Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This hour, we are celebrating the movies from 2025 that our Instagram followers were most excited about. One of those movies was set right here in New York City. It's titled Preparation for the Next Life. It's directed by Bing Lu.

Aishe 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 in Afghanistan. He has returned with both wonder of a big city, unlike his hometown, and the hard realities that PTSD has given him. Throughout the film, we see Skinner and Aishe wrestling with the same thing from different angles. They're both bringing their own baggage to 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. 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 the Next Life is available to rent now on VOD or to stream with MGM+. Here's my conversation with director Bing Liu and actor Fred Hechinger.

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Alison Stewart: Bing, this is based on a 2014 novel. When you first read the novel, what felt resonant about it?

Bing Liu: I just really connected with these two outsiders living on the fringes of society who both felt extreme sense of loneliness. I relate to that. I saw that in my mom and her immigration journey into this country. I just also relate to what it's like when you feel that, and you try to find love at the same time. I was really drawn in by that unsentimental love story.

Alison Stewart: When we meet Skinner, Fred, he's sleeping on the couch in Times Square. He goes into a restaurant, and 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 developed the kind of personality that Skinner would have?

Fred Hechinger: It kind of happens through all the details. I think we met very early on in the process. I think any character you play, you sort of find your ways to love them. He's someone who-- I felt really, really inspired by his urgency, but I also felt really personally connected to the struggles. It's very, very hard to muster hope. If you've already lived through a lot of difficult things, continuing to hope is what you need to do. It's also very dangerous. I think he exists in that place where we're having hope is still somehow dangerous.

Alison Stewart: 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?

Fred Hechinger: 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, give him a little bit of time, and let's all hang out and spend some time together.

Alison Stewart: Bing, in terms of archetypes, what is it about the immigrant story and the story of a soldier coming home from warfare that fit together?

Bing Liu: Well, both of them, like Fred was saying, struggle to find community, struggle to find people that understand their experience. For both of them, I think they both felt an even higher degree of isolation because Aishe is an ethnic minority within an insular community already. Skinner, he got disillusioned with his experience in the military when he was overseas. 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. Just the degree of loneliness and lack of connection with other people is, I think, what I felt was so strong about their connection.

Alison Stewart: 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 taps the guy and the person on the foot. At first, I thought it was going to be Aishe, but it turned out to be Skinner, which I thought was really interesting. I just wanted to hear about that a little bit.

Bing Liu: Working with the writer Martyna Majok, who's an amazing playwright. She came up with a lot of interesting ideas to where--

Alison Stewart: It was.

Bing Liu: Yes. She sent the script over, and I immediately knew why she did that. I was like, "Okay, this is great. This is going to be a great handoff to this other character."

Alison Stewart: 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.

Fred Hechinger: 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. Sebiye, who plays Aishe, 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's so deeply truthful.

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 pushes in the direction of something more challenging and more deep. We actually had our chemistry workshop not too far from these offices in downtown Manhattan. I remember the day I met her, immediately thinking, "Oh, this actress is extraordinary."

Alison Stewart: 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."

Fred Hechinger: I think it's hard, too. 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 a healthy part of your life. At least for Skinner, I don't think he has really any examples growing up of healthy relationships. 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.

Alison Stewart: 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 Sebiye, am I saying it right? Sebiye. What did they show you?

Bing Liu: 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. 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 YouTube clips of veterans who were overseas, and they're just singing emo music in their bunker. It's like, "Oh, you don't think about veterans as people who listen to emo music and dance around." I think I wanted to bring out that side of the veteran experience, and Fred brought it.

With Sebiye, she's just a pure unicorn of an actress. She can speak Uyghur, English, and Mandarin fluently. She has the authenticity, and most importantly, 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. There's already a tension in there, and it makes her so watchable.

Alison Stewart: 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?

Fred Hechinger: The main thing was what Bing said about his individuality and uniqueness as a young person. It felt really important to me to not typecast or order him in the box of a veteran, the way that I feel some movies have done. I was also really, really lucky to-- I talked with a lot of men who had enlisted at very young ages, and people were very generous with their time and their experiences. The main thing was just that specificity was the fact that 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. There was just an array of sources. Then, really, at the end of the day, it's just building that character.

Alison Stewart: How far did you go into researching PTSD? Because that is something that your character has.

Fred Hechinger: You ask all the questions, you find out all the information. At the end of the day, I think the most important thing is what feels truthful from him, and his desire in that moment to really build himself up. A lot of depictions of PTSD were like-- sometimes in a movie, it feels like the scene where the character knows that it's happening. In my experience of life, you never know really what scene you're in. 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. That felt more real and truthful, at least to us, that you really, even as it's happening, are trying to avoid it. That's how we approached that scene.

Alison Stewart: Bing, the film is shot in that sort of raw aesthetic running through the night with your buddy kind of feel. What films did you reference when you were thinking about that?

Bing Liu: My cinematographer and I, we looked at skate videos. My background is in skate videos. That's what I started making as a teenager. That got me into film, eventually. Skateboarding videos at their apex, in terms of the craft, is about how to capture bodies moving through spaces in time.

Alison Stewart: It does flip in certain circumstances when Aishe's remembering her dad and her childhood. It's almost, I don't want to say fantasy, but it's got a softer tone to it. Tell us a little bit about that decision.

Bing Liu: Well, the cinematographer, Ante Cheng, and I, we chose these lenses that are in between anamorphic and aspherical because it gave enough realism without going overboard and having it become about too much style that would get in the way of the real story that was unfolding in front of us. We selected this one lens that they used in the movie Heat, Michael Mann's Heat, a 50 mm anamorphic. We decided to use that for any times where we were kind of blending past and present.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting. Fred, this was shot mostly in New York. You're from New York. 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?

Fred Hechinger: I think it's a Martin Scorsese quote where he says that you could pay a million dollars for the fanciest soundstage and it wouldn't even touch shooting on a New York street for free. It does feel that way. You walk outside, and there's so much life just brimming. 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 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. It really feels like you're in another world there. I would say Corona, Queens, and Flushing were where we spent the majority of our time. It was really very special.

Alison Stewart: What challenge did you have shooting in New York City, Bing?

Bing Liu: [laughs] One can only imagine. Noises, people looking into the camera, people not wanting to sign forms. We got really lucky. We had a really great team who was out there putting up sandwich boards, saying, "If you come in this area, you might be filmed." 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 an already vibrant, chaotic setting.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn from your filmmaking background as a documentarian that helped you on this film?

Bing Liu: 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. I think I just used that kind of radar to guide me when I was working with Fred and Sebiye in their performances.

Alison Stewart: What did you notice about working with a former documentarian in a film feature setup?

Fred Hechinger: I've worked with a documentarian one time, a turned-narrative filmmaker one time before, and I think Bing and I talked about it at some point early on. I love that. I would say a lot of the time, when you're just getting to the meat of the scene, it feels no different. The one thing that does feel special and unique and different is I think there's not a 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 the group and the community make it the best way.

Sometimes I've been on sets where 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. This was the opposite. Every day felt really intentional and really focused. I think that came from a reaction to life rather than trying to design it too much.

Alison Stewart: 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 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?

Bing Liu: Ooh, that's a good question. I think there is a reason that certain people come into our lives. I think at the end stages of a relationship, as you're processing what the meaning of that relationship was, you kind of want to walk away with something, and sometimes that's not a material thing. Sometimes that's just the knowledge that I am happy and glad that I experienced this relationship even if it didn't work out. I think that's where they both land by the end of the film in the most hopeful read.

Alison Stewart: We don't 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?

Fred Hechinger: I think the trickiest thing to do, but in my view, the most honest, is to hold multiple truths together. I don't think any person is a hero or a villain. To me, depression and joy sometimes walk hand in hand. 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.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with actor Fred Hechinger and director Bing Liu about their new film, Preparation for the Next Life. You can rent it now on Video on Demand or stream on MGM+. Coming up next hour, actor Harris Dickinson on his directorial debut, plus a documentary about combating book banning. That's after a quick break. This is All Of It.