Emerson graduates The Daniels win 7 Oscars for ‘Everything Everywhere’

Sunday night, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” won the Best Picture Oscar. The film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, met when they were undergraduates at Emerson College in Boston.

Kwan, also from Westborough, dedicated his time to passing on a lesson he learned growing up in Massachusetts.

“One of the things I realized growing up is that one of the best things we can do for each other is to protect ourselves from the chaos of this crazy world we live in. Thanks to the storytellers here who did this for me,” Kwan said during his speech.

Earlier in the evening, Kwan and Scheinert won the Academy Award for Best Direction. Scheinert greeted her parents and all the mothers in the world during her acceptance speech. The two have spoken a lot about how important their mother was to them during their trip.

“We want to dedicate this to moms, to all the moms in the world, to our moms. Specifically, my mom and dad Ken and Becky, please don’t crush my creativity when I was making really disturbing horror movies, or really perverted comedy movies, or that I dressed in drag like a kid, which is no threat to anyone,” Scheinert said during his remarks.

Kwan and Scheinert also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. During Kwan’s speech, he acknowledged the formative influence Scheinert had on him.

“He was the person who told me I was a storyteller and a filmmaker before I could even say it myself, and I wouldn’t be here without him,” Kwan said. said during his speech.

The spark for this hugely creative partnership was ignited in an animation course the two took at Emerson, they said during a Q&A at Emerson last year.

After initially attending public school, Kwan transferred to Emerson and eventually felt like he belonged, he told Emerson College Today in 2016.

“There (were) so many… people like me, and it was just a really exciting couple of months when I realized I wasn’t a freak,” Kwan said at the time.

Although the two Daniels met as college students, they didn’t start making movies together until after graduation. That summer, they both worked as teaching assistants at Harvard’s New York Film Academy summer program for middle and high school students, they said. The Boston Globe.

Essentially working as “camp counsellors,” the couple said the job pushed them to collaborate.

“We were jealous of the kids because they had to make movies all day, and we didn’t,” Kwan told the World.

Kwan taught Scheinert how to use After Effects animation software, and Scheinert in turn taught Kwan how to shoot live action scenes. The result is a strange and surreal short film of less than a minute called “Swingers”.

Now, more than a decade later, the Daniels have gone from brave Boston film students to Hollywood pinnacle.

In total, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” won seven Oscars.