Everything Everywhere All At Once directors ‘the Daniels’ on this year’s craziest film – which just happens to be an Oscars frontrunner

Published

2 years ago

March 11, 2023

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There’s no doubt that this year’s Oscars frontrunner for best picture is not your standard awards fare.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is an existential exploration of relationships and love via a launderette, taxes and the multiverse, with themes of nihilism and absurdism thrown in for good measure.

The film’s writer-director duo, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – known collectively as “the Daniels” – admit they knew it would be a lot for audiences to take in.

In fact, they told Sky News they were almost looking for a tipping point.

“We thought there would be the people who loved the movie and then for everyone else it would be like, this is too much,” said Kwan.

“Because we kind of made this movie as a stress test, to be like, how much can an audience member hold in their brain? How much can they experience before they give up?

“So we were expecting a lot more people to be like, ‘this was too much for me’ – and some people are saying it’s too much, and that’s fine, but this reception has been mind-blowing.”

The journey this film has been on has indeed been mind-blowing, with the Oscars coming almost a year to the day since its world premiere at the South By Southwest (SXSW) film festival.

From there it became a massive word-of-mouth hit, eventually becoming US studio A24’s highest-grossing film to date – taking more than £90m at the box office worldwide.

It has since gone on to sweep awards season – stars including Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan have already picked up gongs at ceremonies including the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards for their performances – and it looks set to continue that success at the Oscars, where it’s nominated for 11 awards and is the clear favourite to win best picture.

For Kwan and Scheinert, who started out making music videos together before their first feature Swiss Army Man – which featured Daniel Radcliffe playing a flatulent corpse (yes, really) – it’s been curious to see their work finding a completely new audience.

‘We’re used to the weirdos of the world’

“We’ve been making strange things our whole careers,” Kwan said. “It’s been over a decade of just us putting weird things onto the internet and seeing how the world reacts.

“We’re used to a very specific crowd who loves our stuff – you know, the weirdos of the world… and they just connect with it because they see us as weirdos and it’s a beautiful thing where they love it, it’s some of their favourite stuff they’ve ever seen.

“But then for everyone else, they’re like, ‘it’s not my cup of tea’. We’re used to that.”

But he also admits many compromises were necessary during the making of the drama.

The filmmakers were mindful to tread a line in order to make this movie appealing to viewers, with certain scenes (not least one involving a sex toy), raising some questions.

Making the strangeness accessible

“[We asked ourselves] Okay, If we include the butt plug trophy fight scene, what percentage of our audience do we lose and is it worth it? There was a lot of bartering with ourselves, just being like, okay, selfishly, I want this, how many people are we going to be pushing away?” Kwan said.

“Because one of our barometers is always: can we show this to our moms? Which is a very funny thing to be asking ourselves when there’s so much vile stuff in our movies, but it is really important that we really want to make the strangeness accessible.”

Content wasn’t the only area of compromise – budget constraints also led to some difficult decisions about what could and couldn’t be included.

But Scheinert says there were some advantages to being somewhat constrained. “Sometimes the challenges really can be demoralising when you’re like, ‘oh man, we bit off more than we should have’. But a lot of times that process makes the movie so much better because it forces us to have conversations about like, ‘Does this matter’?”

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With the film’s release coming so soon after the pandemic changed attitudes to cinema-going, the pair say their intention was to make something that justified the extra length audiences go to in order to see a film on the big screen.

“This is a movie that if you have a short attention span, it doesn’t matter,” Kwan said. “If you want to just have a good time, this movie’s for you; if you want to just feel things and just feel catharsis, this movie has something for you.”

“If you want to go with friends, leave the theatre and talk for a few hours at the bar, this is for you,” Scheinert continued.

“It is a love letter to all the reasons we like going to theatres – fight scenes are an obvious thing that people like in a theatre, but I love feeling uncomfortable in a theatre, I love hearing people around me get uncomfortable, I love seeing other people cry while there’s tears in my eyes – and I also love the movie Jackass and I love screaming, ‘oh no, no’, at the screen.”

You can watch the Academy Awards on Sunday 12 March from 11pm exclusively on Sky News and Sky Showcase. And for everything you need to know ahead of the ceremony, don’t miss our special Backstage podcast, out now, plus look out for our special episode on the winners from Monday morning.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

2 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Despite the increasingly strong performance by the British music industry, artists are said to be receiving less money.

Experts have said the musicians make less than people would think because of the role of streaming – platforms do not normally pay artists directly and divide any owed payments among the rights holders of songs.

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

Entertainment

Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: ‘I’d automatically get defensive’

Published

11 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: 'I'd automatically get defensive'

Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.

The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.

He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.

“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.

“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.

The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.

Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.

“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.

“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”

‘The biggest taboo on a movie’

Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.

“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.

A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.

“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.

The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.

‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’

The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.

Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.

He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.

“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”

‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’

A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.

Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.

He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.

“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.

“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

14 hours ago