Son Lux Discusses Composing the Impossible in 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'
Everything Everywhere All At Once finally got a wide North American release this past weekend. In case critic reviews haven’t been abundantly clear (you can read our review here), it is widely considered to be a modern masterpiece.
The film, which follows a woman who discovers that she and her multiverse counterparts are the key to saving mankind - all while simply trying to do her taxes - is just as imaginative as it sounds. It’s genre-bending sci-fi, kung-fu, and drama-filled plot, combined with hilarious homages to films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille ensure that it lives up to its title.
While the mind-boggling visuals and editing promise to keep your attention for the film’s 2 hour and 26 minute runtime, the film’s 49-track score by experimental musical trio Son Lux make it fly by, all while simultaneously tugging at your heartstrings.
Although it sounds almost too good to be true, even those behind the film’s actual sound admit the film was so challenging that at times they didn’t think they’d finish it. In an exclusive interview with FilmSpeak, Son Lux sat down to explain how worried they were about creating a score for a film that seemed impossible to make.
“It was really a tall order,” band member Rafiq Bhatia said. “They wanted one musical identity for [the] film…just making something coherent serve the picture is a task unto itself, but having it be the many different versions of that were required for this was the big, big challenge and where most of the pain and pleasure in this process originated.”
Fellow bandmate Ryan Lott even went so far as to compare the experience of developing the album to the multiversal soul-searching that the protagonist does over the course of the film. He said, “The underlying task was, like, on a soul level is that we had to be willing to find places creatively that we had never been before. And I think in that way our process really mirrored our protagonist Evelyn. [The same way] she undergoes a process of discovering all these different versions of herself, and having to pull different skills from other parallel universes, other versions of herself, I think that right out of the gate we felt that.”
The group’s Ian Cheng didn’t hesitate to praise how motivational the directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively and professionally as Daniels), were. He added, “[They] were a creative tour de force, as well as just like a gravitational magnet for inspiring people to go above and beyond to do like the best work that they possibly could.”
Interesting enough, there’s tangible proof of that uninhibited motivation on the score. As Cheng also points out, you can hear co-director Daniel Kwan’s “bad trumpet playing” in one song. For those who haven’t seen the film, there’s one sequence where a character tries to play the trumpet player, but they can’t because of their fingers. As the trio further explains, Kwan felt like his absolute lack of skill would get the job perfectly, and it did.
Kwan isn’t the only cameo though. The score features additional performances from the likes of David Byrne, Randy Newman, and even André 3000 - three artists who might not come together under any other circumstance. Nevertheless, here their work converges to further prove just how cosmically relatable the story is. As the trio points out, there are a plethora of thematic plot points the audience can connect with. “I think it addresses generational trauma [and] immigrant life in America. It also addresses mental illness,” Cheng explained.
For a film titled Everything Everywhere All At Once, the biggest themes are surprisingly the simplest: kindness and love. If you aren’t convinced by the time the credits roll, the band’s got a very special - and literal - song to prove you wrong.