← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
'Preparation For the Next Life' is a New York Love Story
00:21:08
The new film "Preparation for the Next Life" tells the story of a Uyghur immigrant working in Chinatown and a vet returning from a traumatic tour of duty.
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- [00:00]
A
WNYC Studios is supported by AT&T, offering a guarantee covering both wireless and fiber Internet service that is all about having your back. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Visit att.com guarantee to learn more. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee for details. AT&T connecting changes everything. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. New York City is a place where all different kinds of people come to start fresh. Some have huge dreams. Others want to just kind of figure things out. Some want to hide. The new film, Preparation for the Next Life is a love story between two such New Yorkers. Asha is a Uyghur Muslim refugee from China. She has a keen sense that she's running towards something hopeful, a better life. And she's willing to grind for it. Skinner is a former member of the armed services returning from an extended tour of Afghanistan. And he's returned with both the wonder of a big city, unlike his hometown, and the hard realities that PTSD has given him. Throughout the film, we see Skinner and Asha wrestling with the same thing from different angles. They're both bringing their own baggage, the pursuit of the so called American dream. The film is a really interesting look at what it means to move from one phase of life into another with intention or without it. And it also asks whether it's better to plan for a future with someone you love or to decide you love yourself too much to wait for them. Preparation for Life was just named a New York Times critic pick. Woo hoo. Joining me now to talk about the film is its director, Bing Liu. Hi, Bing.
- [01:56]
B
Hello.
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A
And also actor Fred Hechinger, who stars as Skinner in the film. Hi, Fred.
- [02:01]
C
Hi, Allison.
- [02:02]
A
So Bing, this is based on a 2014 novel. When you first read the novel, what felt resonant about it?
- [02:10]
B
I just really connected with these two outsiders and living on the fringes of society who both felt extreme sense of loneliness. I relate to that. I, you know, saw that in my mom and her immigration journey into this country. And I just, you know, also relate to what it's like when you feel that and you try to find love at the same time. So I was really drawn in by that unsentimental love story.
- [02:37]
A
When we meet Skinner Fred, he's sleeping on the couch in Times Square. He goes into a restaurant, he's flirting with the server a little bit. What were some of the things that you were thinking about or you discussed with Bing about how you develop the kind of personality that Skinner would have.
- [02:57]
C
I mean, it kind of happens through all the details. I think we just. We met very early on in the process, and I just. I really. I think any character you play, you sort of find your ways to love them. And I just. He's someone who. Yeah, I felt really, really inspired by his urgency, but I. But I also felt really personally connected to the struggles. I think it's very hard sometimes the most. It's very, very hard to muster hope. And if you can, if you've already lived through a lot of difficult things, continuing to hope is what you sort of need to do. But it's also very dangerous. And I think he exists in that place where having hope is still somehow dangerous.
- [03:45]
A
If I were going to meet him and you were going to say, hey, this is my friend Skinner, what adjectives would you use to describe him?
- [03:53]
C
I think he's funny and wants to connect. I think he's at a pretty desperate time in his life and he needs stability in a community of some kind. I guess I would say, like, you know, give them a little bit of time and let's all hang out and, yeah, spend some time together.
- [04:17]
A
Bing. In terms of sort of archetypes, what is it about the immigrant story and the story of a soldier coming home from warfare that fit together?
- [04:27]
B
Well, both of them have, you know, like Fred was saying, struggle to find community, struggle to find people that understand their experience. And for both of them, I think they both felt an even higher degree of isolation because Ayesha is an ethnic minority within an insular community already. And Skinner, he got disillusioned with his experience in the military when he was overseas. And now he's coming back having lost his best friend that was there, and he's wandering around in a city where he doesn't know anybody. And so just the degree of loneliness and lack of connection with other people is, I think, what I felt was so, you know, strong about their connection.
- [05:12]
A
There's a scene I want to ask you about when we first. It's early on the film, and you see a person asleep in Times Square and the cop sort of taps the guy and the person on the foot. And at first I thought it was going to be Aisha, but it turns out to be Skinner, which I thought was really interesting. I just wanted to hear about that a little bit.
- [05:31]
B
Yeah, that was, you know, working with the writer Martina Mayok, who's an amazing playwright. You know, she came up with A lot of, you know, interesting ideas, you know, to where. Yeah, she sent the script over, and I was. I immediately knew why she did that, and I was like, okay, this is great. You know, it's gonna be a great handoff to this other character.
- [05:50]
A
Fred, you and your fellow actor have some really great and complicated chemistry in this film. How did you work together to understand your characters and what they would mean to each other? Because it does change over time, but initially, what they would mean to each other.
- [06:07]
C
I think in the first moment, there is one of these mysterious but very real sparks that they feel a shared desire for another kind of life, that they both are really trying to build a new life in different ways. Sabia, who plays Aisha, is just an extraordinary actress. It's actually absolutely insane to me that this is her first film because she has the expertise of a great veteran actress, but she just is, like, she's so deeply truthful. And so the way that we started working felt so organic and so moving to me, because everything she does feels truthful, and everything that she does sort of pushes, like, in the direction of something more challenging and more deep. And so I felt from the day we actually had our chemistry workshop, like, not too far from these offices in downtown Manhattan. And I remember the day I met her immediately thinking, oh, oh, this actress is extraordinary.
- [07:19]
A
It was that look you guys give each other. I think we've all hoped for that look at some point in our lives with someone else, like, oh, this is magic.
- [07:28]
C
I think it's hard, too. It's. Because so much of the movie, I think, is about what are the practical decisions that you can make to carry these things into your life, where love is not an escape, but something that is healthy part of your life. And at least for Skinner, I don't think he has really any examples growing up of healthy relationships. And so I think he's really trying to build one in real time. But I think he has a lot of fear and is hiding a lot of stuff, which makes it really difficult to build that genuinely.
- [08:07]
A
Bing, what was that casting process like to find your two leads? Because it really is about these two people. What did you need to look for? What were you hoping to find? What did Fred and Sabilla. I'm saying it right, Sabia, what did they show you.
- [08:24]
B
With Fred? One of the things that I was really fascinated by was how young a lot of boys were when they were first sent overseas to serve in the armed forces. And I think in Fred, I saw the ability to tell the story of Youthfulness. One of the things I was doing when I was researching how to just show the veteran experience in a different way was I found these youthful YouTube clips of veterans who were overseas, and they're just singing emo music in their bunker. And it's like, oh, you don't think about veterans as people who listen to emo music and dance around. And so I think I wanted to bring out that side of the veteran experience. And Fred brought it. And with Sabilla, she's just a pure unicorn of an actress. She can speak Uyghur English and Mandarin fluently, and she has the authenticity, and most important, she has the emotional resonance that is just one in a million. I mean, she will try to hide her feelings, but you still see through that. And so there's already a tension in there, and it makes her so watchable.
- [09:31]
A
We are talking about the new film Preparation for the Next Life, which is in theaters today. My guests are director Bing Liu and Fred Hechinger, who plays Skinner, an Afghan war vet who falls in love with a Uyghur Muslim refugee from China. You know, it's interesting, Bing, you said, looking at those videos, because we see the scene where you guys are looking. Skinner is showing the videos of him while he was there, and he doesn't have that many likes over on the side. It's like zero likes. Zero likes, four likes. Was that intentional?
- [10:04]
B
Oh, yeah. My assistant Katie and I, we spent a lot of time actually just figuring out what those Facebook pages were gonna be. Cause that's the. That's the main backstory we get with this character. And so we wanted to tell the story of a couple things. How over time, you go backwards and he has more likes. He had more of a community further back in time than you go. And over time, he loses that community. But also what he chooses to post is not violence and trauma and warfare. It's the little things that he notices when he's on his tours. The sunset, you know, or a sunflower blooming over barbed wire. So I think it was. It gave us the opportunity to just really deepen this character.
- [10:46]
A
We don't get a whole lot of backstory on Skinner. What kind of research did you do, Fred, to get in the head of someone who had been to war and had to go back and back and back?
- [10:58]
C
I mean, the main thing was what Bing said about his individuality and uniqueness as young person was felt really important to me to not typecast or other him in the box of a veteran the way that I feel certain some Movies have done. I was also really, really lucky to talk to a lot of men who had enlisted at very young ages. And people were very generous with their time and their experiences. But the main thing was, was just that specificity was the fact that, you know, being so young means that you've lived through a lot. And also you have a complicated multivariate relationship to what you've gone through. There are also a lot of different books. There's great writers like Phil Klay, who wrote Redeployment, and then Atticus Lish, who wrote the novel this is based on and his work. Both of his novels were helpful, but there was just an array of sources. And then really, at the end of the day, it's just building that. That character.
- [12:06]
A
How far did you go into researching ptsd? Because that is something that your character has.
- [12:11]
C
Yeah, you know, you do. You do all of that kind of. You ask all the questions, you find out all the information. But at the end of the day, I think the most important thing is what feels truthful from him and, yeah, his desire in that moment to really build. Build himself up. And I do think all of those. A lot of depictions of PTSD were sort of like, you know, sometimes in a movie, it feels like the scene where the character knows that it's happening. And in my experience of life, you never know really what scene you're in.
- [12:49]
A
Yeah.
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C
And so I guess we looked at that and we thought about that as something that he's trying with all of his might to deny or to stop. And that felt more real and truthful, at least to that it was that, you know, you really, even as it's happening, are trying to avoid it. That's sort of how we approached that scene.
- [13:11]
A
Bing. The film is shot in that sort of raw aesthetic. Running through the night with your buddy kind of feel. What kind of. What films did you reference when you were thinking about that?
- [13:24]
B
My cinematographer and I, we looked at skate videos. That's. You know, my background is in skate videos. That's what I started making as a teenager. That got me into film eventually. But, you know, in skateboarding videos at their apex, in terms of the craft, is about how to capture bodies moving through spaces in time.
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A
That's so interesting. Body moving through spaces in time. How does that different differ from the action you see in films?
- [13:50]
B
Well, in a weird way, I think people think skateboarding is like, oh, like, you just follow the skater, but a lot of times you're blocking with them. You know, you're working out. Like, where do I. You know, how do we capture this line in a way where I don't get in your way? You're able to perform the tricks, and it looks really good. And so, you know, it we. A lot of those scenes that are in preparation for the next life, they're quite heavily blocked, actually, you know.
- [14:13]
A
Oh, that's so interesting. It does flip in certain circumstances when Aisha's remembering her dad and her childhood. It's almost. I don't want to say fantasy, but it's got sort of a softer tone to it. Tell us a little bit about that decision.
- [14:30]
B
Well, the cinematographer, Auntie Chung, and I, we chose these lenses that are in between anamorphic and aspherical because it gave enough realism, you know, without going overboard and having it become about too much style that would get in the way of the real story that was unfolding, you know, in front of us. But we selected this one lens that they used in the movie Heat, Michael mann's heat, a 50 mil anamorphic. And we decided to use that for any times where we were kind of blending past and presented.
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A
Oh, interesting. So, Fred, this was shot mostly in New York. You're from New York.
- [15:05]
C
Yeah.
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A
As an actor, does it change the job to be playing against such a potent backdrop like New York and especially a place where you grew up?
- [15:14]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a Marty Scorsese quote where he says that, you know, you could pay a million dollars for the fanciest soundstage and it wouldn't even touch shooting on a New York street for free. And it does feel that way. You know, you walk outside and there's so much life just brimming. And at the same time, there's everyone that's on the street living their life. Sort of doesn't care too much about the filming either, which is. Which is useful and helpful and connected to these characters who are just trying to get through their day. I would say the majority of this film was made in Flushing, Queens, and that was enormously special to work there. It's one of the most beautiful neighborhoods, but it's also not depicted that much on film. And it really feels like you're in another world there. And so those. I would say Corona, Queens and Flushing were where we spent the majority of our time. And it was really very special.
- [16:15]
A
What challenge did you have shooting in New York City?
- [16:18]
B
One can only imagine noises, people looking into the camera. You know, people now want to sign forms. You know, we got really lucky. We had a really great team, you know, who was out there putting up sandwich boards saying, you know, if you come in this area, you might be filmed. I mean, we did it kind of doc style because we really wanted to embrace what was already there rather than try to impose a movie on top of our already vibrant, chaotic setting.
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A
Yeah. What did you learn from your filmmaking background as a documentarian that helped you on this film?
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B
I would say that there's a certain truth you look for that you're kind of waiting around for when you're filming people. And I think I just used that kind of radar to guide me when I was working with Fred and Sabia in their performances.
- [17:04]
A
What did you notice about working with a former documentarian in a film feature setup?
- [17:10]
C
Well, it's. I think it's this. I've worked with a documentarian one time. I turned narrative filmmaker one time before, and I think Bing and I talked about at some point early on, but I love that. And I would say a lot of the time when the scene, like when you're just getting to the meat of the scene, it feels no different. But the one thing that does feel special and unique and different is I think there's not a sort of meaningless obedience to past rules of what a film set is supposed to be. I felt like we were redesigning the process every day based on what the material was and what would help our, you know, the group and the community make it the best way. Sometimes I've been on sets where, you know, you're shooting this. No one knows why the camera is in the place that it is. It's just like coverage for the sake of it. And this was the opposite. Every day felt really intentional and really focused. And I think that came from a reaction to life rather than a trying to, you know, design it too much.
- [18:16]
A
Fred, so much of the film is wordless. Yeah, it's. It's really interesting. I was sort of, like, looking at my watch when I was watching. I was like, they still haven't spoken. Do you like that?
- [18:29]
C
I kind of love it, yes.
- [18:30]
A
Why?
- [18:32]
C
Well, in terms of Aisha and Skinner, I think at the beginning they have a language barrier in some ways. But I think through that they're finding other connections. And I do think so much is said in movement and body. And I think sometimes we talk to avoid or to hide. And when you can't talk that much, it feels like you can't hide as much sometimes. I actually think in some ways they're falling in love with each other at the beginning is easier because they lack the defenses of speech.
- [19:13]
A
It's Interesting. One of the big questions in the film, before we run out of time, I want to make sure we get here is this sort of like, what do we owe each other? Bing? Like, what do we owe each other? What were you thinking about when you were thinking about that?
- [19:29]
B
Oh, that's a good question. I think there is a reason that certain people come into our lives and I think, you know, at the end stages of a relationship, you know, as you're processing what the meaning of that relationship was, you kind of want to walk away with some thing, you know, and sometimes that's not a material thing. Sometimes that's just, you know, the knowledge that I am happy and glad that I experienced this relationship even if it didn't work out. And I think that's where they both land by the end of the film. In the most hopeful read, we don't.
- [20:09]
A
Want to spoil anything, but the film kind of leaves us with some open ended, some unresolved questions. Without giving too much away, Fred, why was it important for the film to end this way?
- [20:24]
C
I think the trickiest thing to do, but in my view the most honest is to hold multiple truths together.
- [20:34]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [20:36]
C
I don't think any person is a hero or a villain. And I think with, to me, you know, depression and joy sometimes walk hand in hand. And at least without spoiling anything, I would say the open endedness of this was about being very truthful and not looking away from what's in front of us. But also through that, as Bing was just saying, finding things that can push us ahead, finding ways to continue walking, finding genuine hope. Not that kind of cheap and fake hope, but real hope.
- [21:14]
A
The name of the film is Preparation for the Next Life. It's in theaters today. My guests have been director Bing Lau and Fred Hechinger. Thanks so much for coming in. We really appreciate your time today.
- [21:26]
B
Thanks, Alison.
- [21:27]
A
And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.
- [21:39]
C
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- [21:48]
B
I need a coffee.
- [21:49]
C
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