for Everything Everywhere All At Once revolved around the concept of there simply being too much - what if there are too many wants, too many goals, etc. - the fact that they succeeded in creating a film so emotionally powerful and resonant deserves recognition. The success of the end product is also highly dependent on the film having a good edit, for which credit is due to editor Paul Rogers. Rogers has collaborated with the Daniels before during seminal moments in their career such as their work on the "Turn Down for What" music video, but this was by far the biggest project the group had tackled together. Rogers used Adobe Premiere Pro and Frame.io among other tools to edit the film.

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Paul Rogers spoke with Screen Rant about working with the Daniels, scenes left on the cutting room floor, and using Adobe Premiere Pro.

Paul Rogers on Everything Everywhere All At Once

Screen Rant: You had worked with the Daniels on "Turn Down for What" and some early shorts, but then you didn't do Swiss Army Man. How was it to reunite with them on what was probably their biggest project to date?

Paul Rogers: It was exciting, and intimidating, and scary, and wonderful. There's always that mix when you take on an ambitious project, especially one that means a lot to your friends. There's a responsibility that you feel to not mess it up.

For Swiss Army Man, I had never cut a feature at that point. I had cut feature [documentaries]. The editor they used, Matt Hannam, had cut a ton of features. He's super talented, and ended up becoming a good friend of mine, and give me a lot of great advice for this movie. They went through it on that movie; it was their first feature, and they were working out the kinks of how to collaboratively direct and edit this insanely ambitious first film. I got to benefit a little bit from the therapy that they went through with Matt on the first movie, and all the stuff that they worked out and learned.

Once we got into the edit of this film, it wasn't always easy, but it was always really respectful. The communication was always very open, and honest, and direct, so any fears I had about working with two close friends on something intense with a lot of pressure, and [a lot of] ways it could have gone wrong, flew out the window pretty quickly. It was also just a lot of fun.

I did have these fantasies that we would all be in the room together for half a year, eating great food and going out for drinks afterwards; obviously, we cut this in the middle of the lockdown, [so] none of that happened. We were all on Zoom, just trying to make it through each day. My wife was still working, so mornings into the early afternoon, I was just taking care of my little boy, and then I would work [from] afternoon into late evening. I was on an iMac in my living room because I didn't have a home office, so it was just a very different experience than what I pictured.

How close was your collaboration on the edit? Were you screen-sharing with them and getting really specific?

Paul Rogers: Yeah, it's very close. And we also we used Productions, which is a feature of Premiere Pro, where you can share [your projects], and I can jump into their project while they're working. We were all synced up from our different homes; all of our hard drives are synced in real time. The way that I've always worked with them is super collaborative. We jump in and out of each other's projects. We share things. They edit on stuff, and I take it, and put ideas down, and give it back, they'll do more ideas and give it back, and that's the gist of it.

There is so much creativity in editing. Outside of shaping the film as a whole, are there moments that you can point to that came alive because of very deliberate editing choices?

Paul Rogers: There's definitely things that changed. The most drastic example is a scene where Jobu confronts Evelyn in the hallway, where everyone realizes that her daughter is Jobu. Jobu comes out with a pig and the Elvis outfit. After she kills all those security guards and policemen, she gets up, and in the script and the shoot, there's this long conversation as she stalks down the hallway. Jamie Lee Curtis' character Deirdre is there, and they get into it, and Jobu and Evelyn start making fun of Deirdre, and she starts crying and runs away. It's this big, long, really funny scene. Jobu talks about all the things she's had sex with, and all the other multiverses, and freaks her mom out. It was great on paper, [and] it's really fun to watch the raw footage, but in the movie, it just became this kind of convoluted mess of a scene.

This was one of those scenes that kept me up at night. I'd just be sitting in the shower with my head in my hands, like, "How are we going to figure out a way to make the scene make sense in the movie?" Eventually, we just came up with this idea of, "What if we just simplified it, and it was just the predator stalking their prey?" So, we digitally removed Jamie Lee Curtis's character, and we added a couple of ADR lines, and we focused on the music and made it where Jobu could control the music. Stephanie Hsu was doing these little hand gestures in her performance, and in the edit, I was like, "Wouldn't that be cool, if she was controlling with coming over the PA system? Piping things in from other universes and radio stations?" So, that kind of became the device that we use to make that scene centralized, but also to give it a purpose, and a meaning, and throw some fun multiverse magic into it.

Was there a lot that was filmed that didn't make it in? It sounds like it.

Paul Rogers: Yeah. The first cut was two hours and forty-five minutes, I think, so we cut around half an hour of movie out of it. Some of the characters who pop up early in the film or the fight scenes popped up again at the end, and they had their stories very cleanly and nicely wrapped up. We realized that our ending was forty-five minutes long, just her trying to get up the stairs at the end to keep Joy from getting into the bagel. I'm probably exaggerating, but it was very long. And [we realized] that people didn't really need to see all the stories wrapped up. They didn't need to see Jenny Slate's character on a Zoom call with her baby at a birthday party.

It was all this stuff that was really cool, and funny, and great in the moment, but when you put it all together, the cup was overflowing. [There were] some deleted scenes. There was a universe called Spaghetti Baby Noodle Boy; that whole universe we just excised from the film. It's all on the deleted scenes, so if you get a Blu-Ray or something - or I think on Apple TV - you can watch all these things.

The whole film has such a pace and rhythm to it. Were there some scenes or sequences that were particularly difficult to edit?

Paul Rogers: I guess my philosophy, personally, was, "Let's push it until we break it, and then start working backwards from there." So, the first cut was just loud, and fast, and insane, and overly flashy and completely overwhelming in a bad way. Then, we just started pulling back, finding our moments of quiet, finding the shots that weren't connecting in these longer montages, and really trying to recenter the story on the family.

[I was] actually focusing more time and energy, editorially, on the family moments than the visual experimentation that we were doing. That stuff was almost like the dessert that we would get to do once we had cracked the more emotional scenes, because that stuff doesn't require as much from you, creatively. It's fun work to put together the crazy montages, and sound design, and different universes. It's the scene work between Michelle Yeoh and Stephanie Hsu; that's the work that I really spent the most time and energy on.

I'm sure this when you all were making this film, you had no idea what was going to happen when it came out. How has it been for you to see how audiences have reacted to the movie?

Paul Rogers: It's been heartening to see that the world is much weirder than we thought it was. I think we thought "This will find its little niche audience, and certain people will love it, and we're making it for them. But to see it be embraced so widely...

I think one of the great things about Dan and Daniel's work is that it normalizes these messy, and silly, and sometimes infantile jokes in service of a bigger point - an actual deep point. What I hope the movie has done, and what Daniels' work in general has always done for me, is allowed people to hold that you can be silly, and you can use that silly childlike part of yourself in order to explore these really hard, deep questions about life, and about trauma, and love, and the universe. You don't have to be a heavy philosopher sitting around sad and mopey in order to address these things. You can do it with a sense of humor, and you can do it with your friends by your side.

It's been really nice to see that, and to hear some of the stories about the bonding that parents and kids have had, [and that] couples have had. The kind of healing that's actually happened as people watch the film. When they described the film to me for the first time, and when I read the script, it was a beautiful piece of art, and I'm just happy that it seems to have connected with even more people than we could have imagined.

About Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everything Everywhere All At Once was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Schienert ("Daniels"), and quickly became production company A24's highest-grossing film ever. The film is an existential, multiverse-spanning tale of generational trauma and healing, and features must-see performances from Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

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Everything Everywhere All At Once is available now for purchase or viewing On Demand.