Director Bing Liu is a rising star in indie cinema. The China-born, Midwest-raised filmmaker is best known for directing Minding the Gap, which was nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the 2019 Academy Awards, an Independent Spirit Award, an Emmy, and won a Sundance Special Jury and Peabody Award. His new film,
Preparation for the Next Life, is a heartbreaking drama about young love gained and then lost that is both gritty and ethereal. It tells the story of Aishe, a young, resourceful Uyghur woman trained by her military father, who illegally emigrates to New York City, where she finds herself laboring in Chinatown’s underground kitchens. One night, she has a fateful meeting with Skinner, a young American soldier and another free spirit who has just returned from three tours in the Middle East. They fall madly in love, but she gradually realizes that his wartime demons are a bridge too far for their relationship to survive.
With a screenplay by Tony Award nominee and Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, the prestige project was coproduced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and Oscar winner Barry Jenkins’ Pastel Productions. Behind the camera, Liu assembled a creative team that included cinematographer Ante Cheng (Blue Bayou), film editor Anne McCabe (
Nightbitch), re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor Gene Park (
Midsommar) and visual effects supervisor Yuval Levy (
Weapons). The score is by Oscar-nominated composer Emile Mosseri (
Minari).
Photo (L-R): Director Bing Liu and Sebiye Behtiyar on the set of Amazon MGM Studios’ Preparation for the Next Life. (Credit: Jaclyn Martinez)
Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Liu talks about making the film and his love of post.
What sort of film did you set out to make?
“A hopeful film about people trying to find meaning in life. I set out to make a film that would tell the story of my mother and her journey to making a life in this country, and trying to find meaning in it in a way that I've never seen before in an immigrant experience.”
Your two leads - Sebiye Behtiyar as Aishe and Fred Hechinger as Skinner – are phenomenal. What did they each bring to their roles?
“Sebiye brought not just her cultural context as a Uyghur, who grew up in her homeland of Western China, but all her natural ability as an actress — and this was her very first job. She just has it and can't hit a false note. And Fred, who was in Nickel Boys and Gladiator II, is an actor's actor. He does so much prep work ahead of time that he's able to make 10 different choices with every single story beat. And it's amazing to work with Fred in that way, because you can come up with new ideas all the time to really get at the cinematic and human truth, moment to moment, which is the goal.”
What were the main technical challenges of pulling this together?
“I was trying to show a different side of New York City, so that meant a lot of practical locations. But you have a big crew that you're trying to move around and squeeze into these tiny basements and three-story walk ups, and it sucks up a lot of time just moving from location to location. So, it's about scheduling in a way that could help us maximize allowing Fred and Sebiye to just get there and try things.”
Fair to say your documentary background really informs the way it’s shot and the energy of the street scenes?
“Yes. My first love was skate videos. There's a fluidity and an understanding of using spaces to your advantage in them, and it's just instinctual for me to think about blocking street scenes that way. In terms of choosing the camera and lens package, Ante, the DP, and I talked really early on about this dual language of big, cinematic, sweeping material that we can bring to the street story, along with intuitive photography that feels a little run-and-gun, so we chose a camera package that could allow us to do both - the Venice 2 - which was a new camera at the time. I don't know if anything had come out that had been shot on it, but it had a wide latitude, and we knew we were going to do a lot of night work and scenes with very little illumination, so we knew that could help us. And then, to satisfy some of that sweeping, cinematic language, we wanted something that would be not just photorealistic, but add some character. So, we tried a bunch of anamorphic lenses, but it just proved to be a little distracting, like too much style over substance. And Panavision had come out with this new 1.3 lens that was sort of in between a spherical and anamorphic. And it was just perfect as it has a lot of character and shaves off some of the digital edge of the Venice 2, and at the same time did everything that we wanted. For some reason I was really obsessed with the Michael Mann movie Heat at the time, so we also picked up the 50mm anamorphic he used in Heat, and that's the lens we use to represent a lot of the blurring of the lines between apparitions from the past and the present-day reality.”
Tell us about the shoot.
“We shot for 32 days in New York, and then for three days in New Mexico, where we shot all the running sequences that were set in China. It was all mainly locations, but we did five days of stage work at Cinelease Studios in Brooklyn for all their basement apartment scenes.”
Where were you based for post?
“At Company 3 at their satellite office in New York. Anne McCabe was the editor and she didn't come to set. She looked at rushes and every weekend we would have a little chat, and I would say, ‘Hey, this is what I discovered on-set when we filmed the thing.’ So, I wasn’t trying to be prescriptive but just letting her know it was something to consider.”
What were the main editing challenges?
“I wanted to have a high shooting ratio, because coming from docs, I really love the ability to continue to take big swings in the edit and try all the things I want to try, and with this story, and with the performances that Sebiye and Fred were able to give me, I was able to take it in a lot of different directions. Balancing their two stories was a big challenge. I think it took a while to land that right, because just one scene can tip it a little bit too far over one way or the other. We just wanted to have both characters be as fully formed as possible without dragging it down at all.”
Did you end up doing test screenings at all?
“We did a few test screenings near the end and they helped as we did go back and recut a few things. Most of it was the film’s beginning and setting up what you need to know about these two characters before they have their fateful meeting. That was the biggest thing to get right. Everything else was just small details like, how much do we need to know about the legal side of the immigration system? Things like that.”
Tell us about the sound design’s importance and what was entailed.
“We did the sound design with our supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Gene Park at his Brooklyn home studio, Toneburst Audio. That worked out well, as we could just go to it and chop it up and try things before we got to the stage for the final mix at Formosa. And that helped him just get a sense of my ideas and the importance of sound design overall for this. The other aspect was getting the sound of parts of Queens with its many different languages. You can palpably feel that this is a true melting pot of immigrants and people from all over the world, and so the loop group sessions were really fun because we were able to get all these languages. We didn't have a budget to get all the languages we wanted, but we got enough, with bilingual and trilingual people trying all these different things to make it work. And I was pretty hands-on for all the mixing because I wanted a musicality to the sound design.
“So, for example, in the bar where they have their first date and they dance, part of the musicality of that scene isn't just the needledrop. It's some of the foot stomping on the ground from the other dancers, and you feel that percussive quality that adds to the energy of them starting to fall for each other. So little things like that, I think, go a long way, and then there’s the way that I watch movies. There's a top level, where I'm understanding what's going on. But then there's an intuitive kind of gut-level feeling of what's going on underneath, that's more akin to music, and that's how I feel about sound design.”
What about the visual effects? How involved are you?
“I was pretty involved. The-Artery did them all and I really wanted someone to come out on our initial scout in New Mexico, because it's a part of the world that you have never really seen in any major film. And so this is a chance to get it right, and maybe this speaks a little bit to my documentary background, too, of just caring about factuality. So, The Artery’s visual effects supervisor, Yuval Levy, came out and he is amazing. Basically, anything I threw at him, he was like, no problem. I wanted him to see for himself my references for a specific mountain in a specific part of Xinjiang, and to think about things like, how do you get a sense of depth in a place that we're trying to make really vast while keeping it realistic and not letting it go kind of Disney, as we don't want to be too rose-colored glasses about the past, either.
“Then the other VFX challenge was the cotton fields, as once you start introducing a million little plants and people in the background interacting with the plants, it gets very tricky. I was most worried about that, and I didn't want to go overboard with it. So, we had to pack a lot into a few moments, so you get a sense of the village, the mountain and what people do for work.”
I think the film looks beautiful. Tell us about the DI.
“We did it at Company 3 with Tom Poole, who’s so amazing. During the shoot I remember asking Ante, what's our process going to be like for the DI? And he said, the process is going to be Tom Poole — just let him let him rip. And Tom delivered. I learned a lot from working with him and I love the way it looks.”