Photo via Lisa Wassmann/MERU
Chris Daly is still waiting on his POW Starter jacket and coffee mug after 11 years of holding it down on this very site.
Warning: Light Spoilers for “Everything Everywhere All At Once” Ahead
One could be forgiven for lacking familiarity with the work of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert before now. The Daniels, as the co-writing/directing duo is known, previously had only their debut film, “Swiss Army Man,” and a handful of short films, commercials and music videos to their collective name. While the story of a flatulent corpse and a guy stranded on an island appealed to some, it’s fair to say the movie never was intended for a large audience, even if the aforementioned farting dead body was played by none other than Harry Potter himself.
However, with the release of Everything Everywhere All At Once Yet, the Dawn of the Era of Daniels is upon us. Starring Michelle Yeoh in one of her finest roles to date (though “Silver Hawk” will always be a personal fave) and the Hollywood big screen return of Ke Huy Quan, aka Data aka Short Round, while featuring a spectacularly frumpy Jaime Lee Curtis and a career-launching turn by Stephanie Hsu, the plot revolves around Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang finding herself as she learns that she is the possible key to saving the multiverse. On top of that, you’ve got kick-ass kung-fu, mind-bending philosophy and, spoiler alert, the greatest butt plug scene ever committed to film (with all due respect to the adult film industry). While it’s a tad early to start throwing around “Best Picture of the Year” accolades, it’s easily the most entertaining movie I’ve seen in 2022. Or more accurately, have already seen three times this year.
No movie can be considered “great” without an equally stellar soundtrack, and EEAAO does not disappoint in this department, either. As the digital conversation below proves, the Daniels’ vision included a particular audio roadmap. Turning to Son Lux, the trio of Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang, the Daniels sought and found musical partners with a shared, many worlds mentality. While largely instrumental, the soundtrack is anything but one dimensional, alternating between spacey synth workouts and Chinese opera to Disney-esque show tunes and haunting chants. SL talks about how they got involved, their musical scoring process, working with big names as well as up-and-coming artists and the thought process behind scoring that one anal intruder scene.
The following was answered collectively by the band:
How did you get involved in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” in the first place? Did you know someone in the Music Department? Did one of you babysit for the Yeohs? What’s the scoop?
Son Lux: Daniels reached out to us because they heard a multitude of multiverses in the music we make as a band and on our solo projects, as well. We were fortunate enough to be engaged early on in the process, which ended up being a very long but rewarding collaboration. Had we known the amount of work it would entail, our past selves probably would have shuddered in fear at the perceived impossibility of the task, but our current selves are profoundly changed for the better as a result of seeing it through.
I’ve noticed that for a lot of musical scores, the artists will utilize one instrument or theme for each character. Did you do anything like that here? (To my ears, there were obvious tonal differences when characters were in different places, either in their own minds or throughout the multiverse, but I was hoping you could elaborate. In one scene, it’s sparse synths, in another, you’ve got a Disney musical on your hands. What dictated your direction?)
Son Lux: A huge challenge of this film is that there are so many versions even of individual characters, jumping through numerous universes. We had to find a way to balance that tension—to both bring cohesion AND further fracture things in the right places. For establishing the identity of each universe, we largely went with using sonic texture and color to do the talking, because the characters move between verses so quickly that each one needed to be immediately recognizable. On the other hand, we looked for simple melodies to represent different character relationships throughout the film, which could then be imbued with the sonic personality of any given universe. Since we build many of our virtual instruments from a wide array of sources, we were able to reconfigure, juxtapose and rearrange these to meet the needs of each of the 100+ cues.
What was the process like for your scoring? Were you on-set a lot? Did you preview dailies? Or did you get involved once the movie was more or less done?
Son Lux: We actually got involved back in 2019, long before anything was shot. At the time of our first convo with Daniels, we were actually in the middle of a studio residency in New York working on our triple album, Tomorrows. Inspired by those conversations, and an early draft of the script Daniels’ supplied us with, we kept coming across ingredients during our studio sessions that would be useful for the film. Prior to the start of shooting, we ended up sending a giant Dropbox repository of those ideas, as well as instrumental versions of all of the Son Lux records and all of our individual solo projects. We also had to work up some cues in advance that would be sung on screen, like the hot dog hands musical.
Thankfully, Daniels and co. managed to get through filming almost entirely by the day that quarantine hit and the studios all shut down—in fact, I believe they worked through the previous night and wrapped early that Saturday morning. It was shortly after that that the edit started coming together, and we were on working to picture almost immediately thereafter, starting well in advance of a locked cut and working until the reels were being printed on the mix stage. Daniels were extraordinarily helpful and engaged throughout, offering great ideas and advice along the way.
