Daniel Scheinert

Daniel Scheinert (born 1987, Birmingham, Alabama) is one half of Daniels, the directing partnership he formed with Daniel Kwan at Emerson College. They made their name on music videos — Foster the People’s “Houdini,” DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” — before the features Swiss Army Man (2016) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.

“Frame by frame the opposite of an AI-generated movie”

Everything Everywhere was made by a visual-effects crew of roughly a dozen people, most of them Scheinert and Kwan’s friends, working largely by hand. When trade headlines began recasting that achievement as an AI success story — “How AI Is Revolutionizing Filmmaking” — Scheinert took it personally. At a Salute Your Shorts Film Festival panel in Los Angeles in August 2023, sitting alongside four of the film’s VFX artists, he read the headlines aloud and rejected them.

His VFX collaborators backed him up on the same panel, describing the “everywhere Evelyns” sequence as manual Photoshop work and the multiverse flashes as done “one by one.” The team conceded a green-screen removal tool here and a rotoscope assist there — but nothing that would justify the framing.

The SXSW keynote

In March 2024 Daniels returned to SXSW as keynote speakers. Kwan told the room he was “really terrified” of AI while insisting “we’re not saying don’t use A.I. — I don’t believe in dogmas.” Scheinert’s contribution was narrower and more practical: he told filmmakers to interrogate their own motive before reaching for the tool, asking whether a given use increases the value in your life or simply makes money for billionaires. Then he went after the sales pitch itself.

That is a narrower objection than it first sounds. Scheinert has never vowed never to use AI, never called for a ban, and never signed on to stop it; his quarrel is with unexamined adoption and with who captures the upside. It is also worth noting the irony he lives with: Daniels built their early career, in his own telling, by “chasing the algorithm” with viral shorts on YouTube and Vimeo.