EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE Directors Tried To Put Short Round From INDIANA JONES in The Movie
Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of my favorite films of the year. It’s just such a damn good film, and it was so cool to see Ke Huy Quan back in action after all these years! Quan was a child actor from the 80s who hasn’t made a film since he was a kid. One of his most recognizable roles is the character Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Well, it turns out that Everything Everywhere All At Once directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert actually tried to include Quan’s iconic Short Round character in the movie!
The Daniels give an audio commentary of the film on the DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K UHD edition and it’s there they share how Short Round would have been included in the film.
Quan plays Waymond Wang, the husband of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and he explains the multiverse to her. There’s a flashback montage in the film of how the characters met as children and fell in love. Kwan talked about this scene, saying:
“This sequence was a fun revelation. Basically, we could take a sci-fi conceit which is someone scanning someone’s brain for their life memories and in the same motion, you’re also getting their full life story. So it’s like a little bit of sci-fi stuffed in with a little bit of character backstory.
Scheinart added:
“It was a real ah-ha moment when we came up with this scene. Oh wow, now we can tease everything that’s going to come later, all of Michelle’s character’s regrets, and all the relationships.”
It’s in this sequence that the Daniels wanted to try and include Kwan’s Short Round in the film, but they ultimately couldn’t effectively pull off the de-aging effects. Scheinarts explained:
“Right there for young Waymond, we spent a while being like can we somehow motion track Key Quan’s childhood face onto that actor and make it look like Short Round? Did not work. It was too much work and wasn’t worth it.”
That would have been fun to see, but ultimately it’s fine that it didn’t make it into the film. It was still a freakin’ great movie! You should watch it if you haven’t seen it yet!