On trying things over and over again

I’m curious as someone who also works in different storytelling mediums, what drew you to documentary filmmaking initially? Why do you think the medium is still something that is interesting to you?

I think people who have seen my film Minding the Gap know that I got my start in documentary filmmaking through making skateboarding videos. I think what skateboarding videos are is they’re kind of like a zine. It’s very DIY. You do it because you want to shed light on this thing that you love. When I realized that I could use the camera to capture and reconstitute the reality and the life and the experience around me, it became a little bit of an emotional processing tool.

I also had friends who were artists and filmmakers or creative people, and part of what everyone did was they just made things. I think going into my 20s I just made things, and one of those things would become Minding the Gap. But before it was that, it was just this project I had an idea for, which was going around interviewing skateboarders about their upbringings, their relationships with themselves and each other and their families and their friends, their fears, their hopes, their dreams. And after a couple years of that, I had this thing that I thought I was just going to put up in Vimeo like the other things that I made, and I had dinner with some friends and they were like, “Hey, you should apply for this fellowship for people like you who are just trying to get a career off the ground in documentary.” It was called Diverse Voices in Documentary and it was run by Kartemquin Films in Chicago where I was living at the time. I applied and got in, and it was this six month, once-a-month fellowship. It was a little bit of a crash course, not only in just what documentary could be, but also that there’s a whole micro-economy of the documentary world that I could get plugged into and join a community of people who were also really passionate about documentaries.

But the thing that drew me in on a deeper level was seeing films like Hoop Dreams and Stevie and Harlan County, USA and just seeing, oh, documentary doesn’t have to feel like this thing that the substitute teacher would put on for an hour in school. It could feel like this dramatic narrative and it could kind of get at all these issues and themes in a way that is through character. So, that’s when I was like, I don’t know if I want to be a documentary filmmaker, but I want to make this project that I had into a documentary that’d be recognized as a character-driven story.

Even though it’s character-driven, when you’re making the documentary, what you start with is usually very different from what it ends up being. What is your approach to being flexible with that, but also being in tune with what the real story is?

I think I’m very postmodern about it in that I don’t know if there is a platonic ideal of what the story is. For me, I just treated it like making skate videos or skateboarding itself, which is you just try a bunch of things over and over and over and over again. You do what feels good, you do what feels right, and you do what works. So that’s what the process of Minding the Gap was. I would just edit in my bedroom all the time, not because I was like, ah, I can’t get it to where I want it to be. It was more like, oh, let me just try this, let me just try that. Oh, this works, this is interesting, this says that, and it was just that for years.

Preparation for the Next Life is your debut feature film. How did you translate your background in documentary filmmaking to this project?

In some ways I was set up for it from prior phases in my life. I went to community college and then I went to a four-year university to become a high school English teacher, but then when I spent a semester in a high school shadowing this teacher, he scared me straight and was like, “You don’t want to do this. This is a miserable, hopeless thing if you actually want to make a difference.” So, I was like, “Okay, I’ll just go back to regular English and maybe I’ll become a novelist.” I started trying to be a writer, but then I started working in the film industry. I started working as a grip, and then I switched over to camera. In my 20s, I was a camera assistant in the union and I worked in all these productions. So I think those two experiences really kind of helped in a way that was unintentional at the time. But when I got the opportunity and privilege to be able to make Preparation for the Next Life, I was able to utilize this prior skillset that I built up to be able to work in a fictional sense, but also be able to just plug back into all this experience in physical production on different sets.

Is there a different way that you thought about approaching a fictional project versus documentary work? Or would you say that they’re more similar than you anticipated?

I think it was more similar than I anticipated. That’s also because the types of documentaries I make are verite-style documentaries, where you shoot it like a scene and you try to edit a character arc journey. The biggest difference is that in documentary filmmaking oftentimes it feels like you’re trying to convince everybody to be in a movie the whole time, whereas in fiction, it’s like everybody’s kind of already on the same page. It’s like, oh, we’re all here to make a movie. I think the other component that’s very different is just working with actors. The biggest surprise was just how much I enjoyed working with them. So much of the filmmaking process is technical and logistical, and the only people that are really fully engaged in the emotional process of making a character come to a life in the emotional sense are the actors. So working with them was this rarefied space in the chaos of just keeping a train on the tracks.

Something that I found interesting with Preparation for the Next Life was that at the beginning of the film, I thought it was a romance, but by the end it was not about that at all. It was more about what it takes to really back yourself. Is that what you saw as the story? Did anything from your personal experience inform what you wanted this film to really be about?

I think the thing that makes me cry most consistently in movies is when people don’t believe in themselves and somebody else gets them to see that they do have the strength and what it takes–that they aren’t these negative narratives that they’ve internalized and are not the product of those things. I think the reason that makes me cry is because that’s who I was growing up. I felt like I didn’t have anybody tell me that I was worthy or that I would amount to anything, or that I could make my dreams come true, essentially. I wanted that, even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time.

I saw that in my mom too. She was somebody who came here and made her version of the American Dream come true. She started working in restaurants as a waitress, and she eventually got a house and got a car. She had all these things that she only dreamt about when she was living in China, but I saw her in the private moments of her life feeling very unsure about herself and not believing in herself.</span> She made a lot of choices in her life that reflected that narrative that she internalized. So I wanted to make a film that got at that, that showed a little bit of a road map of, this is what it looks like for this woman to get to a point where she takes a stand and makes a decision in her life about who she wants to be and who she doesn’t want to be. I think that’s my response to your response to the film.

I see this theme in your previous works as well. Are you surprised that these themes come up in your work? How intentional are they? Or do they only emerge when you look back retrospectively?

I think it’s probably more of a hindsight thing. Because when I’m in it, I just want to be in it. I think I’m a very intuitive person. I don’t have an internal monologue. I try to use the intelligence of my gut sometimes more than my logical brain. I think part of it is happening in real-time right now, because this process can be so lonely at times. I remember when I was on set, I’d hear laughter from another room, and then I’d walk in and the crew would stop laughing, and I’d be like, “I’m one of you.” But I’m not, and really it feels very lonely in that way. So, what’s exciting about this part of the process, of just talking about the movie with people like you, is that you’re helping me articulate and put into words, yeah, why did I do these things? Because at the time, things are happening so fast, you just go off your gut.

As you said, the process of filmmaking can be really lonely, especially when you’re in the editing room by yourself and you’re like, what the hell is going on! What advice would you give to people who are having trouble creating in those lulls?

First of all, I’d say that’s absolutely part of the process. I think it would probably behoove you to accept that you’re going to have phases like that, and that’s where having knowledge about what kind of self-care works for you to be able to just sit in it and go through it rather than try to avoid it will be more helpful in the long run. But second of all, try to figure out what inspires you or what inspired you in the first place and go back to that.

Try to get outside your comfort zone. Go see the movie that you maybe don’t want to bring yourself to get out of your apartment today to go see, take a chance on this book that you see and think, oh you don’t want to take on another book right now in your life, because you’re so busy. You never know. You just have to keep trying to engage. I think that’s what can get you out of a slump.