The physical preparation culminated in one of the film’s standout sequences: a fight scene involving a fanny pack, choreographed in a style derived from the Chinese martial art wushu and its rope dart techniques. Quan trained for weeks. The first take of the one-shot version of the sequence was, by his account, a disaster. The second take worked. He called it one of the happiest moments of the entire shoot.
## Production in a Pandemic
Filming on *Everything Everywhere All at Once* began in 2020. By that point the COVID-19 pandemic had begun to reshape every aspect of American life, and the film production industry was not exempt.
The production had completed 37 of its 38 scheduled shooting days when the shutdown came. One day of filming remained. The crew disbanded. The equipment was put away. Quan and his co-stars went home, and the film existed in a state of suspended incompletion.
Eight months later, the crew regrouped. The final day of filming was completed. The film was finished.
Before its release in March 2022, Quan experienced the specific anxiety of a person who has bet everything on a single opportunity and is waiting to find out if the bet pays off. He had auditioned via self-taped submissions — without the direct feedback of a callback to tell him how he was doing. He had lost his health insurance in the gap between completing the film and its release, the specific precarity of an actor between jobs in an industry where employer-provided coverage is tied to active employment. His producer encouraged him to wait.