With his 2018 documentary Minding the Gap, director Bing Liu crafted a tender, reflective story that functioned as a portrait of masculinity, centered on three young men whose friendship is bound to their love of skateboarding. Liu’s ability to coax truth from his subjects — including his own mother, whom he interviews about his abusive step-father — garnered the film a Best Documentary Feature nomination at the Academy Awards. His first narrative fictional feature, Preparation for the Next Life, refines that sense of care and gentle touch to even greater effect.
Now in theaters, the film is the tightly wound tale of a Uyghur migrant, Aishe (played by first-time actress Sebiye Behtiyar), who pieces together a quiet, scrappy existence of grueling days and tired nights working in Chinatown kitchens. She tentatively starts a relationship with an Army veteran named Skinner (Fred Hechinger), who is struggling with PTSD and housing precarity. The relationship isn’t a reprieve from the systemic forces bearing down on them individually, but rather a magnifying glass for them. Her liminal status in America siphons happiness and ease from her life, making it difficult for her to connect with him. Similarly, Skinner’s inability to get the care he so desperately needs for his PTSD strains their bond. Liu directs heart-expanding, tender performances out of his leads, and the screenplay by Martyna Majok forgoes the maudlin or condescending notes of so many Hollywood depictions of immigration stories.
Preparation for the Next Life is being released in a moment of strife and fever-pitch arguments about the American Dream — its perils and illusory qualities especially for those who have migrated to a country so primed on their exploitation. Through Aishe’s carefully tended story, Liu demonstrates the belief that if you work hard enough, abundance will follow to be more fantasy than truth. As he tells Vulture, he understands some of this from personal experience.
How do you create a sense of intimacy on-camera that the audience can feel?
I think as somebody who grew up skateboarding and making skateboarding videos, I love being able to experience a sense of movement through space. Also, my mom worked in all these Chinese restaurants as a waitress, and I feel like I never saw her stop moving. She was always doing, doing, even when she wasn’t at work. I know young men who remind me of Skinner, and they can’t really stay still. There’s a kind of restlessness. I wanted to use that restlessness in these characters to help us move through this rich tapestry of Flushing, Queens, through its labyrinth and underbelly. That, to me, is engaging enough that when we land in these close-ups, or moments where there’s tension or story happening between these two characters, we’re going to be like, Okay, this stands apart from the other kind of kinetic energy that we’ve been feeling.
What is your relationship to the close-up as a director? I feel like a lot of directors maybe depend too much on it; it’s better deployed sparingly. Personally, I’m interested in the stories the entire body can tell, especially for someone who is working on their feet like Aishe.
There’s a whole language outside of the close-up, if you are keen to pay attention to it with these two characters. They both have a very specific relationship with their bodies. This Uyghur immigrant, she has this father figure whose relationship with her was built on working out, on being strong and tough and fast. I wanted to be able to show how she carries that in her body. And then with Skinner, he went through basic training and was in the Army. And the backstory that we focus on the most with him is this relationship with his best friend in the Army, and their whole thing was kind of wrestling and getting physical. A part of what makes Aishe and Skinner have misunderstandings is that their first languages are not the same. And so in absence of a verbal language that can only go so far, I think there’s a somatic language that they are able to find together.
When we were doing rehearsals, I would start every rehearsal with a dancing session. The assignment was for everybody to bring in a song and we won’t tell each other what the song is, but the only rule is we have to dance to everybody’s song. And I participated too. So we danced to three songs at the beginning of every rehearsal. And that just made us all recognize, okay, our whole body is a part of what we’re going to be using as a tool to tell this story. So to answer your question, the whole conceit of building these two characters was based on their full bodies in the first place.
I decided to read reviews of the film. The word naturalism was often used to describe it, which I found interesting and maybe a little off base. Especially in a medium as manufactured as film. Was naturalism something you and your collaborators were aiming for? And how do you look at the idea of naturalism in film?
I appreciate the Dardenne brothers; I feel like, for me, that’s the platonic idea of naturalism. But I think I say that because their films feel like documentaries. It’s hard to articulate just what I see as truth. I think I just want things to feel real. I think there was a way of adapting the novel by Atticus Lish that would feel a little like an early Aronofsky film, kind of dark-pretty, or like a Safdie brothers movie almost. But I wanted to figure out how to have the gaze of the film be in opposition to naturalism in some ways. To communicate that these are small stories, but for them it feels sweeping. So what if the camera’s gaze is also big and sweeping at times? We played around with anamorphic lenses, and that felt almost too stylized. I didn’t want to put style over substance that much. And then we found this in-between lens that was specifically made at Panavision for us, these 1.3 X lenses that are kind of in between spherical and anamorphic. And allowing Ante Cheng (the cinematographer) the time to light in a way that was so beautiful really paid off. It gave us a little less time to do as many takes and try as many things in the performance, but it was important to try to tell the story in a visual way unexpectedly.
I think what some are reading as naturalism is actually just the sense of care the movie shows with the grueling particulars of what it means to live in poverty. All the little corners you have to cut and tensions you have to navigate. The film is doing that in a very humane and honest way.
I think I wanted this movie to feel allegorical in some ways. There’s a kind of immigrant narrative that’s very socioeconomic, that’s very about material gain. And I think what I saw in my mom was that she worked in Chinese restaurants, she bought a car, bought a house, eventually bought a fur coat. But then I saw her sometimes just spend hours in front of the computer playing solitaire. She had no friends. We grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where it was like 2 percent Asian. She found this Chinese church that met in the basement of this other church, and she went for a while, but it was just not for her. So then she went back to her life of isolation, in a way. I think what I wanted to get at is there’s a spiritual, emotional cost to the immigrant narrative. That was why we wanted to get a bit more stylized. One of the lenses we chose was the 50-mil lens used on the movie Heat. And you notice it every once in a while, in times where it feels like a scene is meant to be asking, What is the meaning of your life in this moment? What is the meaning of this religious leader saying, Don’t be late for your family? It’s just not this literal moment of “good luck, see you later,” but what is the future of your spiritual health going to be?
Your lead actress, Sebiye Behtiyar, comes across as so assured despite this being her first feature role. She’s also very comfortable with the camera in a way that I think probably also adds to people’s sense of naturalism. Talk to me a bit about directing actors and your philosophy in helping your leading actress.
I took acting classes for a couple years in L.A. when I was living there, and one of the things I noticed were the different ways in which my acting teacher, Jeffrey Marcus, dealt with people who had no professional experience. There were also people who had a lot of professional experience, and so what I learned is there’s no monolithic way of doing it. You just kind of do what works. What I really gravitated toward was anytime the process became about asking questions. That was where I felt like, oh, this dovetails with what I do. In documentary, it’s just about curiosity. It’s about always trying to chase the unknown, trying to chase a choice that none of us might even think could work, but it might work. So in those terms, I think even though Sebiye didn’t have the same years of experiences as Fred, she was open enough and emotionally intelligent enough and self-aware enough to be able to go along with that process. But in terms of getting more technical, I mean, Sebiye is somebody who just locks in; it was just about expanding her initial instincts.
Part of what I’ve discovered in making skateboarding documentaries is that people will open up more and be more honest directly after skateboarding. Oftentimes, we think about communication in this verbal, brainy way, but it is a full-body exercise. They say there’s five times as many neurons in your gut as your brain, and I think I noticed that in skateboarding. That’s why I wanted to bring dancing to the rehearsals and into what’s filmed onscreen, so that we can feel fully embodied in a both literal and figurative sense.
What do you think shooting on location in New York City brought to the film, and how did you and your cinematographer approach one of the most depicted cities in all of history?
I mean, I want it to be a love letter to a place that I think not a lot of people get to go and experience. It was a lot of urban exploration on my part and then bringing my collaborators onboard, Ante Cheng and production designer Kelly McGehee. I wanted to turn it into a walking tour in which we all got inspired not by how do we practically do this, but what is the thing that’s so special about this? Let’s get specific. There’s a working Daoist temple next to a Latin bar, and that’s real. How do we lean into that and pick up the nuggets that are already there, rather than trying to manufacture and impose our ideas onto it? It was a big lift for the locations department, honestly, because these are very insular communities. These business owners are a little wary of having cameras in their shops and signing documents.
We got really lucky and worked with this one locations person, Jenny Liu, who has been a bit of a fixer in the Chinese community in New York City since the ’80s in movies. She was very persuasive and carried cash on her and she made it happen. We just tried to show how connected and strange some of the spaces were. There’s that office that Aishe’s boss walks from, and then into the back of the kitchen, and it’s like, whoa, this is real. This place used to be a government office that’s defunct, but it was really connected to the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, and it’s like, okay, let’s try to make that a oner and show that this is a real location.
I really liked the almost fantastical touch of seeing Aishe’s parents working out in the jail cell after being arrested. It made me start to think about how the film uses voice-over in her mother tongue, Uyghur, It’s such an interesting window into her personality and avoids the tropes you kind of expect with voice-over. Can you talk about the decision to use voice-over?
Voice-over gets talked about a lot in documentaries. I remember when I was making Mind the Gap, I tried voice-over as an initial way of bringing my part of the story into the film. And then I just didn’t really like it. It felt posed; it took you out of the film. And so I started looking at what makes a voice-over work. I started seeing the things that I liked about films that did use voice-over: They had a point of view and told their own story. And often, they paid off in their own way by the end. You understand that this isn’t voice-over as a device, it comes from character. Once I figured out that, okay, this is a character talking, it turned into Aishe talking to her father. She’s so strong and holds her cards close, so sometimes it’s nice to be able to see that, oh, there’s a kind of softness and a tenderness and an innocence underneath that.
I find the dynamic between Aishe and Skinner fascinating, especially in light of the last thing she says to him in her mother tongue: “You think I owe you my life for treating me like a human being? I am a human being.” That really crystallizes their very different perspectives. What was important for you to establish in the film through them both politically and emotionally?
That last line was the genius of Martyna Majok, the writer of the script, who is
also an immigrant. I mean, so much of their relationship came from just pulling from our own relationships that we’ve both experienced and witnessed around us. I think when you’re in those types of relationships, it is strange and not what you expect, and it’s hard to articulate. And I really felt like that was important to get right, because in the 20-year history of my mom’s relationship with my stepfather, whom she married to get us citizenship, there were all sorts of phases. It was loving, it was fun, it was really trying. It was aggravating, it was toxic, it was abusive. There were a lot of moments of hope. I think with this particular story, though, I just wanted people to remember their age.
These are people who, yeah, they’re in their 20s, but they didn’t really get to live out their childhood. They grew up too fast. And when you don’t get to be a kid, you act like a kid in a relationship, and that’s fun, but you don’t know how to repair when things go wrong. That’s what I felt like went wrong with them. All relationships have mistakes and people end up inadvertently upsetting the other person. Conflicts arise. But they didn’t know how to repair.
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With his feature debut, Preparation for the Next Life, director Bing Liu probes the perils and illusory qualities of the American Dream.
