Weird of the Week: "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

The directing duo's big break

I couldn’t wait for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and caught it the week it was released. I love that it was well embraced, critically, and what it’s doing for the Asian community (I’m half Japanese) - and especially that it’s giving older women social currency. I was tearing up over their Golden Globes speeches, too.

To note: when the first IRS fight scene began in our theater, the audience went nuts, especially over the fanny pack sequence — and I don’t remember any other movie with consistent audience gasps, verbal reactions, laughing and cheering throughout. If you haven’t seen it, the movie is an over the top trip by directing duo, Daniels - Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert - filmmaker friends who met at Emerson and teamed up as music video directors. The movie is currently A24’s highest grossing movie and led to a Universal deal, but let me go back in time to their breakout music video.

I’ve been obsessed with them since we used their DJ Snake and Lil Jon video, “Turn Down for What” on a series I did for J Lo, right before the song exploded into a viral anthem. [This is a personal, behind the scenes story, so I’m taking this one behind the paywall.] Above, Daniel Kwan and friend Sunita Mani starred in the video that the directors had pitched to DJ Snake as, “humping things until they explode.”

In 2014, Jennifer Lopez’s production company, Nuyorican, teamed up with VEVO with an idea for a Latinx hosted music video series for her past network, NUVOtv. Because I had done another a dancer docuseries for her in the past, I was hired as the Executive Producer and Showrunner, to take their concept from a few pages on paper to a fully fleshed out, two hour format. The challenge? My lean team had only three and a half weeks from my start date to get this show on the air!