Bing Liu has built a pair of terrific films around the question of how young people come of age when the odds are stacked against them. His Oscar-nominated 2018 doc Minding the Gap charted several years in the lives of three skateboarding friends in Rockford, Illinois—including Liu himself—as they struggled through troubled families and identities. And now in his first narrative feature, Preparation for the Next Life, he adapts Atticus Lish’s novel into a Queens-set love story between an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and a haunted U.S. Army veteran. Like his first film, Liu’s eye for human truths reveals both lyrical tenderness and sobering realities.
I recently caught up with the thirty-six-year-old Liu, who shared reflections on how his own immigrant story shaped his connection to the material and why he was drawn to its characters living on the margins, how he guided actors Sebiye Behtiyar and Fred Hechinger through a unique process allowing their connection to blossom on screen, perspectives on the film’s visual language and more.
What about this story made it right for your first narrative feature?
Bing Liu: It’s the story of outsiders living on the fringes of society, but it’s also really similar to the story of my mom and me. We both moved from China when I was five in the early 90s, and she was working in Chinese restaurants. She was working her way up in the kitchens as part of the waitstaff. When I was eight, a customer asked her out on a date. She said yes for many complicated reasons and that relationship led to a choice she had to make: ‘Do I get married to this man?’ That marriage would give us citizenship. While the character in the book chose otherwise, my mom chose yes. What would be the emotional cost of that choice? So that was my personal weigh-in.
Preparation for the Next Life tackles some substantial topics. It’s right in the current moment regarding the struggles of the undocumented community. It also addresses the tolls of PTSD. Yet it never feels didactic and always leads with its characters.
BL: A lot of that came from working with Kartemquin in Chicago, which produced Hoop Dreams and who produced Minding the Gap. Before I started working with them, Minding the Gap was a bit more informational. But then once I was introduced to Kartemquin and their work with films like Hoop Dreams, Stevie and Harlan County, I learned that documentaries could include characters that are making choices on a journey of change. And through that social issues that will come up in a more organic and emotional way. I think I took that to heart when I transitioned into fiction. I felt like we didn’t need to hit anything on the head. We just had to tell the story of this couple trying to make a dream of theirs come to fruition. And when that doesn’t happen, what do they do?
When Atticus Lish talked about his novel, he said he wanted the bond between the principal characters to feel so strong that it could “melt a chain-link fence.” That intensity comes through in your film—the sense of a connection that burns bright, even if only for a short time. What’s striking is that you brought together two very different performers: Sebiye Behtiyar, a newcomer just out of the Savannah College of Art and Design, and Fred Hechinger, who already has a robust résumé with roles in The White Lotus, The Nickel Boys, Thelma and Gladiator II. How did you help them find that spark on screen?
BL: We had a two-week rehearsal scheduled in the prep phase. But what that really means is that you’re trying to cram rehearsal into everything else you have to do in those two weeks of prep, like location scouting and department-head meetings. What ends up happening is you get an hour here or there. An early conversation I had with them both was, ‘Look, we can do this the short way. We can just rehearse scenes and try to get them up on their feet and feel comfortable enough going in on the day and filming them. Or we can do this like a play. We can explore it off the page. We can explore character. We can explore wrong choices or weird choices.’ The were like, ‘Cool, let’s do that.’
So we would start every rehearsal with something I learned while interviewing skateboarders: you get the most honest, holistic, emotionally vulnerable interviews right after people skateboard. It’s because there’s a sort of grounding that happens, and they feel fully in their bodies and present with you. So we’d start every rehearsal with this assignment: each of us would choose a song, so we’d have three songs. We wouldn’t tell each other what the song is. When we got to the rehearsal, we would all dance to each other’s songs nonstop—no questions asked. It was a way of doing what skateboarding did to those skateboarders—grounding us in a sort of way. And then we were ready to do the work after we had all just done this silly, weird, vulnerable thing together. It helped us grow closer.
Once it was clear that they had a specific type of chemistry we let them just go beyond. We just pushed them to go beyond the script; to keep going. What would happen? We filmed a 10-minute take where they just kept coming up with ideas and making choices. There was almost like an aspect of them in which they had grown up together or something. They turned into children with each other; it was a kid-like innocence, almost like siblings or something when we did that first McDonald’s scene read.
We see that childlike rush in the movie, which is a luxury for each because the weight of the world is on them. He’s gone to war, maybe shot a gun and killed people but hasn’t been in love or isn’t equipped. She doesn’t feel like she fits anywhere, and a relationship is the last thing she’d expect. Yet for a brief moment, their burdens fall away.
BL: For me it felt like this is how it feels to be in puppy-dog love as teenagers. You run around; it’s physical; you’re wrestling; you’re racing. Everything feels like a dream and everything blurs around you. You become hyper-obsessed with this person in front of you. I remember when we rehearsed the scene that happens the morning after they consummate their relationship. I think the way we unlocked it was: ‘I think you guys are meeting each other for the first time in a new way.’ It’s so physical and there’s been lust involved. After the first time having sex it’s like, okay, now what? That’s the part where a lot of young people don’t have examples.
The whole sequence from getting into the taxi—‘take us to the closest hotel’—to the morning after is quite something. And in that morning moment you withhold their touch by keeping them in separate close-ups until that final two-shot against the window reveals their hands. They fit together in that room but where do they fit in that skyline behind them?
BL: I love that the city is so far away, too. You’re not in it. It’s kind of an aspirational thing.
There’s a current view that American movie love stories are out of vogue—that ticket buyers might not want to go to them. I appreciated seeing two likeable people fall in love. Did you think of it as a love story while making it?
BL: I think I just wanted to make something that was different. I’ve seen a lot of relationships play out like this with people who haven’t had the best examples of what a healthy relationship is. I think love doesn’t always look clean and simple. People fall in love for all different reasons and meet in all different ways, and they have experiences that—even if they don’t work out—if you can really be present enough in them, you’ll walk away with being changed as a person. I haven’t really seen enough of those stories.
It’s the story of outsiders living on the fringes of society, but it’s also a story that’s really similar to my mom and me.
-Bing Liu
Specifically regarding Sebiye’s performance and being selected as your lead, what was it about her—as a novice who’d only been in a few student films—that made her right for this role?
BL: It was so scary to cast this role. It was just going to be a big lift. We needed somebody who could speak fluent English, Uyghur and Mandarin, and understand Cantonese. Somebody who would have the emotional vulnerability but also the authentic cultural background to bring to the role; somebody who was believable as an immigrant woman. Sebiye was our first self-tape. There were less than eight people that I saw. I think there was a reason why our casting director sent her first. There’s something about her.
It seems that many young actors today are hyper-confident on screen and hit their marks with a lot of attitude. She doesn’t do that and seems less interested in ‘performing,’ per se. She considers, listens, looks and conveys. It’s a less-is-more, naturalistic performance that’s greater for that. Is that how you saw it?
BL: Yeah, absolutely. After we cast her we brought Fred in for chemistry, and we rented this loft in New York’s Soho. I gave them the McDonald’s scene, and immediately they had a really interesting connection. But what I noticed is that they listened to each other, which isn’t always the case right away. I think sometimes you get actors together and they’re both talking over each other, or performing and making choices over each other. So I was like, okay, how far can we go? Let’s just keep going past and beyond the scene. And they went for a 10-minute take where they just kept making choices because they kept listening to each other, and it was believable. Sebiye has the ability not only to let you in on what she’s feeling but also to stay on track. She’s going to stay present with her scene partner.
New York City has been a prolific shooting location for movies this year with Celine Song’s Materialists and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing. All the way back to Midnight Cowboy, it’s been a great place to depict strugglers and strivers. Had you experienced the city before you made this film? Did you have a view on it?
BL: I have a very particular view of spaces, particularly urban spaces, because for most of my life when I travel I bring my skateboard with me. You get a sense of a city and its inhabitants on a street level when you’re sitting down waiting for your friend to do a trick, or sitting in this urine-stained alley, and there’s unhoused people hanging out with you. I think there’s something about that which I felt was particularly rich in New York—there are more people, more going on and more chaos. So yeah, that was my initial experience of New York City from the skate trips. And then when I was developing this film, I would just do urban exploration in Queens; particularly in Flushing. I’d go into places I probably shouldn’t have gone into and then wait to get kicked out and then apologize. That helped me get a sense of what it’s like on the non-customer-facing side of Flushing.
There are different visual styles in the movie. In the first half, they’re at that street level you mention, running around town with near euphoria. There’s that wonderful shot where they have ice cream and the camera cuts through the crowd and presents them as if they are the only two people in the city at that moment. And you almost create two different places: lyrical and romantic in the first half and more hardscrabble later.
BL: When the cinematographer, Ante Cheng, and I were discussing the movie we talked about how to make the visuals feel like they would be coming from the characters’ experiences and not like we were looking from the outside in. I think the first half feels more impressionistic—more Wong Kar-wai or Dardennes brothers at times—just really fluid. And a lot of what we talked about, too, were films like Heat or Magnolia, which give a magnanimous quality to what on paper are kind of small plot points. For the characters, these small moments feel huge. We wanted to figure out how to represent that in the second half.
And you chose to shoot in widescreen—2.35 or close to it. I think you were debating whether to go widescreen or spherical or otherwise. You came up with a hybrid approach, right?
BL: We tested a lot of cameras and aspect ratios before settling on 2.35 and the (Sony) Venice 2 camera. I did not want this to feel only social realist. How could we take the edge off? How could we give this some impression? Anamorphic felt too much; it was distracting and style over substance. So Panavision helped us develop a special 1.3 lens, which is in between anamorphic and spherical in terms of the quality of what the lens does. And it was perfect. It gave us a little bit of impressionism, but not too much.
You also have a lovely score here by Emile Mosseri; one with a degree of romantic propulsion, you might say. Can you share thoughts on working with him?
BL: One reason why I wanted to work with Emile was when we first spoke and I was talking to different composers, I was like, ‘I’m looking for somebody who wants to play in a sandbox much, much before—much sooner than—you’d usually get to the part where you score, and I don’t want to show you the film. I think I want the scoring process to be its own thing. Part of what helps me in documentary editing is that I use music to inspire different emotional sequences and different ways of trying to get into the story. So can we do this with this narrative film? Can you and I create things that we feel can get at what this film is saying emotionally that can inform the way I’m going to edit it?’
So that’s what we did. Near the end of the scoring process, I flew out to LA where he has a home studio in his garage, and we stayed up until one in the morning a few nights just trying other things. He’s really talented—he plays piano and guitar—so some of what we were doing felt more like working with an actor than with composers I’ve worked with in the past, in the sense that he’s never going to give you the same thing twice. The way we work isn’t technical but more, ‘Let’s talk about what we discovered in that last take on the piano or guitar, about what we liked or about going in a different direction.’ Working with him felt like working with a true artist.
Love doesn’t always look clean and simple. People fall in love for all different reasons, and even if it doesn’t work out, if you’re present enough, you walk away changed.
-Bing Liu
I’m sure you are fielding quite a bit of discussion around the film’s immigration themes.
BL: People bring up the issue of immigration a lot. Depending on how they ask it, I answer differently. But typically, the thing I say most is that if you’re a student of history, you know the history of U.S. immigration policy is long and winding, and this isn’t the first time it’s been very draconian regarding who gets a shot at making a life here. Unfortunately, we’re in the time we’re in. But it says something that while the book was written during the Obama years and the film was made during the Biden years, the story is still relevant today.
It shows the reality of what it takes even to make it in this country. It’s not easy. There’s a spiritual and emotional cost to getting—if you are even able to—material gains. If you’re lucky, you find a community. At the end of the film, Aishe does have a bit of community. She lives in the middle of nowhere, but she has people she works with and lives next to that, in some ways, understand her situation, and she understands them. She’s picked up yet another language. Life goes on. There’s not a lot you can control in this world, but if you’re lucky you can find people with whom you can commune.
Earlier you mentioned the notion of social realism. We used to have social-realist filmmakers in the U.S.—perhaps John Cassavettes in the 70s and a healthy 80s/90s festival circuit of independent films, which has kind of dried up. Those movies looked at ordinary lives and dilemmas. Not so much anymore in America, whereas in other countries we have the Dardenne brothers, Ken Loach and more. Would it be fair to call you a social realist given the themes in Minding the Gap and this movie?
BL: I feel like that’s outside of my career title to say that. I don’t know. I feel like I just know what I know. I know what feels right. I feel like I’m a very intuitive person. I just go off my gut and what I know in my bones. I let that guide. But yeah, I’m not mad if somebody says I’m a social realist. That’s my work.
You got an Academy Award nomination a few years ago. Was that a surprise? Here you are, a first-time filmmaker who picked up a camera and for many years to document your life and those of two friends—and suddenly you’re an Academy Award nominee. What was that like?
BL: It felt dissociative. When nominations were announced live on an internet stream, I was watching in bed, sick with the flu, like, ‘This is so weird—my name is nominated.’ I was making my second documentary at the time so I immediately drove to a shoot and turned my phone off for the day. It was surreal.
Getting into Sundance felt a bit more like a shock. I got a phone call from a programmer and I didn’t pick up, so he left a voicemail: ‘Hey, we’re in our final selection round for Sundance this year. Can you call us back? We just have one question for you.’ I missed his call! I called him back and it went to voicemail. I kept calling and it went to voicemail. The next 12 hours that I couldn’t get a hold of him were the most stressful of my life. The next day I finally got him and he said, ‘How would you like to come to Sundance with your film?’ That was more of a shock because when I first started this project I was just going to put it up on Vimeo, like a lot of the other passion projects I’d done.
And then Hulu bought it and put their might behind it to enter the awards race that year. I started learning over the course of that year how the sausage is made in terms of how a campaign is run. I was getting sent all over to basically glad-hand and kiss rings and try to get votes, and that was really strange and weird.
That’s slightly nonchalant.
BL: Yeah. It just feels literally uncanny; unbelievable. I can’t compare it to anything else. At its core, it’s capital-W weird.
Not every young director gets Brad Pitt and Barry Jenkins backing their first narrative movie. It looks like you’re going to have quite a road ahead. What are you thinking about in terms of what you want to do or don’t? Sometimes careers are built on what people turn down.
BL: There are some fiction projects and a couple docs I’m developing. I just want to keep remembering why I got into this business, and that is to make a difference in the world. I think it’s easy to lose sight of that once there’s more money and audiences and partners involved, and I don’t want to lose sight. It’s happened to some other projects I’ve developed, where the thing that made me sign up for the project kind of fizzled and faded into something else. I had to really come to terms with that and make a decision about whether or not I want to continue. So yeah, I guess I’m still thinking about that.
When will you make a follow-up to Minding the Gap? I thought of Michael Apted’s nine-film ‘Up’ series. Have you thought about it?
BL: I have, yeah. I think there’s a reason why there hasn’t been a Hoop Dreams sequel. It’s such a specific time and place in those boys’ lives and in media literacy. I was making that film before everybody got literate at self-representing and self-narrativizing through our phones. There was a more vulnerable aspect I could get from those boys in the 2010s that I don’t know if I can get in the 2020s. I think there’s something to be said about how Michael Apted’s series feels at times a little more anthropological. You’re literally getting updates. They’re gathering and it’s almost reunion-type filmmaking at times. I think that might be the way to do it, but then I don’t know if that is what I want to do.
That’s interesting because Apted could be called a documentarian and also a narrative filmmaker—he moved comfortably between disciplines for his whole career. Not many do.
BL: Yeah. I think Bennett Miller is kind of a great— I know he’s been trying to make another doc for years, but yeah, his first film, The Cruise, was amazing.
And then to follow that up with Capote.
BL: And then Capote! He’s one of the few examples. RaMell Ross is a good example. I’m curious to see what he does next. But you’re right. Early on during meetings after Minding the Gap people asked me, ‘What career do you want to emulate?’ At the time I couldn’t think of any doc-fiction people who could move back and forth in a fluid way. What I said was Richard Linklater, because he retains his voice. He started in indies, has done studio films and still does indies. He does it in an uncompromising and earnest way that’s very him. I think he cares a lot about the community he comes from, too. But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think of doc and narrative as that different. The pathway to them getting made is very different. I do feel like making a doc is a very specific way of doing things, and in some ways it’s an insular industry. So I’m glad I speak the language of how to make something happen there.
You might also do what Chloé Zhao did with The Rider—living for months on the reservation or with the real-life caravan of Nomadland. Or Debra Granik on Winter’s Bone, living in the Appalachians to gain an understanding of the community. In Leave No Trace she did that too.
BL: That’s right. I mean, Kelly Reichardt has done that also. There are examples, but you’re right.
I just want to keep remembering why I got into this business, and that is to make a difference in the world.
-Bing Liu
You thought you were going to teach English and then you became a filmmaker. Have you accepted this as your vocation now?
BL: I think ‘accept’ is maybe not the verb I would use because it feels more tenuous than that. It’s more like I’m grateful that I get to do this. But there’s a sort of uncertainty as to whether I can keep doing this because I don’t know if I can adapt in a commercial way. And I don’t know if that’s required of me to keep going and sustain in this career. I don’t think I have the constitution for that type of filmmaking.
There’s a long list of fairly ‘non-commercial’ but successful indie filmmakers eking it out. Last year Brady Corbet said he, Sean Baker and other Best Director nominees were still barely making it.
BL: I’ve gotten a call from a Marvel producer who asked, ‘Do you want to…’ I was like, ‘No, I don’t.’
But good to get the call, right?
BL: Yeah, good to get the call. That was like five or six years ago. I think it was a different time. Now it feels like I just see a lot of people struggling. Even if they have done the indie thing of making a movie with equity financiers and they take it to market, they can’t get the film sold or distributed in a meaningful way. I think a lot of people are looking at what Sean Baker is going to do next because, in a way, Anora was his most commercial film. But he’s always spurned traditional financing because he’s wanted to retain final cut and copyright. It’s great to have somebody like him fighting for that type of model. I think everybody’s watching to see if he is going to go more commercial than Anora.
Yes—like, will he work on a $20 million budget or even higher?
BL: Yeah, exactly. I think he’s a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for filmmakers who want to make independent films that retain artistic freedom.
What’s your favorite movie?
BL: My favorite? Oh, my God. I don’t know. Weirdly, the movie I’ve probably seen the most is Waking Life. But I don’t know if it’s my favorite movie. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of the movie that I’ve seen the most.
What’s your comfort movie—something you can fall asleep to that makes you feel good?
BL: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Yeah.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Preparation for the Next Life opens theatrically on September 4.
