Paul Schrader’s Thoughts on EEAAO

Here’s one that totally bypassed my attention. I spoke to Paul Schrader yesterday to get his two cents on “Everything Everywhere All At Once” winning Best Picture and was reminded that he had actually written about the film — I must have missed it.

EVERYTHING IS EVERYWHERE. Saw this after receiving several commendations. It’s ingenious, impressive and occassionaly moving, but I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it. I think you need to have grown up in fractured media society to feel at home with it. In other words, it made me feel as old as time itself.

I’ve grown up in this “fractured media society.” I don’t necessarily believe it’s just that. Yes, the ADD generation will most likely fall harder for EEAAO than, say, boomers, but it’s more than just that.

It would make sense on a purely aesthetic and visceral level. Daniel Kwan mentioned that he created EEAAO as a form of therapy for his ADHD, and it clearly shows.

Supposedly, when The Daniels had begun conceiving of EEAAO, they were toying with making it about someone who had such severe ADHD they could tap into another universe.

Here’s Kwan explaining how ADHD runs through the DNA of his film:

So I started doing some research [on EEAAO]. And then I stayed up until like, four in the morning, just reading everything I could find about it, just crying, just realizing that, "Oh, my God, I think I have ADHD." So this movie is the reason why I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed, I went to therapy for a year and then went to a psychiatrist. And I'm now on meds, and it's such a beautiful, cathartic experience to realize why your life has been so hard.

This movie, obviously, when you look at it now, was made by someone with ADHD. And it's just funny how many people have come up to me after screenings and said, "This feels like you're in my brain." And some of them are people like yourself who suspect that they have ADHD and then other people who recently got diagnosed because I think during the pandemic, a lot of people have been struggling in this new version of life, where there is less structure because ADHD people need structure, otherwise we fall apart.

All of this makes sense. EEAAO is a film delivered as a relentless ADHD-infused assault on the senses. The Daniels dare you to keep up with the storylines and multiverses piled one on top of each other. This is the ultimate film of the Tik-Tok generation.