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In Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan\u2019s wild, universe-hopping movie Everything Everywhere All At Once<\/em>, a lot of the plot revolves around the branch points where people make their significant choices. Every decision creates a new timeline, and a new what-if world. The hefty companion artbook A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur<\/em> creates its own set of what-ifs \u2014 particularly in the script for a scene the Daniels cut from the film. The sequence suggests an entire alternate timeline for their movie, with entirely new characters and a radically different tone.<\/p>\n

In this early version of the movie, Kwan tells Polygon, the Wang family \u2014 Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), and her father, husband, and daughter \u2014 were briefly introduced at the beginning, before an unseen narrator took over the story. \u201cIt used to tie in more with the family,\u201d Kwan says. \u201cIt started with a video of the family, and then the narrator would be like, \u2018Anyways, let\u2019s continue!\u2019 and we leap into this other thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole other thing\u201d is a sequence that feels like something out of Douglas Adams\u2019 classic tongue-in-cheek sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy \u2014 <\/em>particularly the radio-play version and the 1981 BBC TV version, which frame the story with narration from the titular hitchhiker\u2019s guide.<\/p>\n

The narrator in Everything Everywhere<\/em>\u2019s deleted scene starts out by introducing the story in cosmic terms: \u201cHere we are, in this moment, at the beginning. And because most beginnings are also often endings, it would be wrong for me not to point out that we are also here, at the end. And because every moment would not be possible without the moment before it and is rendered unnecessary without the moment after it, we could say that the existence of everything that has happened and will happen hangs on the existence of this one moment. This is it. This is everything. Let us begin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrator goes on to introduce two men who illustrate the movie\u2019s infinite-multiverse principles. The first, W.T. Warren, is a 20-something football-helmet tester in 1912 Pennsylvania. His job involves putting on the helmets and running headfirst into a farmhouse wall. When a quantum accident causes him to pass completely through the wall during one test \u2014 an unlikely event that\u2019s bound to happen at least once in a universe of infinite possibilities \u2014 he gets drunk and decides God wants him to inspire people with miracles. So he confronts three armed robbers, who fatally stab him \u2014 though, as the narrator notes, in a small subset of universes, the knife passes through him as well, and he goes on to marry the love of his life, who he was trying to impress when he stood up to the thieves. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if you think all of this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works, then I\u2019m afraid your opinion of infinity, my friend, may be too small for this story,\u201d the narrator says.<\/p>\n

The scene continues with another character, a high-school football player in 1957. In a specific game, if he catches a specific football, he becomes a cult leader. If he misses it, he\u2019s injured and becomes a lonely carpenter who\u2019s only happy in universes where tables can talk. All this narration lays out the idea of a multiverse defined as much by accidents as by choice, but it all seems like a huge departure from the finished movie, which focuses in much more specifically on Evelyn and her family. <\/p>\n

As Scheinert explains, he and Kwan discarded this scene from their original script fairly early. \u201cI don\u2019t think it was ever in a draft we sent to anyone,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was like, draft zero-point-eight. Before we sent [the script] to any producers, we cut [this sequence], because the script was 255 pages long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kwan and Scheinert say the narration was all meant to set up a specific alternate universe that also doesn\u2019t appear in the final film. The narrator was meant to have what Kwan describes as \u201ca very eloquent, maybe Southern voice.\u201d \u201cSomeone like Susan Sarandon,\u201d Scheinert adds. Eventually, as Evelyn is crossing into different multiverses, she\u2019d enter one where her voice was provided by the narrator as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo she would have the voice of Susan Sarandon,\u201d Kwan says, \u201cand you would realize, \u2018Oh, in this universe, she was adopted by a white family who brought her over from Asia, and she grew up as an adoptee, and she has perfect English, and she became a writer.\u2019 So that was one big, long part of the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scheinert says the entire framing concept was meant to equally evoke Douglas Adams and Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s Magnolia. <\/em>But it also sprung from the Daniels\u2019 admiration of Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em>, Being John Malkovich<\/em>, and Synecdoche, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s one of the biggest tangents we went down,\u201d Scheinert says. \u201cWe love Charlie Kaufman, and there was a very Kaufman-esque quality to the initial idea, which was like, \u2018Let\u2019s make a very accessible sci-fi action film that falls apart, because the multiverse is crazy.\u2019 It took us a while to realize that we didn\u2019t have to go postmodern to achieve that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Daniels say the movie\u2019s entire concept was inherently so postmodern that it didn\u2019t need recursive characters or framing. \u201cIt was in the fabric of it,\u201d Scheinert says. \u201cSo we stripped a lot of that away. But we were playing with that for a long time, like, \u2018Should we show up as characters in our own movie? Should the movie be a book being written by this alternate Evelyn?\u2019 I\u2019m glad we went down these tangents, because it helped us develop the themes, but these ideas weren\u2019t necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur <\/em>is available from the A24 merch store. In addition to the deleted scene, it includes original art, short stories, an interview about the multiverse between the Daniels and \u201ctheir favorite neuroscientist, David Eagleman,\u201d and an essay by Carl Sagan\u2019s daughter, author Sasha Sagan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan\u2019s wild, universe-hopping movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, a lot of the plot revolves around the branch points where people make their significant choices. Every decision creates a new timeline, and a new what-if world. The hefty companion artbook A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/thumbor\/kvcnuXAmi_J6n57GZ1AlQKoj3oo=\/0x0:3000x1571\/fit-in\/1200x630\/cdn.vox-cdn.com\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/23393468\/Training.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-news"],"yoast_head":"\n