The best Easter egg in Everything Everywhere All At Once is a secret director’s cameo

polygon.com:

The multiverse martial-arts comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once takes a lot of unpacking. A lot of Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s follow-up to Swiss Army Man goes by at breakneck speed, with pop-culture references, goofy cameos, and effects-driven visual gags that beg for the home-video freeze-frame approach. Some of these gags are big and obvious, like a pre-history sequence involving ape-like creatures fighting to the death, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey’s “discovery of tools” sequence. Others are relatively subtle, like the way the Daniels pattern one alternate universe after the films of Wong Kar-Wai. In a world where harried laundromat owners Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) are rich, successful movie-industry figures, they mourn the romance that never happened between them, and the aching emotions, intense colors, restrained dialogue, and stark lighting all recall Wong films like In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express.

At a Chicago screening of Everything Everywhere, the Daniels talked to me about those scenes, and said they aren’t modeled after one specific scene in particular — as Kwan put it, their cinematographer, Larkin Seiple, has bristled a bit about critics specifically citing In the Mood for Love as the only inspiration there, and wants people to notice that the lighting and key color schemes don’t match that movie exactly. We talked in passing about several other points of interest in the movie — like how the name of the film’s villain, Jobu Tupaki, came from a list of interesting sounds Kwan and his wife generated when they were looking for a name for their daughter.

And Daniel Scheinert shared the photo above, which is arguably Everything Everywhere’s greatest Easter