193 | Daniels on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You may know from listening to Mindscape, in general, or my AMAs in particular, or reading any of my books, there's something out there called the multiverse. Well, what I would say is that there's an idea out there called the multiverse. We don't know for absolute certainty whether or not there actually is a multiverse out there. In fact, there are different kinds of multiverse, which I would assign different credences to taking seriously. There's a quantum mechanical kind of multiverse, which I take very seriously. There is a cosmological kind of multiverse where literally just very, very far away, there's different pockets of space time where things behave differently, that I'm indifferent about. Maybe it's there, maybe it's not. There's good reasons to take it seriously, but we honestly just don't know. There's also more philosophical kinds of multiverse. The philosopher, David Lewis, famously advocated modal realism, the belief that every possible version of the universe is actually real in some sense, and the question of figuring out which universe we live in is just locating ourselves in the space of all possible worlds...

0:01:08.8 SC: You may also have noticed that the idea of the multiverse has moved beyond science and philosophy to narrative, to movies, TV shows, books, things like that. This is not a completely new move. Fiction writers have used the notion of a multiverse as a device for decades now, but it's gaining in popularity a little bit. Back when we had Scott Derrickson as a guest here on Mindscape, he had just come off directing Doctor Strange, the Marvel movie.

0:01:37.1 SC: The new sequel, it will be Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which follows up on the most recent Spider-Man movie, which also investigated the multiverse idea. So it's out there, okay. We're using it. There's a new movie, which I very much encourage you to see, called Everything Everywhere All at Once, that just came out as I'm speaking this in mid-April 2022, and it's by Daniels. Daniels is the collective name for a writing directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and they've made this movie starring Michelle Yeoh which has a multiverse concept in it. I'm not gonna give away too much, don't worry about spoilers here. But they use the multiverse in a very interesting way because, look, as I know from talking about the many worlds of quantum mechanics, which is one version of the multiverse, you can talk about the Schrodinger equation and decoherence all you want, what people really latch on to is the possibility that there are other versions of yourself out there, real people who are experiencing slightly different or very different realities in some way. It is undeniable that that's a concept that grabs us, that really makes us think about this. Some people contemplate it and reject it as terrible and dumb and ontologically extravagant, others are sort of charmed by the romance of it all. Some of us just stick with the equations and try to make sense of them as a physical theory, but all of us are thinking about these ideas.

0:03:08.3 SC: So in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the idea is that Evelyn, who is played by Michelle Yeoh, a very famous, wonderful, just about ideal actor for this role, starts out in... Not in trouble. Well, I guess, in trouble is okay. But, anyway, her life is not going great. There's family issues, there are issues of paying the taxes on her laundromat that she and her husband owned. There's just issues of putting food on the table and so forth. And, honestly, owning a laundromat isn't that sexy or exciting, so it's a life that is a little bit gloomy and struggling, and many of us can, in different ways, identify with that kind of struggle when life doesn't go well. It's exaggerated for cinematic purposes, but we all have some of that in our real lives. And then the multiverse comes in in literally the way that there's different versions of the universe, and all of them have a different version of Evelyn. And the gimmick, which, again, I'm not spoiling anything, is that she learns how to take advantage of skills that she, or versions of herself, have picked up in other versions of the universe. And there's sort of different parts of the universe. The multiverse are fighting against each other and she has to do battle, and that's all I'm gonna tell you about it.

0:04:25.0 SC: But the great thing about this particular version of the multiverse is that it's not just, "Ooh, look, there's a lot of weird things out there," but it makes us reflect on the real world fact that there are roads not taken, that there are things we could have done, decisions we could have made where things would have turned out differently. We would have become different people. And so this is where, for me personally, the use of way-out scientific philosophical concepts is at its best in telling a story, making movie when it's making us think about the real world, okay. It's not just amazing us with how things would have been very different if the world had been a different kind of world, it's making us think about the world we actually live in. 'Cause we all have regrets or wonder about how things could have been different had we done things differently. So both Daniels are really, really thoughtful people about everything from the philosophy and science of the multiverse to the techniques of writing and making a movie. The movie has been getting rave reviews from people all over. It's not just for us multiverse aficionados, it's something for everyone.

0:05:33.5 SC: I encourage you to go see it. And I think you're gonna like this conversation 'cause we get into a lot of things that you don't normally get to talk about with filmmakers. So it's a different perspective, and I think it sort of resonated really, really well. Occasional reminders that we have a web page at preposterousuniverse.com/podcast with show notes, links, full transcripts of every episode completely searchable, and there's also a Mindscape Patreon page. You had a patreon.com/seanmcarroll where you can support the podcast, get ad free versions, suggest questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes, and get a feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded Mindscapers. So, again, you can do that if you want, you don't have to. It's great if you're listening to Mindscape whatever way it is. Tell your friends. We want everyone in the world listening to Mindscape, everyone in the multiverse, for that matter, even if I do not get donations from elsewhere in the multiverse. At least I haven't figured out a way to do that. Maybe I should start thinking about that. And with that rather down to earth thought, let's go.

[music]

0:06:36.7 SC: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:06:48.8 Daniel Scheinert: Hello, good morning.

0:06:50.2 Daniel Kwan: Thank you for having us.

0:06:53.9 SC: [chuckle] So you have a movie that's just come out, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and there's a lot of things that happened, but let me just start with the obvious thing that where you begin is very mundane. The concerns of the movie right from the start are food, family, laundry, taxes. These are concerns that we all have. So maybe this is just storytelling 101 and it's the obvious thing to do, but a little bit of insight into why you chose to be quite that grounded in things that we could all agree on right from the start knowing that you're gonna go some crazy places.

0:07:24.3 DK: Yeah. It's a great question. I think a lot of people expect multiverse movies to exist in very high concept, high superhero-type genres, and we wanted to make sure that ours started in the opposite, just 'cause we knew how wild the rest of the film was gonna be, and how much we were going to ask the audience to come along for this ride and suspend their disbelief. And so with this movie, we were like, "Let's spend a decent amount of time at the beginning just grounding our characters in a very real world that feels relatable and also, as many people have been putting it, mundane, because in the end, we knew we wanted to find a lot of small, beautiful, profound things in that mundane quality.

0:08:12.4 DS: Yeah, we always knew we wanted to juxtapose those things, but it did used to start... We threw a lot of things at the wall. There used to be a different opening scene where she was physics professor doing... Michelle Yeoh is teaching the students about the wave form collapsing.

0:08:28.5 DK: Yeah, the double slope experiment. Yeah, yeah.

0:08:29.9 SC: I'm very sad now. You've made me sad that this is not in the movie. [chuckle]

0:08:33.4 DS: So it's a whole deleted scene. And then as she's showing the wave becomes particle, she's putting dots on the chalkboard, and then her students started giggling. And she's like, "Why are they giggling?" She turns around and all of the dots have formed a perfect penis...

[laughter]

0:08:49.4 DS: And then she just... And then she mutters, "Oh no, she's here." And then Jobu walks in, and it was a whole matrix sci-fi intro, but...

0:09:01.5 SC: It's so embarrassing when that happens in class.

0:09:03.2 DK: I'm sorry. One more time?

0:09:04.5 SC: I said it's so embarrassing when that happens in class, when you're lecturing on the double slope experiment.

0:09:08.0 DK: Oh, yes, I'm sure... [chuckle]

0:09:11.0 DS: Oh, is that common?

0:09:12.6 SC: Hard to bring the class' attention back to the equations once that happens.

0:09:15.3 DK: Exactly, exactly.

0:09:16.5 SC: Well, that's why I was asking the question because a superhero movie, whatever, people love these obviously, but it's not that we identify with the characters, it's that we aspire... We wish we could fly or people approve or whatever. Here, it's much more like these are our problems as well, right?

0:09:35.7 DS: Totally. I think some people identify with megalomaniac White men...

[laughter]

0:09:41.8 DS: And those people have had plenty of movies about them. It's mostly about a guy who's got a good intentions but is a little too egotistical, and we're like, "We'll make our protagonist a little different."

0:09:55.5 SC: A little bit different.

0:09:57.0 DK: Are you just talking about us now, just 'cause that's what [0:09:57.1] ____ for the most part.

0:09:58.5 SC: I don't wanna say anything. [chuckle]

0:09:58.6 DS: But that's what the first seven Marvel movies were, and it's so fun that they're starting to change it up, but it was like, "What's Thor's problem? Too confident. What's Doctor Strange's problem? Too confident. What's Captain America's problem? He's a confident dude."

[laughter]

0:10:13.1 SC: Well, I was... Look, I love Doctor Strange, and my friend, Scott Derrickson, who also was a previous podcast guest, directed Doctor Strange. He was my guy growing up in the comics, but I always questioned this idea that he was somehow made humble. He was arrogant then he was humbled. He became the sorcerer supreme, that's not exactly a humbling experience. That's a wish fulfillment experience.

0:10:38.0 DK: Totally, yeah.

0:10:39.7 SC: But then, okay, you bring... Then things do go crazy. It's not mostly a movie about paying your taxes on the laundromat. So there's a lot of places... A lot of movies you could make about paying your taxes in the laundromat, but you brought in the multiverse, some crazy ideas inspired by science fiction. Why is that a good place to go if you do want to tell a more or less relatable story?

0:11:03.1 DS: Yeah. We reverse engineered it, and we had this concept of a multiverse story where you tap into lives you could have led and borrow their skills, because...

0:11:18.4 DK: I know we just started, but two sides of that coin that's really interesting to us is, first, you get some powers, which is great for a crowd-pleasing action movie. But then on the flip side, every time you tap into a power, the double-edged sword is you suddenly have an existential crisis because you realize how good your life could have been, and that felt like a really fun device to throw our character into.

0:11:42.2 DS: Yeah. So then we talked about what character would be the most interesting one to put through the wringer, and the more we talked the more we got excited about being someone who's older, someone who's maybe our parents' generation, who's had more life lived, so maybe more regrets. And then we started talking about our parents and started talking about the immigrant experience, 'cause Dan's parents immigrated, and that was even more interesting, even more kind of color to the past lives... The alternate lives they could have led. And then, yeah, the more mundane, the better where we are like, "Oh, if it's someone who really doesn't feel good about their life right now, then this is gonna be extra existential for them."

0:12:35.3 DK: But then ultimately extra rewarding for them by the end.

0:12:36.9 DS: Right, and then the goal became to make a big flashy movie that ultimately is about how beautiful and wonderful that normal life was all along. So we wanted to make that challenge, which we knew early on was the challenge, not too easy and be like, "No, no, no, we're gonna make you love the taxes universe. By the end, you're gonna be like, "I wanna stay right here in taxes.""

0:13:00.7 SC: In my taxes, yeah, get them right. I just wanna pause for a second to give kudos to the amazing acting in the film, Michelle Yeoh, most obviously. She was brilliant in this role.

0:13:13.1 DS: Thank you. Yeah, we love taking credit, but we don't deserve any credit. She just killed it. She just came in and was so prepared and passionate and believed in the movie. Yeah.

0:13:26.5 SC: And I did find online that there are a couple of interesting alternate universes where different people were playing the main character in this movie. [chuckle] Right?

0:13:35.6 DS: Yeah. The only two we ever tossed around were... Very early on, we were like, "Who are our favorite Chinese actors?" And we were like, "What if we could get Jackie Chan and/or Michelle Yeoh in our movie?" So early on, we were talking about them. And then when we weren't sure about Michelle Yeoh, our producers were like, "Who could you go to if she's busy?"

0:14:01.8 DK: And we couldn't think of anyone, 'cause we basically accidentally wrote ourselves into a corner. And we're like, "This movie lives or dies off of Michelle Yeoh," which was a terrifying realization because we had been working on the movie for a couple of years at that point. But then almost as a last ditch effort, my brain went back and then was like, "Well, you know, in some ways this character was inspired by my mom, maybe we could just cut the budget down to 10% of the original budget... "

0:14:28.1 DS: And then the whole movie is like a prank film where these directors drag... Literally drag their mom into their movie and surround them with pedigreed actors, and it would be more like a Jackass-style meta film, and nobody liked that idea. We never pitched it to his mom. The producers were like, "That's not a real idea. Don't... " [chuckle]

0:14:52.7 SC: Well, the reason I wanted to bring this up because alternative casting is always a weird thing. We live with what the world we got and it worked out really in not only Michelle Yeoh, but everyone in the movie is a fantastic actor. But the movie is, like you just said, it's about thinking about all the roads not taken. That's why it's a really, to me, a cool use of the multiverse idea, because it's not just other worlds where weird things are happening, but other worlds where you make different choices. It's very, very directly tied to the real world, the fact that we always carry around with us these questions about how things would have gone differently had we done things a little bit differently at crucial moments in our past.

0:15:30.2 DS: Totally.

0:15:31.5 DK: Yeah. I think a lot of people keep asking us this question of why the multiverse... Why is it having a moment right now, and I think a lot of people can relate to it, because there's never been a time where our brains have been allowed to explore all those paths, all the potential things that our lives could have been and all the potential ways our lives can still go. If I wanted to, I could pack my bags and move to another city and have a completely different life. And that wasn't the case 100 years ago, and I think...

0:16:03.8 DS: Or what's extra different is now you can go on Google Maps... You can go on Zillow, look at real estate in any city in the world. You can go on Instagram, figure out what it would be like to live in any city, figure out what all your friends are doing.

0:16:16.6 DK: There's even like they talk about dating app tourism, where you literally can just change your location on your phone and suddenly you can see who is single in Malaysia or who is single in Brooklyn. And I know some people who've actually done that and then actually flew to the location just to meet one person. And so our producer...

0:16:37.2 DS: Maybe did that...

[laughter]

0:16:37.3 DS: And his fiancee.

0:16:39.0 DK: We're calling him out on the podcast. Yeah, and now they're gonna get married, but...

0:16:44.5 DS: He didn't go to Malaysia for a mail order bride.

0:16:47.3 DK: No, no, no.

0:16:47.4 DS: He went to New York where he had an apartment...

0:16:48.9 DK: It was Brooklyn. Yeah, exactly. But the whole idea is that I think this movie is resonating with people, and the multiverse in particular resonating with people, because we are living in the existence that already feels like the multiverse, and that's why we wrote this movie.

0:17:04.3 SC: That's a really cool point. Because as a physicist, I think of the multiverse as being something that we talk about is maybe scientifically real in a different sense than it would be in this movie. But I had never thought about the fact that in some sense, we are closer to the multiverse now in the modern world because the space of possibilities for our lives is bigger than if you grew up as a peasant in the 14th century or something like that.

0:17:27.0 DK: Yeah. It goes back to... I don't know if you've read this, or maybe you can even prove me wrong if my research was incorrect, but when we were reading about everything about the multiverse in preparation for writing this movie, one of the things I found really interesting was one of the earliest recordings of the word multiverse being used in the English language actually had nothing to do with science. It had to do with morality and theology. It was actually written by a Theologist who was lamenting the fact that he believed that there was one moral universe center to everything which was God. But then when he looked around at the secular world, he was confused by the plurality of moralities and the moral multiverse that made him struggle every day. And so that was where he... That's where the word multiverse came from, which is really interesting because it's moved so far from there, but I feel that's where we're living right now. We're living in a place where the internet has created so many moral bubbles and different centers of universes, and what's happening now is we're watching them collide and we're all terrified to see what's gonna happen next. But, to me, I think that's one of the more interesting things I came across while we were reading.

0:18:50.0 SC: Well, and am I correct to... Well, let me just ask it as a question rather than just saying statements. Did scientific ideas or philosophic ideas about the multiverse inspire you at all, or did you sort of hear them and go, "Huh," and just run with it yourself, or did you... I think you alluded to reading about multiverse ideas.

0:19:08.3 DS: Totally. No, yeah, that was the other thing I was just thinking is, we're both really fascinated by science, but we only have enough vocabulary to understand pop science books.

0:19:25.3 DK: Yeah, we're really big into interdisciplinary studies, so it's about everything combining. Science is obviously a big part of that.

0:19:30.6 DS: And I always find... I love a big swing of a take on science and philosophy or the state of the world, and when it makes me start feeling emotional or sends me on a philosophical tangent, and so reading about huge ideas of physics, like reading Stephen Hawking's or reading stuff about evolution and the like is a huge source of inspiration for us, 'cause we'll come to each other and get, "Whoa, what if? How did that make you feel when you read that article about the... What's it called? The brain simulation? What if it's more likely... "

0:20:11.9 SC: The simulation argument, right.

0:20:13.3 DS: The brain would just form and...

0:20:16.1 DK: Oh, the Boltzmann brain?

0:20:17.1 DS: The Boltzmann brain, right. And we're like... We'll come to each other and be like, "What a crazy article," and it... And then we're off to the races tossing around how that could affect a story.

0:20:30.0 DK: And so in this particular case, we read a lot about multiverse from every angle, 'cause the fun thing about the multiverse is almost every single medium and every single field of study has its own way into it, 'cause there's the quantum mechanics version of it, which is all about probabilities and quantum decisions and things like that. But then if you go to cosmology, we're talking about the infinite scale of an expanding universe that contains a multiverse even within itself. But the way I got into it was actually through linguistics, oddly enough. I came across this idea of modal realism about 10 years ago, and I was just so fascinated by this idea of taking the modality of language and treating every version and every variation as real, as almost as a thought experiment and just went down a rabbit hole down that direction. But mathematics has its own version of the multiverse. I would argue Joseph Campbell talking about the many faces of God is another version of just talking about infinity and again talking about the multiverse. And so to me, the entry point is more, like we're saying, is more interdisciplinary. It's about this bigger picture idea of us looking at bigness, at scale, and trying to squeeze that into a sci-fi action movie was really fun.

0:21:54.7 SC: Well, this is great because much of what you just said, I could easily have said or have said before. I've written a lot about Boltzmann brains and about the quantum mechanical multiverse. The idea of modal realism is still one that even I come up a little bit short. This is usually associated with David Lewis, a famous philosopher, who thinks that literally every possible world is equally real and we just happen to live in the one that we find ourselves in. And I think that's a step too far for me, but maybe I'm just too down to earth. I don't know. [chuckle]

0:22:27.0 DK: Oh, totally. To me, the fun thing about all this stuff is that it reminds me... Obviously, it's all rooted in some truth, but it still reminds me of the way that our ancestors all interpreted certain truths in different directions, like the way that they would... The ancient Greeks would watch a lightning strike and paint a picture of a god throwing lightning in anger or whatever, or the fact that there was probably a great flood thousands of years ago and every single civilization at the time came up with their own version of a story, just describing that flood and explaining that flood. And I feel like all of these different things, whether it's modal realism or quantum mechanics or whatever, we're all just pointing at the same thing and we're trying to understand it. And so, to me, I believe none of it, and I also believe all of it. It's a very strange thing where... It's the closest thing I have to a spirituality or to this idea of a faith, because I will never be able to fully understand any of it. And so you saying modal realism doesn't make sense is totally fair.

[chuckle]

0:23:30.2 DK: To me, it's just fascinating because it's another tool for pointing at the same thing.

0:23:34.7 SC: Sure, yeah. I will make one point about quantum mechanics, which I try... Because I know that I have... My friends and audience listeners out here who will care about this, which is just that I really do believe that in my body, 5000 times a second, there is a nuclear decay, there's a little bit of radio activity, and there's a universe in which that nucleus decayed and one in which it didn't. So I believe that there's many, many, many copies of me being made all the time. I actually do believe this. But I also don't... I insist that the versions of me in the other universes are not me. They're like... They share a past with me, but it's like an identical twin. Once we split apart, we're two different people going our own ways. We obviously have a lot in common, but it's not like things that happen to that person affect me in any way. That's the one thing that I want to make clear about my view of the multiverse, and it's perfectly okay...

0:24:28.0 DS: I love it.

0:24:28.4 SC: If in the film that's not how it is.

0:24:30.4 DS: I feel like sometimes in interviews, people have asked us like, "What's interesting about the multiverse," and they're coming at it from this pop culture perspective. And I wish I was as articulate as you, 'cause part of me wants to be like, "Well, a lot of very smart people for very valid reasons think it's real. It's not just a comic book thing, guys." It's the best explanation we have for these tiny physics observations and...

0:25:03.7 DK: But then it goes both ways...

0:25:05.8 DS: There's a primary good chance there's an infinite number of us, and we are living the life of a random one.

0:25:12.4 SC: One of them.

0:25:14.6 DS: And that's mind-blowing to me and that...

0:25:17.2 SC: It should be.

0:25:17.5 DS: And that was a huge inspiration for this movie, to just be like, "I don't know how that makes me feel and I don't know what to do about it, but I am excited to stare at it for a few years and see if I can tell a story through that mind, that just absurd but maybe real premise."

0:25:41.7 DK: Which is why we push... For those who have seen it, you know we push our character to the cognitive limits and our audience as well, because we're trying to basically touch upon what it really feels like when we treat that as real, whatever you just said, this refreshing of our bodies. How terrifying. How beautiful. [chuckle]

0:26:04.5 DS: Yeah. But how beautiful. It's like, "Oh, it's a miracle that I'm able to reach over and pick up this object right now... "

0:26:13.4 SC: [chuckle] Yeah, I agree.

0:26:17.1 DS: "And observe just one thing."

0:26:18.8 SC: And, as you alluded to before, in all this infinity of possible futures that my past self had, the one that you're focusing on in the movie for Michelle Yeoh's character is the one in which she's the worst. She came out the worst of all of that. And it's still not so bad. That's the little bit of hopefulness in there, right?

0:26:38.2 DS: Yes.

0:26:38.6 DK: Totally, yeah. And it's almost... That's almost from a place of judgment from the alpha universe, which is sort of... If there are villains in this movie, it's probably them. And so even though they say that, I don't think we actually believe it, and I don't think by the end, the character doesn't believe that, obviously, but in that moment is the worst thing that she can hear, and she takes it to heart because I think a lot of people feel that way. I think a lot of people, no matter who you are or where you are in the world, they have this feeling that maybe maybe this is the worst version of me. How did I screw up so many things to get to this point. And so I think a lot of people laugh at that moment in the movie when the character says that, but then I've also heard people say that this actually made them tear up...

0:27:26.6 SC: It's very touching, yeah.

0:27:26.9 DK: Because they felt so targeted almost it's like the film was speaking to them. And I love that because I think if it was speaking to them in that moment, then I think by the end of the film, hopefully, it really pulls them out of that and makes them believe in the future possibilities. If we are constantly fracturing out into infinite number of versions of ourselves every few milliseconds, like you're saying, that also means we are getting resets every moment. Every moment is a new possibility that we get to choose, which is really, I don't know, if it's really thrilling to think about that.

0:28:01.3 SC: Let me push on that a little bit. This is a totally unfair set of questions to ask, but one pushback I get when I talk about the quantum mechanical universe is that it makes life meaningless. If everything happens, then who cares about what choices I make 'cause there's some other universe in which I made other choices. I'd try to argue that not all universes are created equal. This is a feature of the quantum version of things where there's sort of...

0:28:23.5 DS: Interesting.

0:28:23.7 SC: More of you in some versions of the universe than there are in other ones. But, of course, you get to cheat in the movie 'cause you get to access all the universes at once. But what is your stance toward this sort of meaningfulness if all of these infinite number of things are happening?

0:28:38.4 DS: Yeah. I think that we went into the project unsure what our stance was, and that was... A lot of times that's what attracts us to a project is that, "Oh, we're gonna chew on a big scary question for a while, and... "

0:28:56.8 DK: Because you're right, the multiverse is actually anti-narrative in that way, where if you have a character make a decision, and you know in the back your head that the other decision was also just as valid and just as realized then nothing matters, because in narrative, the character is only built off of their decisions.

0:29:14.0 DS: Which then in real life is like, yeah, so disempowering, or can be so disempowering.

0:29:19.3 DK: And so we ask ourselves, can we make a multiverse movie where we lean into that and say, "I'm gonna make you not care... I'm gonna make the character not care. I'm gonna make the audience not care, and basically stare at the meaninglessness of all of their decisions, and see if we could pull ourselves out of that because we don't believe that." I think we needed to convince ourselves that even if we are just one tiny speck in a sea of infinite other versions of ourselves that there's something still worth holding on to in this moment.

0:29:48.5 DS: So, yeah, the answer we stumbled upon... So we figured it out, is that...

0:29:54.3 SC: This could be a very valuable podcast.

0:30:00.0 DS: Or the answer we used to get ourselves out of this impossible project and so we could actually release it, was that too much nihilism is a bad thing but a little bit is not so bad, and that a lot of people are so convinced they're right, kinda like Evelyn, our main character, that they're making themselves miserable, they're making the world around them maybe not a better place, and that there's something freeing about that scary concept of this universe is a random one. And we feel that most people, if they took a step back and stared at that scary question, and then they ask themselves, "Do I wanna be a nice person or a mean person?", the answer just intuitively is a nice one. I guess I wanna do good in the world. I guess I wanna spend time with the people I love. Maybe I'll quit screaming online at people I hate and bake some cookies for my neighbor if I have a little existential crisis, a little healthy one.

0:31:17.9 DK: Yeah. I don't know how deep we wanna go down the road of morality or just turning this into a morality tale, but... 'Cause I was raised very religious Evangelical, almost fundamentalist Christian. And so now I'm very allergic to objective morality or any way of talking about those kind of things in the objective sense is very scary to me, but I am fascinated about the fact that... For so long, the golden rule was this very strong center to humanity. The idea of treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated has been such a big part of human morality, and I'm watching that breakdown. And I think a big reason why is because the definition of neighbor has just been stretched thin. I think that was really useful back when we had communities of a few hundred people, even a few thousand people, but now when the community and the neighbors are literally in the billions, there's no way for that rule to actually hold true anymore.

0:32:28.4 DK: And so to me, what Sean is talking about nihilism allowing us to say nothing matters throughout everything for a moment, just hit the reset button so we can take a step back and find a new center or a new... A new version of morality 'cause I think we constantly have to be updating those kinds of things as the world changes. And I think what we discovered on this movie and is being echoed in a lot of art that's being made right now, it's not just our film, is this idea, it's like the neighbor concept is, I think, is failing us, and so we have to just look at it instead of saying, "How do we wanna treat other people," it's more about the freedom that we need to be giving everyone. And so I think the new morality that I'm chasing is this idea of nothing matters there are no rules, let everyone do whatever they want, as long as you're kind. As long as it's not hurting anyone, and why does it matter? And I feel like that those things will be up to debate forever. Who's every action hurting and to what degree, and we will always be struggling with that, but rather than being trapped in this idea of trying to police our neighbors or think of just the individual neighbor, I like the idea of just freeing us ourselves up to say, "Don't worry about it. Nothing matters. Just be kind."

0:33:50.9 SC: I promise we'll get in a minute to down to earth questions about screenwriting and moviemaking, but I have some still sometimes deep questions I... Deep issues I wanna talk about 'cause this...

0:33:58.7 DS: This is our jam. No, we're excited.

0:34:00.4 DK: Yeah, I'm bored of talking about movies.

0:34:01.6 DS: I'm just gonna chime in and say I still think treating your neighbor how you wanna be treated checks out for me. I don't know. It's like...

0:34:08.9 DK: No, it checks out but it's limited now, I think. I think it's just breaking down a little bit.

0:34:11.2 DK: He treats his neighbors like garbage. I never wanna be like Dan. [chuckle] He's like...

0:34:13.7 SC: He wants to be treated like that. Maybe he wants to be treated like that.

0:34:17.1 DK: Exactly.

0:34:17.3 DS: You throwing dog shit over the fence all the time.

0:34:20.0 DK: Yeah, I just wanna be shamed and...

[laughter]

0:34:25.4 SC: Well, the flipside of this is when you contemplate these gigantic multiverses, not only do you think about, is it meaningful 'cause I could have been other things? The other worry from the existential side of things is I notice that I am very small inside this huge collection of infinitely many things happening. Even if it's not other mes out there, there's certainly a lot of other stuff out there. So I personally... When people bring that up, I lean on a version of the serenity prayer. I'm like, "Well, yeah, but know the wisdom to understand what you can affect and what you can't." And even if it's small, that is what matters to you, right?

0:35:00.6 DK: Yeah. That's great because what you just said is where my brain has been at the past couple of weeks, the serenity prayer, just like knowing when the limits of the individual, and that's probably gonna go into our next movie, I don't know. There's something there that is really profound, and our visual effects supervisor, who's a good friend of ours, who worked on the movie, this morning, he literally just sent me a podcast about that very thing, about the limits... The limitless expectations and limitless imagination that we have versus the limited bodies that contain them, and that tension is so awful. [chuckle] But, yeah.

0:35:44.1 DS: And then I feel like on the other side is like... I've recently been reading more like Alan Watts philosophizing. I haven't read much, but there's something so... It's one of the only philosophers I've read where I'm like, "Oh, this just adds up. This all just like... " It's not super difficult to parse out. I guess that's what he's known for, is being like, "Hey, I'm gonna take Eastern philosophy and make it so Westerners can understand it." But his... He talks about how it can be a really upsetting, dangerously upsetting, thing to really focus on the self as something 100% separate from the rest of the world, and that it's a porous thing. There's your consciousness, is that the self, or there's your body, is that the self? But the food in your stomach is not the self, or maybe... But maybe it's this...

0:36:40.0 DK: It's becoming the self. [chuckle]

0:36:40.8 DS: But maybe it's this...

0:36:42.4 SC: More and more of it, yeah.

0:36:44.0 DS: Porous thing that you control some, but you control it less and less the further it goes out. But also Dan is a part of me. My community is a part of me, and the universe, as huge as it is, is me, and that there's something beautiful about that where it makes you feel less shitty about being so tiny. And then you're like, "I love redwood trees. Good thing those are a part of me 'cause I'm a part of earth." Pretty cool. I think it's a high five to redwood tree and be like, "I look good." This is a good... That's my version of Alan Watts.

[laughter]

0:37:20.0 SC: The great thing about art, in general, is it can take these lofty ideas from science or philosophy or whatever and bring them down. Once you have to make it manifest in the plot and characters of the story, then that's sort of what matters. Philosophers love them, I'm one myself, but you can talk in abstractions all the time and it can often be like an extra step that doesn't get taken to make that real in people's lives. But as filmmakers, you have no choice. You're showing people doing things on the screen.

0:37:52.3 DS: Yeah. I think sometimes we come into a project with some hot takes that we're real confident about, and then when you start having to illustrate them with human beings and trying to make them relatable, it's humbling and you're like, "Oh, there's more nuance to this. The point I was trying to make is changing because I want it to feel real and real people aren't as black and white as my opinion." A bumper sticker is easier and then... So even while working on this project, I think we had to put our shoes... Put ourselves in the shoes of these characters that are our parents' generation, and I think at first we were a little know-it-all-y as we did that, and we were like... And through the process of making it, we're like, "It's not easy to understand your children who are raised on the internet if you weren't raised on the internet. It's not easy to understand your kid's pronouns when your kid's pronouns change. That's hard but it's also still important." But, anyway, yeah, that's what your comment made me think about is like, are bad art is just propaganda where someone's screaming a hot take? But I think like, yeah, the good art, which we aspire to make, requires nuance and you're like, "Oh, whoa, I'm having to get in the weeds here."

0:39:21.6 SC: Well, you're giving me an idea that maybe it should be required in philosophy courses that all the students write a little bit of a screenplay to illustrate the ideas that they're thinking about, really put it into action somehow.

0:39:33.0 DS: I think it's a great idea...

0:39:34.3 DK: That's amazing.

0:39:35.5 DS: And vice versa. I think filmmakers should have to take a philosophy course and figure out what on earth they're trying to say, otherwise they'll just go out and just have someone shoot a bunch of people in the forehead 'cause it looks cool, and they never think about what it means or why they made that movie.

0:39:51.1 DK: All this is reminding me of a... Of something I read once, and I'm gonna attribute it to Kurt Vonnegut, but that might be totally wrong, but...

0:39:57.6 DS: When in doubt...

0:40:00.4 DK: When in doubt...

0:40:00.9 DS: Kurt Vonnegut says...

0:40:03.1 DK: But, basically, it helped me understand our place in the world as storytellers, and basically the idea is, in order for any paradigm shift to happen and for any big idea to come into the zeitgeist, you need three types of people. The first one are the ones who basically come up with the idea and are treated like heretics or just crazy people, insane people. They're the ones who have an idea so wild that the world rejects it. Then the second person you need is someone who basically looks at that crazy person and says... The first one who says, "Oh, wait, there's something here. This person actually is on to something," and they're the ones who validate it. They're the ones who bring them into... Out from the outskirts and into society.

0:40:56.1 DS: The podcasters.

0:40:57.2 DK: Exactly, the podcasters. Exactly, yes, exactly.

0:41:00.7 SC: Thought leaders, we like to say.

0:41:01.5 DK: And then, the final person that is needed is the storyteller. It's the person who can take these very complicated... Just... They are convoluted, complicated, contradictory ideas that the world is not ready for, and turning it into something digestible and something scalable for society. And so, after I heard that, I was like, "Okay, I can do that. That sounds like something worthy of my time. I want to chase after complicated feelings and complicated ideas and try to turn them into something that my mom can understand, or high school kids can understand, or at least begin to understand." And so, I do think whether it's for science or philosophy or any of these fields that the person who translates it to the masses is such an important part of all of this. And I think a lot of storytellers forget that that is one of the many hats we can wear.

0:42:00.5 SC: Yeah. There's plenty of movies out there with the shooting in the head. We look... But I like the idea that a little bit of forced reflection [chuckle] might make them just slightly better...

0:42:07.3 DS: It makes me think about... On the other side of... On the less optimistic side, Dan was... I haven't read this, but you were telling me about, I think Socrates, was really anti-playwrights and anti-storytellers...

0:42:23.1 DK: Maybe Plato. I forget.

0:42:23.3 DS: It might have been Plato. But one of them was like, there's nothing factually reliable about a piece of theater, it's just emotionally effective. And then he's like, if you're trying to create an educated populace who's trying to figure out how the world really works, the worst thing you can do is just throw art at them that's super persuasive and has no scientific method involved at all. And I love sometimes it's such a fun humbling thought to be like, "I'm... " Sometimes I could be translating something important for the masses and other times I could just be throwing misinformation out there that's as detrimental as something the Kremlin is cooking up or...

0:43:13.2 SC: There's a responsibility there. Yeah, one of my recent guests, Peter Dodds, is a statistician data scientist. But he studies the... Uses big data to study stories and narrative, and his motto is, "Never bring statistics to a story fight." It's just not going to be a...

0:43:31.9 DK: Interesting.

0:43:33.0 SC: Fair fight. The stories are always going to win.

0:43:35.6 DS: That's such a bummer, yeah, 'cause... Yeah, I think about that a lot 'cause we started off like... We've been thinking about it a lot in the last few years, that our work early on was just us dancing with the algorithm, like what kind of short film can I make that YouTube will like? And we weren't spending much time thinking about what the difference that might make in the world. And then sometimes you look back and you're like, "Oh, I accidentally spread misinformation." Even if it's just representation in media, you can do the statistics and you're like, "20% of people look like this, but 100% of people in this movie look like this." But also our obsession with serial killer stories makes us think there's more serial killers than ever when homicides are way down, or that there's child predators everywhere, but it's way down. And it's like, "Oh, that's not... " Yeah, I love statistics, and sometimes I have so much guilt about being a filmmaker. [chuckle]

0:44:46.7 SC: Well, as a scientist, as a physicist who lives in Los Angeles, I've consulted on a bunch of films, including a bunch of Marvel films. And I'm very much of the opinion that I'm not gonna object to the laws of physics being broken in the movie. What is the point of that? But there's still a little voice inside of me that sometimes squeals or gets annoyed or something like that. So I'm gonna give you one little... I'm gonna let you know. I'm gonna let you in on the one part of a... Not just your movie, but movies like this that I can't quite stop thinking about just to get your reaction to it, which is just the fact that infinity is very big. [chuckle] When you talk about an infinite number of things that can happen, most of them are either terrible or boring. The vast majority of universes out there don't have us in them at all, and not just like other versions of us. And oftentimes when people portray, like Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide, The Infinite Improbability Drive, they portray other possibilities as cute and fun, and there's an example in your movie where you do this also. And so is it just, "Forget about that. We're telling a story. We're gonna have fun. We're gonna be cute." Or do you contemplate the idea that, in the vastness of infinity, most of it is terrible and boring?

0:46:11.5 DS: Yeah. No, that's my pet peeve too, and it was hard to grapple with, and we threw a lot at the wall.

0:46:22.1 DK: We nod to that a bit. There's a universe where life doesn't... That conditions weren't right to form or whatever, and...

0:46:30.1 DS: And most of them are like this, but then it turns out that there's still talking.

0:46:32.9 SC: You still made it cute. It was still cute. It was my favorite part of the movie but it was still adorable.

0:46:38.1 DS: Oh, great. Thank you.

[laughter]

0:46:40.4 DK: But, yeah, you're right. There is that tension between what is accurate and what is going to help the story. And I think, for the most part, the universes that we picked were the ones that would collide with the protagonist the best, and so a lot of it ended up being the wilder ones, which is interesting.

0:47:00.2 DS: And we can't always...

0:47:01.7 DK: Maybe we'll do a sequel that's like all boring universes. It's just universes that are just like so mundane and nothing's happening. [chuckle]

0:47:08.2 SC: Love it. Yes.

0:47:09.1 DS: Nothing's happening forever is the title of the sequel.

0:47:12.1 SC: Gets the little class to do the score. I think it'd be great.

[laughter]

0:47:16.7 DS: But, yeah, we wanted to start with something extra accessible and cute and be like, "Oh, what if there was one other universe?" And from very early on, we're like, "We're gonna introduce more and more, the audience is gonna get a little stressed out, and then we're gonna pull the rug out and we're gonna introduce a stupid number of universes to point at infinity, almost like an exponential curve of universes for our movie knowing there was no logical way we could film... There would be limitations on what we could film and also what would be interesting at all to look at. But, hopefully, people leave our movie and they can tell that we were pointing at even more universes than what we showed, and that ours is a cute little... Is a cute version of the physics 'cause... And, yeah, I'd love nothing more if people took that germ of a feeling and went off and actually...

0:48:20.0 DK: Did some research.

0:48:21.2 DS: Read into it more 'cause it's fascinating.

0:48:24.9 SC: Well, this brings up a filmmaking point because once you've granted yourself access to the multiverse, you can be as silly as you want, as weird and bizarre and shocking as you want. And I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but I get the feeling that you enjoy that freedom. How much do you have to pull back and say, "No, no, no, that's just too silly or two gross or too off-putting," versus, "Yes, let's shock the audience just a little bit."

0:48:52.6 DS: Totally.

0:48:53.5 DK: Yeah, it's a constant debate within ourselves. I think we're always trying to surprise ourselves, 'cause if we surprise ourselves then we surprise the audience. And what better gift to give an audience...

0:49:03.6 DS: And we get bored easily...

0:49:05.1 DK: Exactly.

0:49:05.5 DS: So we try to make a movie that would not bore us.

0:49:06.6 DK: But then we're always... With every new ingredient we add, we're always doing the calculation in our head of like, "Okay, what percentage of the audience are we gonna lose if we include this element that's too far?"

0:49:18.1 DS: And then how important is it to the main character's journey, and that became the back and forth.

0:49:24.5 DK: But the most shocking thing about all of this is we're used to our movies cutting out a certain... Pushing away certain audience members, 'cause it's too much, it's two weird, it's too aggressively strange, and that's why we're always doing these calculations in our heads. And so we expected certain people to walk out of this movie being like, "That was not for me." But I think something has happened in the time since we started making this movie where the world has just gotten so weird and the world has gotten so chaotic. You read headlines and they feel like a parody website is writing these headlines, but they're real. These are actually happening. Real life feels absurd. And for some reason, audiences are really embracing this movie way more than we ever expected. The fact that we're even on this podcast right now is very funny to me, 'cause this is not what we were imagining when we set out to write this movie. We thought we would find some interesting weirdos like us who would enjoy this and that would be that, and we would be happy with that. But this is proof that something has shifted and the world is ready for art that reflects life, and right now, life is absurd.

0:50:36.5 DS: That was... That ended up being our excuse for keeping a lot of the most shocking stuff in there was that the Internet is shocking, and that, in a lot of ways, this movie's in conversation with how it feels to live online these days. And even our parents' generation is spending more time online than ever and is more aware than ever of just how you can scroll between something that makes you smile to something that disturbs you so quick, and we wanted to not... We wanted to do that justice a little and be like, "Our generation grew up on the internet. There's sexual content... "

0:51:17.6 SC: Exactly, yeah.

0:51:18.0 DS: S1:"Around every corner." And so we're like, "There should be cuss words and sex toys in our movie, even though that's gonna make our moms disappointed with where our film school tuition went." But it felt, yeah, authentic.

0:51:37.1 SC: It's another good thing...

0:51:37.4 DS: But the funny...

0:51:38.6 SC: Sorry. I haven't really thought about this enough, I guess, but this is just the fact that not only do we have this technology now and it's changed our lives in certain ways, but one of the ways is the whiplash, the rapidity with which we can be pushed from one thing into another. I don't know about you, I grew up with 10 channels on the TV and some books than any one book for a long time. But with thousands of channels on TV and literally millions, billions probably, of websites out there, you can get this sort of conceptual emotional feeling of just being... Of just chaos at a very, very rapid rate, and I guess that is partly what's being reflected in the film.

0:52:20.3 DS: Yeah, it's wild. I think people have always loved camping because you kinda calm down, but... I'm not that old, so I can't speak for what camping was like in the 80s, but I feel like when I go somewhere and my phone doesn't work for two days, it is wild how different I feel and how my brain feels. And it's like only when you get off the drugs do you realize just how...

0:52:45.9 DK: How bad it was? [chuckle]

0:52:49.2 DS: Different life feels when you don't take your drugs. It's like that with my phone.

0:52:54.5 DK: But, yeah, the movie... I think the people who really click with this movie are the ones who immediately understand that the whiplash that you're feeling is intentional. I think some people watch it and they aren't ready to let go, and it's a lot. It's almost abusive to the audience this movie sometimes. Of course, we took a lot of care in making sure that the abuse was rewarded, but once you let go and realize the whiplash is intentional, you are ready for this roller coaster ride. And we used a lot of genre, and we used a lot of really quick snappy filmmaking techniques to make it apparent, but it is fun to be sitting in an audience with a bunch of people, and some people are laughing and some people are crying, and some people are screaming all at the same time, watching the same exact scene but reacting in all these different ways, 'cause that's what it feels like on the internet. When someone posts a tragedy online, that's what it's like. Some people are cheering, some people are crying, some people are making jokes. It's a very strange way to exist where you're not allowed to have your own feelings about something anymore, because the world is having it first. [chuckle]

0:53:58.4 SC: [chuckle] Let me just take advantage of having you here because you talked about your goals with a movie like this. How does it come together? Is it always the same, or is this... Is every movie different? Do you start with the characters, the plot device, the images?

0:54:16.9 DS: Yeah, I think we start with throwing a lot up in the air. Even right now as we try to figure out what our next movie might be, we have too many ideas and too many things about the world that are interesting us, and we're always just waiting for a bunch of our favorite ones to coalesce. And it's kinda like this aha moment that's not just one idea. It's that moment where like, "Oh, that project will let me do 10 of the things that interest me right now. I'm not gonna get bored with that," which is the other half of my answer which is like, we like to do things that we won't be sure if it worked and we won't be done until the very end. This was like a... It took us all the way through mixing the movie to refine what we were saying, and we were constantly tweaking things 'cause we bit off something hard.

0:55:25.1 DK: Yeah, one thing I'll say is, I think we write the wrong way. I think that, classically, you're supposed to... This is actually a metaphor that our composers used for their process, and I'm stealing it now. So Son Lux, they were the band that composed the score for this film, and they described their process like this. They say normally an architect will build a house and you get the structure right. You make sure that everything feels safe and sound, and then you go inside and you start to populate the house with furniture and appliances and things that make sense. But their process, which feels very similar to ours is, instead of building the house first, they might be walking on the street and come across this amazing chair, this amazing armchair with 10 legs and it has lever, but also there's some pokey parts that stick out if you don't sit in it right. But...

0:56:12.0 DK: They love it and say, "This chair is incredible. I'm gonna build a whole house around this chair, and I'm gonna make this chair make sense. This chair doesn't make sense right now, it doesn't make sense in my mom's house, but I'm gonna build a house where this chair makes perfect sense." And to me, I'm like... When I heard them describe that, I was like, "Yes, that's exactly how we work." We find these weird chairs and we spend the rest of our time just trying to build a house around it. And I think for this movie, the chaos was the chair. Infinity was the chair. We're like, "I want to build the entire thing around infinity even if it structurally doesn't make sense or structurally doesn't follow the rules. This is gonna be a very hard challenge, but a very fulfilling one, if we pull it off."

0:56:52.3 DS: I wish I'd done that with my actual house. I just did renovations and my favorite sofa didn't fit in it, and I had to get rid of it.

0:57:00.9 SC: Defeats the purpose of the house if your favorite sofa does not fit in it, really.

0:57:04.1 DS: Yeah, it just didn't make sense in the room.

0:57:05.8 SC: Well, maybe this is something worth explaining to people who don't make movies for a living. So I think that a lot of people presume that you have a script and then you film it, but there's still a lot of picking and choosing along the way. You film things that don't make it in the movie. You end up filming things that maybe weren't in the script. How... What is the planning versus chaos element in that process?

0:57:29.5 DS: Totally, yeah. I think there are filmmakers like the classic Hitchcock style, is that he would perfect his script, perfect his shot list, have storyboards and he'd come in and he'd move around his actors like chess pieces and execute exactly what he had planned all along. But that's so hard with live action and also very unpleasant and the opposite of why I got into filmmaking. I like the collaboration and the problem solving, and the fact that you're learning new things all along.

0:58:05.1 DK: It's also... It's a self-limiting. If you're gonna go in there and say, "I know exactly what I want," there's no room for the universe to tell you better things...

0:58:15.9 SC: The discovery, yeah.

0:58:16.0 DK: Or to show you better ways of making the film that you're making. And I think a film like this would never have worked if we had gone the Hitchcock route. I think we had to be constantly listening, constantly feeling out what our crew members were saying and what the locations were telling us and how... Just everything down to scheduling around different actors' schedules. All of that is speaking to you and you have to listen as a filmmaker, 'cause otherwise you're just fighting against entropy and you're fighting against just inertia, which is impossible.

0:58:50.1 DS: It's like... So, for example, we get all the way into the final weeks of the edit and there's still things that some audiences aren't latching on to about the logic of the movie, and we were still rewriting lines of dialogue to try to... And just one line of dialogue could make such a difference that would then help everyone just... Help a few more people give up to the absurdity of the bagel, for example.

0:59:23.7 SC: [chuckle] The bagel, yeah.

0:59:24.3 DS: And we were tweaking those lines straight up to the end, or there was one shot that we added to the opening of the film that's just the daughter sad driving her car, and the simplest shot, but it wasn't in the script, it wasn't in the edit. And something about the daughter's journey felt like it wasn't set up properly and audiences were like, "Why is it all about the daughter at the end?" And so I think it's a product of how much we were trying to squeeze into our movie and how ambitious our ideas are but we added that really late and it made a huge difference.

1:00:03.6 DK: It's a chemistry set, and you just gotta keep tweaking those... The proportions until it feels right. But, yeah, to answer your question in another way, he comes from improv, I come from animation. It's... Animation is filmmaking when you have all the control, and improve comes from filmmaking where you have no control, and I think our style of... And our process is somewhere in the middle, where we plan as much as we possibly can, but knowing that our projects are so ambitious, we have to leave a lot of room for improv.

1:00:34.7 DS: And also knowing that we have really talented friends and we wanna leave room for their ideas, leave room for the actors to come in and surprise us.

1:00:45.9 SC: Well, one of the features of the film is these wonderful Hong Kong cinema fight scenes, and presumably those are pretty darn choreographed. But how much were you just nodding toward that sort of genre of film versus actually using the techniques that they would use to make a fight scene like that?

1:01:06.0 DK: Yeah. Growing up, that was all we watched in the house, because my dad loved watching movies and my mom fell asleep in those movies unless they were in Chinese. And so my dad would just constantly be finding bootleg copies of Hong Kong action movies and things like that. So we watched a lot of that growing up, and both of us, we both connected over the fact that we love that kind of filmmaking style. And what was great about it for this movie is not only is it so dancerly and satisfying and...

1:01:37.7 DS: It's our favorite, but it also happens to be not that expensive compared to the bombast of American actions. It's all about two people fighting over a prop as opposed to 100 people with guns as the building falls.

1:01:55.7 DK: It doesn't make it easier, and in fact, I think it is much harder to pull off Hong Kong action because it requires every performer to be incredibly physically able, and then also the camera work has to be very precise, and you have to have a team who's all dedicated to this idea of shooting action unconventionally. I think a lot of... Things have been changing in American action films, but for a very long time, the way that we show action was the same way that we'd shoot coverage of any other dialogue scene, where you get the wide shot of the whole thing. Then you get some close-ups. And then if you need some inserts for clarity, you'd go and get this foot kicking this thing, which is way more efficient because then you're not changing light set-ups constantly, you're not turning around and forcing the whole crew to move every single time you do another take. But that ends up... When you cut it together, there's a dryness to it that feels like you're shooting it as if it's a conversation and not like a dance, not like a proper fight.

1:02:53.4 DK: And the way that... In Hong Kong, Yuen Woo-ping was the legendary choreographer that did almost all of that stuff, or at least influenced a lot of that stuff. And his way of shooting would be he would just choose the exact shot for every single move that would best illustrate the feeling and also, narratively, the story in that moment. So even if it was just one punch to a face, he would find the perfect shot for and hit that punch, and they cut to a wide and suddenly the fall would have a very specific angle that would make the fall feel very dramatic. And so even if sometimes it cuts fast, it's always very narratively clear. And then there's also these incredible moments where they just let the performers perform because they're that good. You can just hold on a stationary tripod shot for a decent amount of time and just be impressed by how incredible these athletes are.

1:03:52.9 DS: And then the last thing in our Hong Kong spiel, we like to say, is that we referenced it so heavily, we tried so hard to make something that could stand up to Michelle Yeoh's career, and then we tried to not hurt anyone. And so the difference was, when we did our action scenes, we had very thick wires and we just removed them in post, but like classic Hong Kong action movies, they used thin wires that the camera couldn't see and it's so dangerous and...

1:04:22.5 DK: And a lot of people got hurt.

1:04:23.7 DS: And a lot of people would get hurt on those movies. And so we're happy we found a safe way to do that style, 'cause we did not want to hurt Michelle Yeoh, our hero. [chuckle]

1:04:37.1 SC: [chuckle] And that's compatible with the underlying lesson of the movie, I guess, which maybe makes this a good last question to ask. Is there a lesson to the movie, is there a moral to the story, and should movies have morals, or is it just not... I shouldn't say just, but is the goal more to give people a bunch of ideas to think about and come up with their own stories? How pat should the lesson be at the end versus a little bit of loose thread chaos left hanging there?

1:05:07.4 DS: Totally. Yeah, I think it's... We're always searching for a balance in there. I'm not sure what the right vocabulary words are but we have... We have a very concise moral to the story that's so simple it sounds like a children's book, which is, "It's chaos, be kind." But on top of that, we tried to make every character's journey nuanced and explore things that didn't have super black and white answers, and leave room for everyone to see what resonates with them when they leave the theater and not in the movie with someone walking off into the sunset happily ever after, so that hopefully there's things to chew on that are gray and that... It does feel like the movie's out of our hands now, and we read think pieces online and we're like, "Whoa, I guess the movie means that. Cool," which is such a fun experience.

1:06:12.7 DK: I think that's all a product of the fact that we don't go into every movie with a moral. We don't know what the moral is gonna be, if there is gonna be one at all, and hoping... We just enter every project hoping that we will find something that we can learn, and if we're learning... Again, if we're learning, then the audience is learning and that's exciting to us. And so I think that's probably why people have a hard time pinning down what this film means is because it grew into its meaning rather than us placing some seed of meaning at the beginning, which I think is... In my experience, those are my favorite kinds of films, is where it feels like the filmmaker is searching. The filmmakers is looking for something rather than trying to teach something. Reflecting it back on a lot of our work, I feel like a lot of... Oftentimes, the characters are... All the worst aspects of our characters are the worst aspects of ourselves as writers and as humans, and we're putting those people into these movies so that we can hopefully see a way to become a better person through the process, and that's... I think, hopefully, that's something that people feel.

1:07:26.3 DS: It's like a hybrid. Our filmmaking process is a hybrid of Jackass and therapy, where we just wanna do things that are fun to do and fun to watch, and we also want to try to grow as people along the way, and maybe that will be valuable for the audience too.

1:07:43.0 SC: Well, and Evelyn has triumphed, but next year she's still gonna have to pay her taxes again, right? There's no escape from this.

1:07:48.3 DS: Yeah.

1:07:49.4 DK: Exactly.

1:07:49.5 DS: It's still chaos. She doesn't...

1:07:52.4 SC: It's still chaos. That is a great... That's the moral. It's still chaos so be kind to each other. So Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:07:58.6 DK: Oh, thanks for having us.

1:08:00.5 DS: It's such a pleasure.

1:08:01.6 DK: Wow. This is... [chuckle] I hope we didn't say anything too stupid.

1:08:04.9 DS: Next time we're gonna interview you. I still have more questions...

1:08:07.1 DK: I know. We have more questions for you.

1:08:07.2 SC: I have answers. Some of them will be crazy, some of them will be wrong, but I'll give them.

1:08:12.7 DS: Great.

1:08:14.0 DK: Maybe we should consult... Ask you to consult on our next movie, obviously, now that we've connected. This is very exciting to us.

1:08:18.7 SC: You know how to connect... You know how to get me, yeah. Love it. Alright, thanks very much guys.

1:08:22.0 DS: Cool.

1:08:22.8 DK: Thanks, Sean.

1:08:22.9 DS: Cheers. Nice to met you.