Our Guest Daniel hwan and Daniel shindig collectively known as the Daniels are an Oscar winning pair of directors and writers known for their groundbreaking films including last year's Best Picture Winner everything everywhere all at once which premiered right here at South by Southwest Daniels welcome how we doing hello thank you we're doing good A little tired we just got off the stage doing a keynote and um right before that we were at the Oscars so it's been kind of like a I don't know it's been fun but like uh this is going to be really
chill yeah chill last night to relax here on this couch with you do you want to lay down right now I mean yeah make it a whole therapy maybe the second half maybe second half when things get really heavy then we'll just kind hav't done therapy in a minute I can use it I'm not licensed but I'll do my best neither is his therapist yeah found this lady just walked off the street and said like hey talk hear my problems please um so you guys have had such a crazy trajectory when it comes to your
careers one of my favorite things to do is point out the Turn Down for What music video and see you humping a TV very aggressively and say ladies and gentlemen one of your directors for everything everywhere all at once and that just Sparks a crazy story if you guys did commercials you did music videos and now you're Best Picture winners like can you talk to us about evolving as filmmakers through all of this for sure yeah I A lot of times like people would ask us questions while promoting everything everywhere uh you know about like
sudden success and uh and it would make me reflect on the opposite thing that I'm kind of grateful that we've been doing this together for 15 years uh not always for money but we we met each other and started making stuff about 15 years ago and so it it didn't feel like overnight we we got a little bit of training and practice making things and and learning how we like to make movies and and we we messed up a lot we definitely there are definitely a lot of projects that uh none of y'all have seen
and that's fine by me um but like it's I mean it's it's been a learning process the nice thing is like looking back you can see the through lines right you can see um we've always uh we've always wanted to have fun we always are are seeking to um surprise our audiences but also just give people something incredibly personal and um hopefully uh authentic um and we're jokes about butts yeah lot almost everything is a butt joke dildos you know everything in between that's our trademark but Spielberg has his his like you know his close-up
shots we have our butt shots put put that down but everybody else is fully encouraged to put butts in their movies too I don't I don't want it to be our trademark I want it to be you know for just a part of Being Human yeah yeah but for everybody you know that's the trademark there uh so your film Swiss army man which by the way anytime somebody comes up to me and says oh I loved everything everywh at once I'm like you have to watch Swiss army man if you love that so I I
try to be like your number one champ but these films push narrative boundaries right and you know I've been describing you guys as kind of the spearheads of the wins for creativity we had Jesse Eisenberg on the couch earlier who's promoting Sasquatch Sunset right and movies like this movies like God no he was not unfortunately you know but he was really regretful about it right right right probably for the best yeah I probably not for me I would have loved to have Sasquatch on my couch you guys just do so well at kind of like
again pushing those boundaries is telling stories that nobody else is telling and I believe it's truly inspiring everyone else to kind of do the same in Hollywood so can you talk to us about like what drives that need to just pretty much do what you want we didn't realize we were doing this at first but like we we Joker talk a lot about like chasing the algorithm being like what we did straight out of college was just like we were just trying to get people to click on our music videos on YouTube and this this
was like a long time ago before we even had the language to talk about it like no one knew how the algorithm was working no one was even using the term um algorithm but we but I was always like we were both inspired by really weird things and then that felt useful in that context and then it just became something that like uh informed I think helped us discover what we're good at and what we like to do which is um to chase after strange surreal experiences and then put something we deeply care about in
there so it doesn't isn't a waste of our time or the audiences um but it started with with just like trying to get those clicks like And subscribe and and then it a lot of Shame helped us learn some lesson and try to inject something useful in there like oh my God this is so empty don't like And subscribe we don't know what to say about the world yet like give us give us some time to learn I also think the fact that where a Duo really helps I think Duos in general if you look
at a lot of the most inventive um directors they are often Duos like um Phil Lord and Chris Miller all the spiderverse movies cloud with the Chance of Meatballs which is like one of their best if you don't if you haven't seen that inred same with the brothers they constantly sing genre playing with like different ways of of making movies hous obviously it's like and and if you look at solo directors their movies are all bad they're really boring and they don't and they don't know how to so crazy no but having two people it
forces you to try to one up each other to surprise each other and when you're surprising each other you often surprise the audience too and I think that's a big part of it is us um Having the courage to together that we wouldn't have alone I would never make the stuff I do without Daniel and same vice versa I was just thinking we just gave our keynote and mo mostly he he said really sincere thoughtful things about the world and I made self-conscious jokes but it was like oh but but I was also reflecting on
like we agree with each other a lot and so I'm like I'm like Greatful that Dan is so sincere and such a deep thinker and pushes me out of my my comfort zone to like talk about the things I believe but I'm scared to say you know um and then it's an honor to um make a stupid joke afterwards it's the best and yeah I think I would be booed off if it wasn't for the um occasional stupid yeah joke I would love to see youed off no I wouldn't love that but it would be
F Bo they would just fall asleep probably I think that's like the equivalent in the movie kind of like industry of being booed off right that's Hollow of like you know there's no umbrella but I think the sleeping is like just as worse or just back on your phones which is see all y'all on your phones right now clearly aren't doing a good job got this interview although like you're doing your job it's okay art that makes you sleepy on purpose is cool too that is cool that's art yeah yeah you know this movie is
meant to make you of there's a YouTube video called Joe perah talks you to sleep oh it's good it's incredible I've watched it like 15 times really I'm going to eat that cuz I have like massive insomnia hey me too what are you what are you I'm just kid hopefully I'm going take this new like YouTube do drugs but you talked so much about your collaboration with so much love and respect and admiration uh how do you navigate Creative differences you say you agree with each other a lot but there's got to be sometimes where
you know there's got to be a meaning of the minds and not yet not yet never um no it's like um uh it's it's like a work marriage you know and like I literally have like like read about like marriage counseling or like marriage therapy techniques and like I'm going okay that's great okay Dan and I should use I feel statements like maybe sometimes we should take a break or you know um start with like sandwich methoding our criticisms of each other with compliments things like that um but it but it's uh We've we've stumbled
into some stuff just by accident that work so well like I think the main thing we talk about is that like whoever cares the most wins oh you know and it's just like and and I love being surprised and I love collaboration and so like if if Dan like as soon as I feel like him digging his heels in and he cares I'm like well well great you seem to care a lot like let's go you know and and then there's the moments where we both care a lot and that becomes uh usually that becomes
a a focal point for us because that means something is wrong with the movie right something something's not working this it's not as good as it could be um and we're slowly it's hard sometimes in the to appreciate that and be like oh this is an opportunity when when we are really in having a conflict but it's like if a married couple got in a big fight about mac and cheese and you'd be like some there's something else going on what's beneath this mac and cheese why are we both digging our heels just the mac
and cheese is like that like so we'll be we'll argue about something on the movie on a movie and then we'll realize there's something deeper that needs to be addressed and that's why we're digging our heels in it's like we haven't gotten on the same page about something way bigger than like you know the color of the curtains or whatever yeah there's there's this incredible is it the was it the new New Yorker article yeah about Duos about do but just not even in film making just across history science and art and specific most Nobel
prizes are for teams of scientists A lot of times it's Duos uh and it's it's a fascinating read but they they really focus on these these two um programmers and coders um for Google one of the the you know formative um Duos for that company and just the way that they work allows them to work faster and to think outside the box in a way that is really beautiful and I think uh we should be encouraging this this sort of um search for a Synergy with another creative partner even if you're not a Storyteller or
filmmaker just having someone else who can really challenge you in ways that um no one else can it's like really um special I'm really lucky to have some some of those kind of relationships in my life this is this is very helpful for me to hear because uh before I started Tik Tok and which eventually turned into this sitting on a couch you started Tik Tok I started on your company I don't if they found out that a black man started Tik Tok that would be very confusing I would join have more that it does
right now so that's a that's an alternate universe movie I like to see but uh I I was in advertising and you know the way you know there's art director copywriter I was a copywriter in that duo but I came into advertising not knowing jack [ __ ] about advertising right but my partner grew up in the advertising World cuz his father was a big time art director so we relied on each other from day one because I was able to bring in some outside thinking he was able to teach me about the world at
the same time and we ended up creating some amazing things together so you know just hearing this I'm just kind of like really special and it applies like whether you're like you don't have to share titles to find collaboration like that and you you find out like so many filmmakers lean so hard on their producer or their manager or their wife who gets no credit or you know things like that um but it's like uh finding that partnership can mean so much yeahh so how do you approach um taking risk uh and what advice do
you have for filmmakers who are also kind of looking to do what you do and take those creative risks cuz you guys take a lot and we love it yeah I mean I could approach it to different yeah I mean let's go in unison okay 3 one risky to talk understand okay great perfect um I kind I weirdly got that I was like makes sense honestly the funny thing is we um because I come from animation and I I love like to have everything planned and I like to find connections I like to tie everything
up in a bow and he comes from improv which is really just like flying off the cuff of the seat of your pants and just is that even the term flying off the cuff F the cuff of the pants on SE cuff of my pants listen the last you got to bury that cuff Hatchet under the baker's dozen okay listen the last review we had we created the words x situationship so I think we're Crea something right now um but because we have both of these skill sets we've learned to really trust um ourselves and
our collaboration where um we we know when there's a idea or a um story worth chasing um even when we don't know how it's going to work out because we've done this yeah again for 15 years and we've done enough projects we' we've kind of figured out how to make mitigated risks that feel really risky to outside Outsiders but to us feel really safe and exciting and um I think that's something that uh again having that Duos ship having this really deep contrast in in processes it was really helpful early on and so now if
we come up with an idea often times uh we aren't excited about the project until we don't know how to finish it you know that's when we're like okay now now this is what we're going to be working on um and so with swi Iron Man and everything everywhere in our next film that we're making right or we're working on right now um they've always started with these unanswerable questions and uh it's really fun to kind of you know Skydive without and then build the parachute on the way down thing um yeah yeah I was
thinking the same thing yeah so in one extreme we try to figure it out as we go and that's interesting and makes us work harder and on the other hand it's that a lot of times we're taking like much more calculated risks Than People realize and we're like no we're playing to our strengths like we've like like if you watch all our music videos like oh they tested out like half the stuff they stuck in their movies and like we figured out what people might like or or we you know we do sit and talk
a lot about um worst case scenarios and how to avoid them and like oh we're not and I'll just completely bail on an idea even if it creatively sounds good if I'm not if it's too risky for other reasons like oh that could be our whole budget or you know we could kill someone or uh you know um that actor's famously difficult I don't think they would be a good collaborator even though we could get our movie financed off them you know that kind of we're always like discussing how to um how risky we want
to be um and and uh time will tell when we finally go too risky I'm I'm waiting for that day not to like say oh I'm waiting for you guys to fall but just there's like limits of it there's like limits of it cut that out and I'm waiting for that risky but it's almost like it's almost like uh when I watch Fast and Furious the franchise and it's like how far can they take this remember we were all rooting for them to go to space since like Fast 6 it's like when when is that
happening right so it's almost like like how far can we go and how far can we push the boundaries of creativity and things like so I'm wait I I really want you to win don't don't worry see I saved myself in that um so very prevalent conversations are happening at this conference of uh AI in the film industry and you know we're all talking about it there's fears of it there's applications of it that are being thought of do you have any thoughts on what that means for the film industry moving forward what's it stand
for uh artificial intelligence artificial oh right yeah we have thoughts on that one um we we have we have too many a couple couple hours talk we we have a lot um I think one of the things that um that is really confusing about the conversation is that we have a lot of really smart people saying this is going to change the world and save us all you know and then on the other hand we have a lot of very smart people who are also working on the AI telling us this is going to end
Humanity um and so the the the the tough thing is like or the only thing we can all agree on is that this is going to fundamentally shift everything like everything is going to be changed um and we have to be really careful um with these typ of changes I was just I mean this is part of like AR Keo actually um nothing in life is for free Evolution and progress and Technology there's always winners and there's always losers and our Collective history we kind of have been quietly erasing what has been lost with every
new techn technological progression um going all the way back to Stone Fire agriculture um I use this example in the talk uh when something becomes two like you know technology is great you get efficiency you get convenience all these things really help um us all open the possibilities of what a society can do um but when something becomes too convenient it becomes disposable and when something becomes too disposable uh then we run into it like rather than we run into the problems that we're having right now which is like everything is disposable the people around
us the your shoes the the the planet itself and if we allow um technology to disposable eyesee want to make up a word um everything at such a pace that we can't catch up and we can't um rescue what is good right right and and hold on to those things that's the danger I'm not against AI um on principle I'm just against the the speed and the the the scale and scope that is being implemented we've we've already seen what social media has done to all of us and that was uh baby AI right you
know that was just like little little tiny algorithms that have made us all depressed and you know disconnected and um just really unsatisfied with our lives what will AI do to us be and when will we realize it before it's too late um yeah I could I could go on for a while but I I just within the film industry I think something we have to be really careful of is how do we make sure that when we do use AI because we're all going to have to it's all it's in it's in the system
and we're already using it to point exactly we're are using it on your phone but how can we be really critical of of of our actions and really ask ourselves every time we use it what is it for what are we doing what am I devaluing in this process what am I uplifting in this process how can I make sure that every time I use it I'm asking our society to have a larger conversation um because whatever the teachers are talking about is very different from what the filmmakers are talking about or what the coders
are talking about and no one is talking about the big picture which is this wholesale um shift where we are devaluing um the last thing that's left which is our humanity and our connections to each other and if we can't hold on to that in this transition uh we're going to see a lot of pain and suffering and and and it's uh it's kind of inevitable in some ways but how can we make sure that in this transition we protect as many people as we can and also protect ourselves as much as we can um
anyways I could keep going you have thoughts yeah uh I'll do some bumper stickers thoughts bumper sticks bum stickers deeply suspicious of the people who are trying to sell it to us like it's just great they're extremely rich they're trying to get richer and I'm really like freaked out you know by Super Bowl ads being like a is going to be so great and one caveat under the there are a lot of people who have really good intentions but they're looking at this much of the picture and they're not realizing for everything that that they
might do over here there are 10 other um road is paved with good intention exactly exactly and you have to be really careful with something like AI keep going buper stickers totally one one time someone like pointed out to us that like anytime you hear the word efficiency uh someone's job might get destroyed like just like anytime in life it's like hey that's going to be a lot more efficient you just got to ask like okay who who can't feed their family uh because of that new cool thing that you know QVC gave you and
and this is like a super efficiency machine so it's like a it's like a scary thing and like someone pointed out to us once that like you know there's there's something called a tech ethicist and like a lot of like AI companies like hire these people to like try to game out possible scenarios um but there's like one ethicist for every like 1,000 employees at these companies like it's like a nightmarish Dro in the bucket and so like until you know Microsoft hires like 5050 you know uh ethicists like trying to do this safely and
people trying to like do the cool stuff right I'm super suspicious of whatever Adobe tries to sell me you know or Microsoft tries to like put online for free that might you know destroy consensus truth and all of our elections and make it impossible to tell if any audio or visual or writing that you see was created by a robot or by a human you know this is a great example just pointing out they just show me the Open Sea the Open Sea thing like I just saw a video of that of the puppies like
in the snow and I was just like what the hell is this yeah it's pretty wild but like but don't worry they have guard rails for all political things yeah of course they do but I mean it's worth pointing out the thing that adobe created is actually this beautiful technology that allows you to dub over any voice and any voice actor to speak a different language and no longer have to have the problem of subtitles or dubbing this it's a Rosetta Stone and every story now can be translated to everyone in the world how beautiful
how how interconnected we are um if we were telling a story of like connectivity and collaboration it'd be like oh now we can communicate better to like you know so for as a filmmaker that's beautiful on the flip side when you openly um you know propagate that to the world suddenly you have these problems where and it's happening all the time now especially this election year uh politicians are saying things that they never said you know and that this is something that we can't put back in the box right and people say that all the
time you can't put the genie back in the box I'm like I agree why are we releasing more Genies it's like let's let's figure this one out exactly like and so and again we can do it eventually when we have the systems that are um strong enough and responsible wise enough to contain that power but until then it feels uh incredibly I mean the U the EU has is getting ahead of it and they're trying their best um China actually because they have a little bit more of a totalitarian hold um they're doing a better
job of honestly regulating it in the US we're you know one thing I've heard is US yeah exactly so the the US like you know we won the arms race to social media and look what it did to us what happens if we win the arms race to AI obviously this is a massive geopolitical problem that is like bigger than all these things um but we have to be really careful like I I do think there needs to be this massive Global coordinated effort on a scale that we've never seen before otherwise we're going to
get the Tower of Babel we're going to get this complete destru yeah exactly we're going to have this complet construction of our shared narrative and ability to trust each other um but as film making goes uh I'm excit for a bunch of creative funny activist badass filmmakers to use AI to tell beautiful stories that value themselves their selfworth a world that we could live in that speak truth to power that like make the people pulling these levers like second guess what they're doing and if AI helps you get there to make your story that we
need to hear then like do it but pay people well in the meantime that's it well you did have a lot to say about that and I loved every second I loved every second of it and now I have the final question right you've premiered everything everywhere all at once at South by Southwest back in 2022 it made a big run at the Oscars the biggest run you could possibly do like it did Awards I was at that Afterparty I saw Anderson pack screaming Clean Sweep throughout that entire I was I was there I saw
it it was fun it was amazing it was a good DJ side he was amazing there man I was it was so but um talk to us about like South by Southwest and like what that has meant to like your career oh my God I I really love this place in this Festival the first time we were here was 2012 um with our first music video uh that has ever not the first one actually one of the first music videos that has ever played a festival and um I was like oh we're allowed here too
as music video directors most festivals don't have a section and so we just kept coming back every couple years with a new video and really building a community meeting a lot of people I have some really um for ative memories um that has happened here when it came time to decide where we were going to Premiere everything everywhere there's a lot of different things that got passed around and and honestly there was other places that people were suggesting and we were going moving towards um but the universe really just like made it uh the right
place the right time like this was 2022 just as people were starting to get comfortable in the theaters and our movie was ready and and it and we were we were just like this is the best place the Paramount Theater with this crowd you you know like this movie is made for these these people um and so it was it was honestly one of the most fulfilling beautiful experiences of my life preparing that movie here to that audience um and uh my my uh the story I tell is like that night I didn't look at
my phone once which is like if if that's not fulfillment then what is you know um and so yeah I'm just I'm incredibly grateful for the community I'm incred grateful to claudet who has been you know when we first came here she was the head of shorts and music videos and she was that music video lady like when we showed up we got a very warm CLA at welcome and uh and met a lot of other incredible filmmakers uh making music videos there and but it's cool that the year that our movie premiered is also
um the same year that she got promoted to the head of the festival it felt really much like we were growing together and she's become a good friend now and I'm just really like also she is so good at her job it's like ridiculous um how good she is at introducing movies movie theaters um anyways I love sou yeah we're it's it's lovely to be back I I will say um I was rejected a lot when I was first starting out from here I always wanted to come here just show them what's what yeah I
like if if people are watching this and you didn't get in with your movie that you worked really hard on me too that happened to me back in 2009 and uh and and it uh it wasn't my time yet I hadn't like cracked the nut and then um but it uh I'm also from Alabama and uh the film festival there sidewalk Film Festival like changed my life and there's something about like coming to like I love I love like Southern Arts festivals you know like it's just s it feels like quadruply valuable and beautiful to
like see like diversity and strangeness and weirdness like happening in like a a Southern state that like other people around the world might not expect this kind of culture or energy or these kind of artists are are like hustling making crazy stuff down here so like it feels like homey as well for me that's great that's that's amazing y'all like I I appreciate you guys coming on the couch and talking to me at the South by Southwest Studio this is just as good as we said it was going to be I know we we did
promise lying down and we never got there we like Li now I'll lie down here you li down there thank you for coming to the South by Southwest Studio you catch all the interviews on the South by Southwest YouTube page that's youtube.com/ sxsw I'm Juju these are the Daniels thanks for watching thank you for watching relaxing we're just going to play ourselves out get some elevator music
