Working on the genre-bending Everything Everywhere All at Once meant that editor Paul Rogers had to jump from comedy to action to sci-fi to drama, all while following Oscar-nominated Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn, a Chinese American woman just trying to run her laundromat and complete an IRS audit when she becomes entangled in an adventure that finds her traveling through the multiverse. But Rogers admits that throughout this complex edit, his overall approach was most akin to character drama.

“The action scenes and the big crazy montages were almost like the kind of fun escape from the real work of the family drama and of making it connect emotionally,” he says. Which is not to say the action wasn’t a sizable challenge in cutting Daniels’ movie, which was released by A24 and is now nominated for 11 Oscars, including best picture, direction, screenplay and editing.

Rogers also had to be sure that the jumps between universes didn’t disorient the viewers; to do that, the filmmakers leaned in to the tropes of different film genres, including use of music, aspect ratios, color correction and the editing style. “You could have the Lifetime movie genre of a marriage in trouble in one universe,” he notes, “and then you could have the Matrix treatment in the other universe. Those kind of storytelling tropes were really helpful in terms of anchoring us into these different universes.”

In cutting the early part of the movie, he also had to set up the rules of the multiverse for the viewer to understand so that he could be increasingly bold in his editing choices, jumping to new universes sometimes for mere seconds. “There was a lot of groundwork that had to be laid,” says Rogers. “A lot of that groundwork was laid in the script, but we definitely spent a lot of time in the edit.” As the story is told through the eyes of Evelyn, he emphasizes that staying with Yeoh’s performance was also a great strength. “She was so tuned in to where she was at any given moment that if you just follow Evelyn and her eyes, you know what’s happening and you know where she is emotionally.”

The movie comes to a conclusion when Evelyn and her daughter, Joy (Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu), finally have a confrontation and make peace in the laundromat parking lot. Says Rogers, “I know from watching the footage, that was emotionally a really tough scene for Stephanie and Michelle to shoot. They just let it all out, and it was incredibly emotional to watch the footage. I felt a huge amount of pressure to do right by what they had given us.” Sometimes in filmmaking, he finds, one can watch powerful dailies, but then “it loses something [in the final film]. And I was terrified of that happening with this scene.” So he spent a lot of time not just cutting but then tweaking and reexamining all the takes — “just making sure that I had done right by that scene.”

That included letting the audience see the mother and daughter finally listening to each other through Yeoh’s and Hsu’s standout performances. “It felt like a really powerful thing to watch them actually take in what the other person was feeling and what the other person was saying,” Rogers says. “You can see Evelyn finally seeing her daughter, and you can see Joy finally seeing her mother. I thought that that was such a powerful statement for the end of the film.”

This story first appeared in the Feb. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.