Lilly Wachowski's written introduction to the "Everything Everywhere All At Once" screenplay book
While browsing the A24 Shop last week to buy the "I Saw The TV Glow" screenplay book (I started getting into Jane Schoenbrun's films last month and consider me a fan!), I noticed the "Everything Everywhere All At Once" screenplay book had a written introduction by Lilly Wachowski (who I knew loved the film), so I knew I had to buy that one too!
A lot of people have noticed the influence of The Matrix in EEAAO (which has also been confirmed by the filmmakers themselves), and my take on Lilly's introduction is that she addresses this, at least indirectly:
>"When I was in grade school, a bunch of us made a radio play on my family's cassette recorder. A heavy, gray rectangular box with plasticized chrome detailing and big square buttons that depressed with satisfying ka-chunks. I distinctly remember the little slotted mic area where we would drum our fingernails for the horse-galloping sound effects (our radio play was a Western). It was replete with Ennio Morricone songs and other epic bangers ("Exodus," "The Magnificent Seven") from an album my parents had called Great Motion Picture Themes.
>I don't remember the plot or how long it was—the cassette was lost after too many moves and, in all honesty, was probably recorded over with some song like "99 Luftballons" or "The Safety Dance." (I hadn't yet made my inevitable turn toward metal and punk rock, okay?) But I do remember the story closed with a big shootout where the main character, some sort of edgy, anti-hero type, got gunned down in the end and scratched the words (very dramatically! in the desert sand), "I...shall...return."
>The story was an amalgamation of all the stuff we were watching, a slew of Westerns, swashbucklers, sword-and-sandalers, all glued together. But that ending, it was an unusual move, our first bit of genre-mashing with this weird, magic element.
>With our story editor hats on, the debate to include this strange ending went something like:
>"'I shall return?' How's that supposed to work? He thinks he can come back from the dead?"
>"Yeah... No... I dunno... It's cool!"
>No arguing with that. "It's cool" was the quod erat demonstrandum for our group. As I got older, I learned the names of the people who had made my favorite films and where the films themselves had come from, how the "Western" was this particular genre where all these different filmmakers were pinging off of each other from all over the world: Mexico, Japan, Italy, Spain, France, Hong Kong. You can see the book Red Harvest (or some facsimile) has been made and remade, from Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone to Walter Hill to the Coen Brothers to The Bullits. An echoing. All these different artists sort of "yodeling" to each other across vast expanses of not only space but time. This newfound knowledge not only altered my sense of the Western as a specifically American construct, but it also upended my idea of what a Western even is.
>That perspective only continued to widen for me as a film-maker. I began to have a sense of my own minisculeness, as well as my connectedness to a much larger thing; I was part of this human collective.
>I look back at the culmination of art I have personally watched, seen, read, heard — all the stories I've been told by friends and relatives, my mom and dad — and my mind reels. Then, imagining the countless paths of where all those stories and art came from, you begin to understand the lifeblood that storytelling is to human experience.
>We are our stories.
>I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in the theater with my boyfriend, and about a third of the way through, the moment when the "Everything" title appeared on screen, I instantly choked up. We were in the hardest part of the pandemic, and my own sense of connectedness had atrophied to some extent. And that moment in the film? Hit me to my core. I wasn't just choked up, I started blubbering! It made me suddenly feel once again that I was connected to something bigger, and what unraveled before me was a marvel. Everything Everywhere All At Once is its title and so much more.
>The boundlessness of love in the heart of these two filmmakers, the Daniels, exploded off the screen. Their love for movies, the love for their craft, for the human collective — it staggered me. Their film took such an important stand against nihilism and hopelessness.
>I left the theater with a renewed sense that there is magic in the world. There is magic in all of us.
>Yodel on, Daniels! Yodel on!
>Lilly Wachowski
You may also be interested in:
The Wachowskis writing about their early contact and falling in love with comics
or Lana's writing about some other type of comics she also grew up with.