The sequence had to work as comedy, as action, and as character — Waymond’s ease with the fanny pack had to make sense as the expression of a man who has developed something unique and improbable into genuine mastery. Quan nailed the second take of the one-shot version after failing the first. He described the moment as one of the happiest of the entire production.
The fanny pack fight became one of the film’s most-discussed sequences — screenshotted, GIF’d, discussed in review after review as an emblem of the film’s ability to make absurdity feel earned. Quan’s execution of it was the reason it worked. His martial arts background was the reason his execution was possible.
## A24 and the Infrastructure of the Return
*Everything Everywhere All at Once* was produced and distributed by A24, the New York-based film company that has, since its founding in 2012, established itself as the most significant American independent studio of the early twenty-first century.
A24’s track record before *Everything Everywhere All at Once* included *Moonlight* (2016), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture; *Lady Bird* (2017); *Hereditary* (2018); *Midsommar* (2019); and *Minari* (2020), a film by Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung about a Korean-American family in Arkansas that received six Academy Award nominations. *Minari* is a useful predecessor to *Everything Everywhere* in this context: it demonstrated that A24 was willing to make and distribute films centered on Asian-American stories, told by Asian-American filmmakers, in ways that did not require those stories to be translated or adapted for a presumed non-Asian audience.