As the title suggests, the film is many things at the same time. On the one hand, it’s a head-spinning multiverse sci-fi, on the other an absurdist comic romp. Equally, it could be seen chiefly as an intimate portrayal of immigrant family dynamics or as a playful riposte to 21st-century nihilism. What, then, were the starting points for such a complex narrative?

“I said, ‘I have a multiverse idea’ and then Scheinert said, ‘I hate multiverses. They make me feel nihilistic thoughts, and nothing matters,” Kwan explains.

“And I was like, ‘Okay, great. Let’s make a movie that’s nihilistic and acknowledges that!’ Then it just kind of bounced back and forth until we’re like, ‘Oh, the multiverse is the perfect metaphor for what it feels like to live right now.’ If we can explore all of our neuroses and fears through the multiverse, maybe we can learn something about ourselves. And so that was it, we’re just chasing questions when we’re making movies – we don’t know the answers until we show it in front of an audience sometimes.”

• Everything Everywhere All At Once review: Extremely ambitious and strikingly original

“And the last ingredient that was very early on was what if it’s a Chinese American family?” Scheinert adds. “What if we get to pay tribute to the kung fu movies we love but instead of getting white people to do kung fu, what if it’s, you know, an immigrant family? And so that was like an interesting personal fun thing, not just a high concept.”

Multiverses are not exactly in short supply at the moment, in particular thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s adoption of the concept – with last December’s Spider-Man: No Way Home and this month’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both making use of parallel universes. But rather than necessarily seeing their film in opposition to those behemoths, the Daniels reckon the other movies might have helped them make their point even more emphatically.

“Early on, we naively thought, ‘Oh, we could set up the multiverse film and then destroy the multiverse film in one thing, and the audience could tag along,’” says Kwan. “And I think it would have worked for some people, but we’re so lucky that the set-up has been done by a lot of great movies like [Spider-Man: Into the] Spider-Verse and things like that.

“And so the audience is tuned into it,” he continues. “They are now prepared for this version of the film, of the multiverse concept, which is kind of meant to show how inherently problematic the multiverse is for narrative – you know, once the characters’ decisions get watered down by every other universe, the character gets watered down, nothing matters. That was something we wanted to explore, and I don’t think we would have been able to capture as many audience members if it wasn’t for those movies.”

While much of the film takes place in fantastical worlds rather different from our own – including one in which every human has hot dogs for fingers, and another which is populated entirely by sentient rocks – the first act of the movie is crucially devoid of any multiverse hijinks, introducing us to main character Evelyn Wang and her rather mundane existence as the owner of a frantic launderette. In these early scenes, we learn of her very real everyday stresses and the complex relations she has with various family members including her ailing father, gentle husband, and teenage daughter – whose girlfriend she has never fully accepted.

“It was so important,” Scheinert says when asked how vital it was to get these early scenes right. “And it took us a while to get the confidence to do that, to be like, ‘No, let’s wait for it to get silly or high concept’.

“As soon as we were editing it and testing the movie on audiences, it really started to click how important it was that you care about these people before the movie gets really challenging. And also the only way to land the ending, what we’re trying to say, and the emotions we’re trying to hit, is if the foundation is strong at the start. So we did a lot of work refining the beginning based on people’s feedback about the ending.”