'Everything Everywhere All at Once' Directors & Michelle Yeoh Break Down a Fight Scene

We did not bring Jamie out for this shoot

'cause all we needed was her hands.

So I got to be Jamie Lee Curtis's hand.

Right so, this is Kie in LA,

This is Michelle in Paris. Me in Paris

And then that's Daniel And you.

Wearing, Wearing.

Just one arm of Dijas outfit.

Yeah.

Should we get started

[laughs]

Sorry, I'm Daniel Kwan.

I'm Daniel Scheinert, who are you?

Oh I'm Michelle Yeoh.

[laughs]

Welcome, this is Notes On A Scene.

and we're gonna talk about a scene from our movie.

Everything Everywhere All At Once.

All at once.

[terrifying sound]

I love you.

[Automated Voice] Jumping pad failure.

Evelyn wait, No.

Today we're gonna watch a little bit

of the scene where Michelle is fighting

with Jamie Lee Curtis' character Dija.

We picked it because it's one

of the first times the audience starts getting ripped

between different storylines.

So we could talk a little bit

about the tonal mismatch of the movie you'll see.

I like to call these the training wheels

that get you ready for the rest of the movie.

It basically teaches you how to watch this film.

[dramatic sound]

This is a drone shot,

so she's landed in the wrong universe.

The pandemic shut us down with one day left to shoot

and this scene was supposed to be on that day.

Don't you remember this scene, Michelle?

I remember this scene, but he wasn't there next to me.

Exactly All right

So we shot this scene during the pandemic

with masked up crew,

with Kie and not Michelle,

with Machico was our stand in.

And then later we shot Michelle

on green screen in Paris and by we, I mean.

We were in A provision Crew.

Yes, we were on zoom. We were on zoom.

It was like a zoom call from hell.

iPad.

It was,

iPhone.

Every technical difficulty

and it was like three in the morning.

It was freezing cold in our little studio.

It was hilarious.

And it's a miracle that

I'm glad you found it funny.

We wanted to lean into the genre trip

so you can even see here right now,

there's no letter boxing.

This is a 185 framing, which is

like usually what you would use for a drama

or a romcom or something like that.

And then later on, you'll see,

we go down to two, three, seven

we go to Anamorphic and we actually shot

with anamorphic lenses.

So it's that, it's the color, It's the lenses

we used, everything about it.

the performances, the music.

The music is like very dissonant.

You'll find it kind of switching.

And then there's like a thematic point to it too,

to juxtapose physical pain, you're getting beat up

with this emotional

discussion about divorce and have like all

these double entendre of sorts of him being like,

I'm not trying to hurt you,

and then you cut to someone really trying to hurt you.

[dramatic sound]

[screaming]

[horn honks]

[speaking in foreign language]

This part, this filming, it was really bizarre

because I was in Paris with a completely new crew

and talking to you guys over the zoom

and then sitting literally with green all

around me and going, remember that scene, remember this

is the part where you were coming

from and then you're going back in here

and you're going there and you're sitting there,

like okay now I look confused and that's perfect.

Look at this confusion, this is.

She's, that's her actually being like what the happening?

It's like, why am I in this movie?

This doesn't make any sense.

Think about it,

[speaking in foreign language]

You always keep pulled away.

We don't have to spend long here, but I'm just proud

that this is Dijas hand back here

about to grab her and pull her into another universe.

Is it her hand?

But it looks a little bit like this hands.

What, what the heck?

What will happen is

[laughs]

Look, here's the brace.

There's the brace look at it.

And I was hiding with a monitor.

Yeah.

To see where it fitted.

Yeah, being like okay, I grab imaginary lady.

Yeah.

[screaming]

I'm sorry Evelyn, I need to go

What?

I need to find the right Evelyn.

Was this on the day that we decided they would act over,

Yes. The top.

Yeah.

And we were like, wait, should the

we could put them on apple boxes, but I think it's funnier.

Especially for Kie

Yeah, and just doing a whole scene where

they literally have to act with nothing,

but their eyes was such like an interesting opportunity,

you know, to kind of focus in on them as actors.

But if you weren't so good, it would be boring.

Yeah.

But you guys are very good.

Yeah, the great thing, At eye acting.

The great thing about this scene is he's eye acting

and he starts off as a sci-fi alpha women.

And then he dips down and stems back up.

And then the reveal that he's not-

Squirrel, wasn't it?

Yes squirrel just like his

like cuddly sweet Innocent version of himself.

Sweet?

No, wait, let me try again.

Alpha women.

Evelyn?

[speaks in foreign language]

He's so sweet.

[speaks in foreign language]

Exactly he's just a little squeaky squirrel.

Like we wanted to rely on the performance as much

as possible to make those transitions,

and Kie did such a good job with that.

He really did a lot of preparation,

Okay, It's been 20 years

since he's been in front of the camera.

Yeah.

And you know, he is such a perfectionist.

He wants to get everything right.

And given such a incredible opportunity

he didn't wanna mess it up.

So what he did was he had a acting coach, voice coach

and then the best one was the body language coach.

Yeah.

So this body language coach went away

and read the script and say, okay

there are three you right, three Raymonds.

The Raymond Wong, Evelyn's husband is like a squirrel.

Then the alpha Raymond is an eagle.

as you can see.

As you can see

Right.

And then the CEO, Raymond is a fox,

as he said, he had to run around the house or run around

whoever he was practicing, like a squirrel eating

like a squirrel, crawling like a squirrel,

and so suddenly it became, Raymond Wong.

Yeah.

Raymond.

The little door swing open, it's such a simple trick,

it's you know,

It's not a trick.

It's Mastery.

Okay, So

We had a styrofoam door built,

that looked the same as the real door.

Crazy deadrick could rip it off

Miscommunicated with our team,

originally the door was supposed to open

towards camera and she,

Yeah.

Oh no away from camera, like she pulls it open.

Yeah, 'cause we wanted to actually match

the way that the door, the car door opened.

But it turns out the hinges were on this side of the door.

So you couldn't pull the door open the way we wanted,

like you can see there's the little nob right there

that the door goes into.

But then on the flight, we came up

with a plan for how to just yank it sideways

and the audience wouldn't notice.

So we have our department people yanking the door

from off camera and I think

we have up here a piece of wood with styrofoam

and debris so that this stuff would fall down.

And usually, it's just a person over here holding it up.

Yeah.

And just kind of shaking it,

And they are very happy about it.

Cause it's a very fun job.

It's a fun job, this person over here is happy probably,

Or they're sad 'cause they got the door not the fun staff.

Exactly, because they're thinking,

I get the drop all over

All over Jamie. Jamie.

And that's the dream job.

[laughing]

But it's one of our favorite things to do

is practical effects like this all in camera something

so silly like a bunch of styrofoam can feel scary,

You know.

Our trick is it happened so fast

that you can't process it.

I think our movies are all about getting past logic

and processing and critical thinking and just being like

I wanna give you something that is beyond that,

and so this obviously isn't there yet.

You know, the rest of the movie gets there

but for this moment, it's just like a fun trick.

We pull the door in one shot,

we rip off a door in another shot, we cut it fast enough,

and it feels,

It feels good.

It's jarring and fun.

Yeah.

And it's kind of what--

Who was looking at the door,

everybody Was looking at Jamie for Gods sake.

I know, Look at this.

There's a real staple in her head.

No, it's not real staple, movie magic.

Also this little details like this necklace,

it was all glasses. With her glasses.

That's all Jamie.

Jamie's just like, I think I should be wearing a wrist brace

with a watch over it, I think I should be, you know

it's like every little detail she was like,

I want to know who this woman is,

I want to live in her life.

And so she just came every day

she'd come with a new idea of like

oh I should have a little rubber thing on my thumb.

Yeah, it's amazing and her face.

Yeah she was scary.

Oh, God

I love you,

I love you.

This is another example of us when

in doubt trying to do things as practically as possible.

One thing that's great about this is that

I always imagine doing a shot from a wide like perspective

of a staircase and having the person jump down and a kind

of like a very matrix dojo kind of reference.

But it's impossible to get that, we'd have to literally

build a set that was like two stories tall

and like have be able to get this perspective,

Be able to remove the the wall.

Yeah, you basically, we had to remove the walls.

This is a real building that we're playing with,

But instead yeah, so at first we were

like can we build a staircase

like how do we, where can we build it?

And instead we like found this building and we're like, oh

we get to see everything and we don't have to build it.

Let's just do it here.

Behind camera it's just a big room

with a door entering the buildings.

This was kind like a entrance to the building,

so it gave us an opportunity which a lot

of times we try to location scout with, soft eyes

you know, and be willing to rewrite the script,

if we walk into a room that changes things for the better.

So Jamie for there's a one wide shot

of her dead on and one close up though

that's actually Jamie jumping for this one,

this was pretty complicated

'cause she actually goes from one side

of the banister stepping and then jumps on the other side.

You see her foot's actually on the other side

which is actually kind of a complicated maneuver,

so her amazing stunt double.

Did that.

Did that.

So that's one pass, then we do.

This is the stunt team.

Yeah.

And they're off camera

with a bunch of ropes and things running the shot.

And then obviously in post we are amazing effects team

You call them.

Just remove it it's really, you know,

really a simple, elegant thing.

And I think for this shot

we also had lighting instrument still here.

Oh yeah, as you can see,

she has this really nice key here,

Key light here and this light would ever actually hit that.

So we added some lights here Larkin loves this trick

And we just knew, oh it's already a visual effects shot,

we'll remove those lights.

Right, and then, so that was pass one,

And then the second pass,

our lovely actors here they just kind of had

to pretend something was gonna hit them.

Really what all we're doing is playing

like cut and paste, it's like a collage.

We also had our SFX team down here.

Oh with a fan

With a fan.

Right.

Blasting as much wind as possible at her so that her hair

and clothes would get this awesome ripple effect.

Right

And then the last pass is the clean plate,

which is no lights, no actors just so that we can,

you know do the removal of these things.

And it's very fun to be able

to combine old school techniques like a lot of Hong Kong

cinema about the wires, except for back

then the wires were so thin

that you couldn't see on camera, but also a little dangerous

Also so thin.

Yeah, exactly.

Easy to snap.

And so now

Fix strong wires.

We had cable.

Exactly, but now because you know, we know after effects

and it's so readily available, we know, okay,

we can make this easy as safe as possible

and we can clean this up really easily.

It's great that Jamie did it.

Oh yeah, and the fact that Jamie actually jumped

like you'll see a shot of her fully coming

down the stairs and it's wonderful.

Yeah, she was like, please let me get up in the wires.

Yeah.

It was a bucket list thing of hers.

We love genre mashups and we love sci-fi movies.

We love, you know, things like the matrix we grew up

on Kung Fu films and this film kind of became a way

for us to do all of that at the same time.

I'm very proud of what we did.

Somehow, it all works.

Somehow, It matches together and it's a beautiful stew.

It's a cosmic gamble.

[laughing]