Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – collectively known as Daniels – spent Sunday night easily clocking up their 10,000 steps. As directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once, they were running back and forth to the Oscars podium more times than Evelyn Wang jumps into parallel lives in their genre-bending film.
In the end, the film took home seven of their 11 nominations for the night, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing (and seriously hats off to that guy) and accolades for their cast; Best Actress for Michelle Yeoh, and Best Supporting Actors to Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis.
In the customary shout-out to the mums and the dads, Scheinert paid tribute while accepting one of the awards: “Thank you for not squashing my creativity when I was making really disturbing horror films or really perverted comedy films or dressing in drag as a kid, which is a threat to nobody!”
It was clearly this freedom of creativity growing up that added to the Daniels' rise to fame, and you can track the chaotic-good essence the pair have become known for throughout all their earlier work. From weird and gory internet shorts and iconic turbo-twerking music videos through to that Daniel Radcliffe farting-corpse film, the path to EEAAO is clear.
The beginning
The Daniels met as film students at Emerson College in Boston, and then as teaching assistants in a school camp. They decided to make their own short film together in 2009, entitled Swingers.
A second, even shorter film, Tides Of The Heart – just 52 seconds – followed, and they found themselves as the next big thing online. As they told Rolling Stone in 2022: “‘The internet told us to be a duo,’ Scheinert deadpans. ‘The algorithms just pushed us together’ Kwan adds, ‘and we haven’t been able to be pulled apart yet.’”
The music videos
Scheinert told Rolling Stone that the beginnings were tricky: “I remember that the first year we started working on music videos, we pitched 50 ideas, which involved writing a whole script, putting together a treatment, getting on phone calls — and we didn’t book anything. Then, once we did get our foot in the door, all our ideas were too ‘insane’”.
However, they were commissioned for their first music video in 2009, Manchester Orchestra’s Simple Math, which very much set up their stall as directors as influenced by special effects and stunts as with making something with heart.
Next up were two collabs with Foster The People, with their first video Houdini seeing Daniels kill off the band, only to have them revived, Weekend At Bernie’s style, to perform a concert. Weird, but genius.
More music vids followed in quick succession z- women spontaneously getting pregnant from a look from Dave 1 from Chromeo; a tribe of butt-naked people going wild in the great outdoors for Joywave, or a guy rolling around an escalator behind Gary Numan for Battles.
However, their biggest hit – currently one billion views on YouTube and rising – is the 2013 video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s Turn Down For What, which features Kwan being possessed by the spirit of the twerk, weaponising it to crash through buildings and infect other people with his ferocious body popping.
The films
The duo graduated to feature films for the first time in 2016 – through the current indie powerhouse that is A24 – with the Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe-fronted Swiss Army Man.
The plot? Well, roughly: a guy (Dano) marooned on an island comes across a corpse (Radcliffe), who’s kind of a bit still alive, as alongside farting, he has incredible powers, like using his penis as a compass, and the pair bond. “Unlike anything you’ll ever see,” said one of the reviews. Well, quite:
The film won the first award season shout out for Daniels, picking up Best Directors at the Sundance Film Festival.
From there, it was six years in the making – including navigating a global pandemic – for their latest Oscar-hauling triumph, 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. Again, how Daniels got this down to an elevator pitch is unknown; the film leaps across a superhero comic book romp to give a take on intergenerational trauma between mothers and daughters, by way of slapstick scenes involving dildo fights and hotdog fingers. It’s best just watched, rather than described.
In an interview with Wonderland magazine back in 2011, the pair foreshadowed their unique filmmaking manner of films like EEAAO, and explained: “We like tonally-confusing films that make you feel three or four different things at once, so everyone takes something different from it.” Meanwhile, revealing their ethos to Rolling Stone, they said the chaotic and often bizarre plot lines of their films are merely an effective way of touching on deeper subjects. “We actually do the crazy things we do because want to make sincere movies, but the only way that artistic brains can do sincerity is if we couch it in something else.”
Where do both Daniels go from here? Given the mad and genre-hopping nature of all their work: literally anywhere, who knows. But with them signing a ‘first look’ deal with A24 – and a five year film deal with Universal Pictures – buckle up, as this journey’s likely to get even wilder.
