Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541878
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST NOV/DEC 2025 OUTLOOK FILMMAKING based on the movies you see getting made and distributed, but I'm also pessi- mistic, because I know how very difficult it is, and how many worthy, interesting movies don't get supported and seen." BING LIU Preparation for the Next Life, Minding the Gap, All These Sons The China-born, Midwest-raised filmmak- er worked as a crew member and got his break directing, shooting and starring in his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age documentary Minding the Gap about three skateboarding friends and their abusive childhoods. It was nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the 2019 Academy Awards. He co-directed his award-winning second feature documen- tary All These Sons, and made his feature film debut with the acclaimed drama Preparation for the Next Life. STRENGTHS: "What's great about post is that you don't have to create lightning in a bottle anymore. You have the pieces, and you can do some ADR work and some reshoots, but this material is what you're working with. And so it forces you, I think, to really go back to the discipline of storytelling, and it forces you to think about the key issue: What is the story I'm trying to tell? And to start at that base point again. So, I feel the strength of it is, it's a spiritual creative reset. It's a rebirth." WEAKNESSES: "Theoretically, you could go on forever in post, right? And that can be damaging. Once it's in the can, the footage is all that there is, but I think you can get kind of lost if you get too obsessed about stuff in post. I think there's a danger in just losing yourself in the process, at least for me. I don't think production or prep is the same, because there's just a certain number of days that you have, and you have to keep the train on the tracks, and you're going off intu- ition. But post invites a lot more voices in, not just from your partners, but from people that you show the film to or from the studio or financiers. And you can lose your vision and focus, and get lost if you're not careful." OPPORTUNITIES: "On Preparation for the Next Life we got the opportunity in post to really strengthen our main character's relationship with her past and her family — and with herself, argu- ably, by adding the voiceover device of her talking to her late dad throughout the film. Another opportunity was the chance to reset the way she and the boyfriend meet, and this goes back to setting up who they are before you meet them. There used to be a much-longer sequence of Skinner wandering around Queens and getting into all sorts of base- ment maze-like places, and just really telling the story of Queens, but it ends up, I think, revealing a little bit too much of him before he meets her, and we have to remember this is a story about their relationship. So I think it was helpful just to learn about him through her and the relationship, rather than just introducing him as a standalone. Cutting that down was a big opportunity." THREATS: "Time is always the big one, but my producers were so supportive, and they fought for more time for me when I asked them. I felt in post that we were almost there, but that we could take it to another level with more time, and they agreed. And it was so important to get that time because it allowed us to discover this device of her talking to her late dad, and it just made the film that much better. If we had just gotten the amount of time that was budgeted, the film would not have been nearly as effective and emotional as I believe it is now." OUTLOOK: "As this lifelong skateboarder, I've always been aware of third spaces — places that are not dedicated to either living or spending or making money. Third spaces for me are skate parks, public spaces, places of community where people gather to experience meaningful things together. And movie theaters are that for me, and they're never going to go away. But when it costs so much to even go to a movie and times are hard economically, indepen- dent film really suffers. My optimistic view is that it's going to make filmmakers find new and novel ways to make independent film and find new models of doing it. And in the next few years, hopefully we'll be seeing films that come out of that new scrappy, innovative way of doing it. This is like what Sean Baker used to do. People have done this before, and people are going to continue to make films, and audiences will continue to want films, and the business of it all is going to get figured out." Bing Liu says post provides many opportunities to improve a feature.