Son Lux Interview: Everything Everywhere All At Once
Son Lux members spoke with Screen Rant about crafting a score to fit the film, collaborating with musical icons, and the beauty in taking a risk.
Filmmaking duo Daniels has an undisputed hit on their hands with Everything Everywhere All At Once. The fantastic, universe-jumping action-comedy starring Michelle Yeoh is equal parts inspiring, heartbreaking, exciting, and hilarious. While the duo has a number of short films and music videos under their belt, Everything Everywhere All At Once is only their second feature film, their first being 2016's Swiss Army Man.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is also buoyed by a musical score just as agile yet large in scope as the film itself. Written by the indie/experimental band Son Lux, the film's score is an exciting adaptation of the band's signature style to a new medium.
Before embarking on their upcoming tour, Son Lux members Ryan Lott and Rafiq Bhatia spoke with Screen Rant about crafting a score to fit the film, collaborating with musical icons, and beauty in taking a risk.
Screen Rant: The movie and the score are both so large in scope. The first question is, how did you even start with this? Both in meeting Daniels and also just creatively? How did you first jump in?
Ryan Lott: Daniels hit us up in the fall of 2019. We were in the middle of recording a bunch of material for upcoming projects, none of which were this. They explained to us that they were working on this movie, and they tried - they did their best to explain it, but ultimately when they sent the script, which was inexplicably strange and definitely was never going to get made, we realized this was kind of an amazing opportunity to do so much more than we'd ever done in a single project.
Unfortunately, like I said, there's no way anyone's going to make this movie. So, the way I felt about it was, "Wow, this is such an honor to get asked, but too bad it's not going to happen." Then at some point they were like, "Hey guys, we got Michelle Yeoh." And we're like "Wait, what? This is going to happen?"
Screen Rant: Were you already thinking of themes and music before the movie was even made? Just from reading the screenplay?
Rafiq Bhatia: Yeah, we started working on ideas for it right after the initial conversation we had with Daniels, which was in the fall of 2019. And we were actually in the studio at the time that we spoke to them, working on this last triple album that we put out called Tomorrows. And as we were sort of collecting materials for that, we were getting excited about the themes for this film.
At the time it was just the screenplay, they hadn't shot anything... and we just kept earmarking little materials, like "Oh, these drums that like speed up at different rates, and they like move in and out of alignment." Or Ryan had written the thing with cellos that would dive and then sort of swarm upward in opposition to each other. There were all these things that felt thematically related to the movement of characters' relationships and how that was mirrored by movement through universes. And we couldn't help ourselves, we just started diving in from the beginning.
Screen Rant: You do a really good job of making this score. It just sounds like a natural extension of your band, and what you were already doing. Were you ever tempted to do anything more traditional scoring-wise?
Ryan Lott: That's a really good question. I mean, I think to some extent, we were more fully ourselves than we had been in the past on any other single project, and I think that's a sentiment that you're hearing echoed across the crew and across the actors. When you hear Michelle Yeoh talk about how, "Finally someone is giving me an opportunity to do all the things that I know that I can do, but that I haven't had a chance to demonstrate." It's all one thousand percent her, but at the same time, it's a her that we hadn't experienced yet. And I think that's true of us as well.
Yes, this music feels like a logical extension of our own albums. But at the same time, there's a spectrum that we covered that we had not really afforded ourselves the opportunity to cover. And to some extent, that has to do with permission. The Daniels, personally, and their creative vision - and then apart from that, what this film is - is such a powerful vehicle for us to discover new things about ourselves. To give ourselves permission to go places we hadn't been before. And sometimes, that's all you need.
Screen Rant: Do you feel like that has empowered you to do that in your band work moving forward?
Rafiq Bhatia: I mean, I hope so. I don't know if it means that we'll ever make a Son Lux song that sounds like the hot dog hands musical, but you never know.
Screen Rant: Sure. And you also have a lot of great collaborators on this score. What made you want to bring in people like Randy Newman, or Mitski, or David Byrne?
Ryan Lott: Randy Newman was the Daniels' dream. They had this wild notion that a certain character would be voiced by Randy Newman - no spoilers - and on the strength of the film in its rough-cut state, he agreed to go for it. He watched it with his whole family and he said his wife hadn't laughed so hard in the entire pandemic. And part of his role was to sing a part of a song on camera. Well, voice a character that's singing a song on camera.
My idea was, "Well, damn. If he's going to sing part of a song, and he's got to come into the studio and do ADR, could I just like maybe write the whole song and have him sing the whole song?" And sure enough, that's what we did. And it's not a long song, it's not elaborate or anything, but that's what we did. And he was super down for it, and once we had his performance, you could build a whole song around it. Insanely, I wound up singing in duet with him, which was another thing that was at the encouragement of the Daniels that I never would have given myself permission to do.
And it is true of all the collaborators and the additional musicians that we brought in... I think I can safely say that - apart from our participation at all - all of them were so enthusiastic about the movie itself, and it meant something so deep to each person that they would've jumped on board if we weren't even part of the picture. So, definitely don't want to take any credit for all those additional musicians that are featured... the folks whose names maybe you recognize. Really, credit goes to how great this film is that the Daniels had made.
Screen Rant: And the film does a lot of playful referencing of other movies and genres. It sounds like the music jumps in every once in a while... on the soundtrack, there's one song called "Plug Fight," and it sounds like you reference The Matrix a little bit. Can you confirm or deny if this was intentional?
Rafiq Bhatia: I mean, I think a similar question could be posed to the film itself. Because there are a lot of aspects of the film as a multiverse, a sci-fi action-thriller being one of the many movies that it is simultaneously, to what extent is it indebted to The Matrix? Because I think what we did with the music is definitely following in the direction that the picture prescribed, in a way. And I think it's interesting that the score read to you as being something that largely sounded like our own music, because there are so many things about it, especially early on, that are drawing on different universes, or feel like overt references to genre in certain ways for us.
And that was by design, because the idea was that we would start out establishing sounds for particular universes, and in cutting through them and moving through them it would help to sort of give each universe its own identity. So that later in the film, as elements of the story start to traverse and move through different universes and cohere into - bring elements of those universes together to cohere into something that feels complete and has emotional weight... that's the part of the soundtrack to me that feels the most related to what we've historically done as a band, because we tend to be concerned with reconciling seemingly disparate elements in our music.
The earlier things, where we were really tasked more with the idea of playing specifically into a particular genre, were the things that to me were almost more of a challenge, or more of a departure from what we've done before.
Screen Rant: To that, I know you also used Debussy's "Clair de Lune," and you hint at it a few times before you go into it in full. What was the creative decision in incorporating that piece?
Ryan Lott: This is one of my favorite little ideas for the whole score, was to give Deirdre "Clair de Lune" as her theme. Deirdre is one of the chief antagonists in the film, and to give her a theme that is so tender and sweet and bucolic as [Clair de Lune], was an idea that only Daniels would have come up with. And in fact, they did. That idea will go down in history as something probably we came up with, but just to set the record straight, this was a very stupid idea that the Daniels had, that personally, I was very skeptical about.
And again, it was one of those things that was, when presented with an idea from outside your personal universe, what are you going to do with it? And what wound up happening was, at least for me, I was the one kind of tasked with most of the implementation of her theme in dystopic fashion, and then Rafiq took lead on the featured one later that's just super gorgeous, but more in line with the original spirit of the piece. That was their idea, and it presented some great challenges that in the end I think worked out fantastic. And I think the more you listen to the score and watch the movie, you'll hear these short little fragments accompanying some of Deirdre's more sinister moments.
Screen Rant: For anyone that maybe wasn't aware of you before the film and is now listening to all your music, what's next for you? You're about to go on tour, right?
Rafiq Bhatia: Yeah. We're going on our first tour since 2019, we're fresh out the gate with a bunch of brand new music. We're doing a lot of things differently than we ever have on stage for the first time, and we're all really really excited. Not only just to be out there playing for people again, but to be kind of coming at it in a new way, and in a way that I think gives all of us more freedom and more presence in the moment. And we're really excited to share the music live. It's going to be a big circle around North America starting in late April and going through early June.
Ryan Lott: I'm excited about it. I think, real quick, just to tag along on that answer. You'd asked about how this movie would impact the band going forward. I know speaking for me personally, this movie feels like - I mean it was - a giant risk in so many ways to so many people. And I think we're all really inspired by that, and just the value of risk on a fundamental level. And so the idea of risk and venturing into the unknown for the sake of something truly surprising and vivid and unique... that's something that we've introduced into our live set.
And it's the thing [that] I think for me personally is the most exciting, and it will mean every night is different. I think our surprise on stage, and our living in the moment, and living at the edge - living in the risk. I think it will read really well on stage, and be an exciting experience for everyone.
Check out our interview with stunt coordinator Timothy Eulich as well.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is currently playing in theaters, while Son Lux kicks off their tour on April 27th in Washington, DC. See dates here.