Daniel Kwan’s life-changing moment: “I was bad at everything in my life”
Sometimes it takes a while for a person to discover what they’re best at, with one Oscar-winning filmmaker finding out that cinema was the arena in which they excelled, even if their initial self-assessment comes off as fairly harsh.
Taking to the stage to collect an Academy Award is viewed as the pinnacle of the industry, with the voting bodies deciding that the recipient is the best in their field in any given year. An artistic and creative triumph in every sense of the word, it’s certainly one way of stumbling upon a chosen calling.
Not that Daniel Kwan was a complete newcomer to the art of the moving image, having crafted a number of shorts alongside collaborator Daniel Scheinert before they took the feature-length plunge in 2018’s Swiss Army Man. It might be best known as the Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie, but it was an impressive calling card for the genre-bending duo.
Ramping the surrealism and existentialism up to the next level, the pair’s follow-up was the madcap multiversal adventure Everything Everywhere All at Once, which came close to sweeping the board at the Oscars by hoovering up trophies like it was nobody’s business in the major categories.
The collective known as Daniels became one of the rare directorial pairings to secure ‘Best Director’ gold, with the film itself additionally scooping ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Actress’, ‘Best Supporting Actor’, ‘Best Supporting Actress’, ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and ‘Best Film Editing’.
As Kwan explained to Edgar Wright, though, it wasn’t always where he saw himself heading. “I was bad at everything in my life, until I discovered film,” he admitted. “I’m actually really risk-averse and if I was good at anything, it would be like, ‘This is what I want to do’. I did not find anything I was good at.”
He attended college to study business and accounting, only to end up “miserable” until a lifelong love of film entered the conversation. “I thought, ‘I’m literally bad at everything I’ve ever tried in my life’. But I do know I like movies, and as a risk-averse person, I was like, ‘No matter how scary it is to consider going into filmmaking, it can’t be any worse than whatever I’m living right now, and I cannot do this any longer,'” Kwan shared. “So, it actually pushed me to become a filmmaker. So yeah, it’s a good thing I was bad.”
Now he’s on top of the world, with the industry eagerly awaiting the hotly-anticipated follow-up to Everything Everywhere All at Once. It goes without saying that Kwan has thrived after finding an area of expertise where he could excel, with that ‘Best Director’ trophy vindication that pursuing filmmaking was the right call.
