Paul Rogers, editor of Everything Everywhere at Once, on the pressure to edit until it breaks – production value

Film editor Paul Rogers started editing films as a fun way to get away from schoolwork. Instead of doing a graduation project, Rogers and his friend made a film that opened up a whole new career path for him. “I loved it and have never felt so engaged and excited about something creative,” he says.

Rogers met the Daniels at Daniel Scheinert’s birthday party, where they immediately hit it off. They asked him to help them cut a “silly music video” together for “Turn Down for What”, which began their long collaboration. “This video was much bigger than any of us imagined and it snowballed from there,” he says.

Directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything, everywhere, all at once follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a failed laundromat owner going through a midlife crisis. While visiting the IRS, her life changes when another version of her husband Waymond (Key Huy Quan) takes her down the rabbit hole of parallel universes to help stop an evil entity from destroying everything. Rogers says he was excited and a little scared when the Daniels offered him the job. “Inwardly I was like, ‘This is the craziest movie I’ve ever heard, it’s going to be insane to edit it’… It was a big, old, fun, experimental freeform edit,” he says. “We have a great way of working where I get the images and they just don’t tell me anything. I read the script…but my first draft is not the script, it’s just to react to the visual material by doing something that I find interesting or funny.”

During the editing process, the Daniels kept the project on track while Roger’s job was to push the editing to the limit. “I definitely tend to push it until it breaks,” he says, “to see how far it can go and then come back to a happy place where it’s a little more balanced… And it gives your clues too.” about why it works. When it breaks, you can see why it breaks, and therefore you can see what held it together.”

He found that the core of the film that holds him together is family and the incredible actors. “The shows were so incredible that it often dictated the type of editing,” he says. “You don’t want to break the spell when someone is really on the right frequency, when the actor is really channeling that magic.”

Click on the video above to watch the full interview.