Preparation for the Next Life Director Won’t Make Minding the Gap 2

Understandably, Bing Liu is still on cloud nine over his storybook run at the end of the 2010s.

His coming-of-age documentary, Minding the Gap, premiered at 2018’s Sundance Film Festival to universal acclaim, taking home the special jury prize for breakthrough filmmaking. The aforementioned praise would eventually stretch well beyond the festival circuit as the film still holds a perfect mark on Rotten Tomatoes. 2018 would end with the first of several more exclamation points, beginning with former President Barack Obama‘s selection of Liu’s doc as one of his favorite films of 2018.

Then, in 2019, Liu received an Oscar nomination for best documentary, as well as a Peabody Award. Thus, it’s easy to see why he hasn’t lost that surreal feeling in present day.

“I’m still waking up a little bit. It was absolutely insane. This is going to sound weird, but I started a gratitude journal a couple years ago because I just feel so in awe that this is my life,” Liu tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I got to make films like Minding the Gap and Preparation for the Next Life. So I don’t think I’ve woken up yet, and I hope I never wake up.”

At 2018’s Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Liu was the recipient of Minding the Gap’s jury prize for best feature documentary, and that’s where he met juror Barry Jenkins. The Moonlight filmmaker strongly encouraged Liu to take the plunge into narrative features, and his company, Pastel, as well as Plan B, eventually recommended he pitch on an adaptation of Atticus Lish’s celebrated novel, Preparation for the Next Life. 

The New York City-set adaptation chronicles an undocumented Uyghur woman (Sebiye Behtiyar’s Aishe) and her whirlwind romance with a troubled American soldier (Fred Hechinger’s Bradley Skinner). Liu’s focused interpretation of the material ultimately won him the job, but he does acknowledge that Minding the Gap’s exploration of his own family’s immigration story likely inspired both production companies to consider him. 

“They probably did [recognize the overlap] in the sense of what Minding the Gap revealed about my life,” Liu says. “I lived in a household where there was a somewhat toxic relationship between a white American man and a woman who immigrated from China and received citizenship through marriage with that man.” 

Liu first started developing Preparation for the Next Life for the big screen in 2019, and at the time, he never could’ve anticipated that his narrative feature debut would hit theaters at such a fraught time for U.S. immigration.

“I really hope this film helps humanize what people really sacrifice to try to make it in this country,” Liu shares. “And that sacrifice isn’t always socioeconomic. It can be a spiritual, emotional sacrifice, and that’s hard to get back once you’ve sacrificed it.”

Minding the Gap documented not only Liu’s challenging upbringing in Rockford, Illinois, but also the personal lives of two of his local skateboarding peers, Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan. The beloved doc seems ripe for a follow-up down the road, and while he’s already been approached about the possibility, Liu is currently of the mind that lightning doesn’t strike twice. The primary reason why is that everyone involved would be more cognizant that they’re shooting a highly anticipated documentary. Conversely, throughout Minding the Gap’s production in the 2010s, nobody really knew what the future had in store for the doc, resulting in more authenticity.

“People have asked, but I don’t know if that’s in the cards. It was such a specific moment to make Minding the Gap,” Liu says. “Part of what people have told me works about it is that there’s such a vulnerability and openness to it. It was made at a time when people were less media literate and less aware of their own authorship and representation. I feel like that’s changed, and I don’t know if it would work in the same way as The Up Series.”

For the uninitiated, The Up Series is a British documentary series that revisits the same subjects every seven years.

“For me, it’s less about what they’re up to now; it’s more: ‘Is there a question that burns as strongly as the one that was burning in me when I wanted to make Minding the Gap?’” Liu adds. “Moving forward, that question might ignite, but right now, I’m not sure if it has ignited.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Liu also discusses Richard Linklater’s influence on his filmmaking career, as well as why he omitted one of the central characters from Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life novel.

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To go back to the beginning, I’ve heard you say that Richard Linklater’s Slacker is what prompted you to point a camera at those around you. But did Boyhood ever factor into the mult-year saga that was Minding the Gap?

I didn’t know that Boyhood was getting made. I felt like it was on the hush-hush. Or maybe I was just too busy making Minding the Gap to pay attention to it. But I just love how Linklater plays with time. So many of his films are 24 hours, and it was interesting to see him go the total opposite way [with Boyhood] and take the big swing towards longitude. But Slacker and Waking Life were the two Linklater films that initially inspired me to do my own version on the types of weirdos that I was around in Rockford [Illinois].

Boyhood came out in 2014, so I figured that you saw that and said, “Oh, I don’t have to rush this. I can take my time.”

That was the first year that I decided to make Minding the Gap as a capital-D documentary. Before then, I had this project where I was interviewing skateboarders around the country about their lives and their upbringings and healing and everything. But in 2014, I got into a fellowship with Kartemquin Films in Chicago, and I was exposed to films like Hoop Dreams and Harlan County, USA for the first time. So that’s when I started the much longer process of realizing that you can make a character-driven documentary. It doesn’t have to be just sit-down interviews. So that’s probably why I didn’t make the connection. 

From winning at Sundance and receiving universal critical acclaim to being year-end-listed by Barack Obama and landing an Oscar nom, Minding the Gap had a storybook run. What was the process of waking up from that and plotting your next move?

I’m still waking up a little bit. I still feel like I need some pinches every once in a while. It was absolutely insane. This is going to sound weird, but I started a gratitude journal a couple years ago because I just feel so in awe that this is my life. I got to make films like Minding the Gap and Preparation for the Next Life. So I don’t think I’ve woken up yet, and I hope I never wake up. 

When did the idea of directing a narrative feature start to enter into the equation?

I met Barry Jenkins at Telluride’s Mountainfilm Festival in May of 2018, and he was on the jury that gave Minding the Gap an award. So he came up to me and was like, “Hey, you should make fiction films.” And I was like, “Maybe I should make fiction films. Let’s keep talking.” 

Barry Jenkins’ Pastel and Plan B pointed you in the direction of the novel Preparation for the Next Life. Did they watch Minding the Gap and recognize the amount of overlap that your own family’s story has with this story?

They probably did in the sense of what Minding the Gap revealed about my life. I lived in a household where there was a somewhat toxic relationship between a white American man and a woman who immigrated from China and received citizenship through marriage with that man. But at the end of the day, I think they just believed in the take that I had. 

The book has three central characters, and I wanted to focus on two of those central characters [Sebiye Behtiyar’s Aishe and Fred Hechinger’s Skinner]. I wanted to really anchor it and ground it in this immigrant woman’s perspective. So that’s where we gelled and took off in an official capacity.

You removed Skinner’s landlord’s son, and there’s actually a shot where the landlord gives Aishe a very particular look. I then assumed that she was going to become the source of many problems for Aishe, but you didn’t go that way. Anyway, what prompted you to remove the landlord’s son? Was it just too dark?

He’s a very, very strong character. Many people who have read the book found that the choices the character makes can be very hard to sit with, and it pulled away from my initial attraction to the source material, which was this Uyghur woman. I wondered how [novelist Atticus Lish] fleshed out this Uyghur character in 2014. It was astounding to me. So one of the reasons was to make sure we weren’t detracting from this character. 

But the other reason might get at your other question about what [Pastel and Plan B] recognized in me to take on this book. Minding the Gap was about tensions between people, but it was mostly about the characters’ internal tensions. So I wanted this romantic relationship and the tension between these two lovers to be driven to a head through internal tensions and not an external factor like the landlord’s son. I just felt it would allow us to go deeper into the characters of Aishe and Skinner.

When you first started developing this movie, immigration was certainly a relevant subject in this country. But now the film is coming out in an era where immigrants have never been more unwelcome in the U.S. Thus, does right now almost seem like the perfect time to show people how common this particular immigrant experience is? 

Yes and no. The U.S. has had a very long history of ebbs and flows with the way that its policy makes immigrants feel welcome or not welcome. There were things like the Chinese Exclusion Act and Operation Wetback. So there’s been a lot of ups and downs, so to speak, with the way in which we allow the most vulnerable people to have a shot at making a life here. 

I really hope this film helps humanize what people really sacrifice to try to make it in this country. And that sacrifice isn’t always socioeconomic. It can be a spiritual, emotional sacrifice, and that’s hard to get back once you’ve sacrificed it. So that’s what I hope to add to the pantheon of other films that tackle the immigrant experience.

There’s a scene at a bodega of sorts that is eerily similar to what we are seeing on the news and on social media right now. Plainclothes agents arrest Aishe as shown in the trailer. Is it odd to watch your film become all the more resonant in real time?

Yeah, it is odd. It’s wild. Growing up in the ‘90s and 2000s, I lived through some xenophobia, post 9/11, but I don’t remember it looking like this, though. You have squads of federal workers going out and just pulling people off the street or out of their court hearings. A federal administration is recruiting through social media to bolster the workforce of people who do this work. So it’s really strange. At the same time, there’s an evergreen story in here. 

When I was growing up, I saw my mom move to this country and work in Chinese restaurants. She eventually bought a car and a house, but a lot of times, I just saw her sitting in front of her computer playing solitaire. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any other family here. So I could see that there was a cost to making it in that kind of material sense. But I do feel like she’s starting to find community now. She just moved to rural Kentucky, and she’s taking up things like fishing.

The community where this main character ends up is also what drew me to the book. It might not look like what we think of as the end point of a successful immigrant experience, but she does have that sense of communion with other people who get her experience. And I think that’s important. 

As you’ve touched on, the film focuses on an unconventional romance between an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and a former soldier who’s been discarded by the U.S. government. And, to me, Skinner is more lost than Aishe is. He’s a stranger in a familiar land. Do you think he’s more lost than she is?

In a way. Aishe is an outsider in Chinatown in the sense that she isn’t Han Chinese. She can still speak the language, and there is a kind of insular community there. But Skinner doesn’t have a community, and this goes back to the importance of community. I guess he could go to Veterans Affairs or try to reconnect with people in his hometown, but he doesn’t want to go back to his hometown. He doesn’t even want to talk about Pittsburgh to Aishe. And I think that’s ultimately the factor that makes her [do what she does by the end]. 

Skinner has a number of psychological issues from his three tours in Iraq. He mentions that he started making mistakes en route to being discharged. Did one of those mistakes lead to his friend Jake’s death?

I wanted to leave that ambiguous because the novel holds your hand a little bit more in terms of figuring out what happened. But in the pantheon of all of the movies about American soldiers serving this country and being in armed conflict, I would argue that it’s known that soldiers are put in very morally ambiguous situations all the time. It can then have a profound effect on them when they come back to American society where morality is not as ambiguous. So I wanted to show that Skinner grapples with that, and while we might not know what that is exactly, it’s less important than the effect of that contradiction.

Fred’s character wears his entire life on his back throughout much of the film. Did Fred also attach himself to that backpack off camera?

He didn’t carry that duffel backpack around, but when we first had dinner before going into prep, I told him about these boots that I pictured Skinner wearing. He then went out and got those boots. And every time we rehearsed, he’d show up in a green hoodie [like Skinner]. So I do think he uses wardrobe in a tactile way as part of his process.

Preparation for the Next Life isn’t just your first narrative feature. It’s also Sebiye Behtiyar’s first movie of any kind, and her performance is quite compelling. Did the two of you bond over being newcomers to this territory?

Yeah, a little bit. I think it helped. I just wanted to be as vulnerable and open as possible with both Sebiye and Fred. But because it was Sebiye’s first time, I just wanted to be very open to the fact that there were no expectations here. I said, “Let’s just work through it step by step. Let’s just see where it goes.” 

But at the same time, I couldn’t really tell that it was her first time. She’s so strong with her choices, and if you give her the right space to move about, she’s really confident. She knows this character. She says it all the time. She’s like, “When I read the script, it was like I was seeing a version of my own story.”

In terms of the transition from documentary to narrative, what was the biggest adjustment for you overall?

In some ways, it’s more lonely. There’s more people, but within that, it’s also more lonely. There’d be times where I’d hear laughing in another room on set, and then I’d walk into the room and the laughing would stop. And I’d be like, “You don’t have to stop laughing. You can keep joking. I used to be a camera assistant. I get it. I’m cool.” 

But on the flip side, what I love about it is that everybody’s there for a similar goal. If you’ve hired the right people, people are collaborative and want to be there. With documentaries, it sometimes feels like you’re trying to convince people to be in a movie all the time. So there’s a niceness to the fact that people are on the same page in fiction.

Moments ago, you gave me a mini Minding the Gap sequel with regard to your mom’s current whereabouts. Has anyone tried to convince you to do a follow-up years from now just to see where everybody is? Has that been floated already?

Yeah, people have asked, but I don’t know if that’s in the cards. It was such a specific moment to make Minding the Gap. Part of what people have told me works about it is that there’s such a vulnerability and openness to it. It was made at a time when people were less media literate and less aware of their own authorship and representation. I feel like that’s changed, and I don’t know if it would work in the same way as The Up Series. [Writer’s Note: The Up Series is a British documentary series that revisits the same subjects every seven years.]

For me, it’s less about what they’re up to now; it’s more: “Is there a question that burns as strongly as the one that was burning in me when I wanted to make Minding the Gap?” Moving forward, that question might ignite, but right now, I’m not sure if it has ignited.

I assumed you quit skating to focus on your filmmaking career, but you’re still at it according to social media. Do you ever hear from your fellow Minding the Gap subjects, Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan?

Yeah, we’ll text every once in a while to say “what’s up” and send skate clips. It’s funny that the way we connect still often revolves around skating.

If you could punch your own ticket, where would your feature career go next?

Oh, that’s an interesting question, but I haven’t thought that far. I have a bunch of projects in development, but I’m just a very one-step-at-a-time person. I just do what feels right and what feels like it’ll inspire me and what feels like it’ll give my life meaning and purpose and what’ll make a difference in the world. That’s ultimately why I wanted to get into making things. Even before making documentaries, I just wanted to make things that go out in the world and do something in the world. So, as long as it satisfies that and fulfills me creatively, I’ll be happy. I’m just really grateful to be able to make films in the first place.

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Preparation for the Next Life opens Sept. 5 in select movie theaters.