Minding the Gap opens with a beautifully shot scene of three young men skateboarding through the hauntingly empty downtown of Rockford, Illinois. Over the next hour and a half, the documentary follows 12 years of the lives of Kiere Johnson, Zack Mulligan, and filmmaker Bing Liu.
It's 30-year-old Liu's feature debut and he has incredible access, getting Johnson and Mulligan to open up about painful experiences with abuse. The final version of the film feels like an effortless cut of deeply personal footage of old friends. But it started out as something very different: interviews with skateboarders around the country talking to the camera about their lives. In fact, Liu didn't meet Johnson until the project was well underway.
"The press paints it as this film that slowly formed over time. I didn’t meet Keire until a year into making Minding the Gap," Liu told the Wall Street Journal last year. "It started out, the idea was I’m going to examine skateboarders’ relationships with their fathers. My first [interview] shoot with Keire was him talking about his father’s abuse and his feelings about it. And then my first shoot with Zack was talking with him about his father."
Kartemquin FilmsSkateboarders Kiere Johnson (right) and Zack Mulligan are featured in "Minding the Gap."
Liu got his first camera at age 14 and began filming around the skatepark in his hometown of Rockford. He taught himself cinematography and editing and eventually got a production assistant job while he was studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For his first film, he knew he wanted to tell a story about the skateboarding community.
"The high concept was skateboarders of all different ages, races, genders—some were parents themselves—all around the country, sitting in front of a camera," he told Filmmaker magazine.
After taking a fellowship with Kartemquin Films, the production company behind Hoop Dreams, Liu began working on the project in earnest, capturing key points in his subjects' lives. He narrowed down the scope of the project to focus on Johnson, one of the only Black skaters at the park, and Mulligan, a young father.
"I went back to archival footage. I went to others who were younger and took footage of Keire to build a sense of who he is," Liu told the Wall Street Journal. "For Zack, I took every shot of footage I had of him in the few times I’d filmed him earlier and built up a sense of who he was as a teenager."
In the editing process, Liu worked backwards to create a cohesive narrative of three skateboarders with stories of abuse—himself included. In one of the documentary's most poignant scenes, Liu is filmed talking to his trepidatious mother about his violent step-father. But Liu didn't intend to be a main character when he started shooting.
"I didn’t begin the film wanting to be in the film," he told Filmmaker. "As rough cuts and assemblies kept getting made and I kept showing them to test audiences, people would invariably ask how I came to find the story. Sometimes people were like, 'Would you consider putting yourself in the film?' I’d usually say no, and that was that.'"
At first Liu considered just having his brother in the film to represent his family's experience with abuse, but after filming his conversation with his mom, he decided to fully participate.
After it premiered at Sundance last year (it's now available on Hulu), reviewers pointed out the raw honesty of the subjects: An even more astonishing feat when you consider Johnson and Mulligan were merely acquaintances of Liu's when the project began. A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times:
As for how Liu was able to get the men to open up cycles of abuse, Liu said on The Daily Show: “As long as you come from a nonjudgmental, actually curious, authentic place, I think young people actually want to talk about these things."
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