By James Kinneen
Hometown Weekly Reporter
It all started when Rachel Liu didn’t want to share a bathroom.
At least, that’s what the Dover-Sherborn High School graduate turned Hollywood producer says when pressed on how she came to work in film. Currently promoting “Student Body”, a horror movie she produced that released to video on demand February 8, Liu’s road to Hollywood followed a slightly non-traditional path.
After Pine Hill Elementary, DS Middle School and DSHS class of 2009, despite developing a passion for creative writing in high school, Rachel went to the University of Pennsylvania and majored in the extremely practical Bioengineering, with a concentration in Engineering Entrepreneurship. But seeking the private bathrooms a certain campus residence offered, she ended up in a film culture program dorm, surrounded by future filmmakers and fell in love with movies.
“At Penn, I eventually ended up in a film culture program dorm, which basically happened because I didn’t want to share a bathroom with people,” she explained over the phone. “They put all the like weird film people and anti-social people into the same dorm, so everyone I kind of became friends with who lived around me were film and TV people.”
But while Liu might not have had the longtime desire to work in film those students had, she had a much better sense of business and logistics. This made her uniquely valuable to the creative students trying to launch their filmmaking careers.
“I had this mathematical, logistical and business background, which is actually a huge part of producing. There are budgets, which includes a lot of math, but also there’s a lot of technical knowledge that goes into filmmaking, and you need to understand what that is in order to put projects together. I kind of started off as the go-to person for that, for people’s projects, and then I produced my first feature film right out of college with a filmmaker who lived on my floor. I did my first feature, and then started getting work on music videos for Sony and Warner, and absolutely fell in love with the filmmaking process.”
From there, Liu took all sorts of film roles to understand that process, with credits on her IMDB page ranging from writer and director to production designer and working in the prop department. Eventually she became a producer, a role she says is involved in nearly every aspect of the production, from working on the screenplay to getting funding, to dealing with agents, all the way to holding a light, if need be, on a smaller production. “It really varies from project to project,” she concludes, “but at the end of the day, a lot of the onus of getting the film made itself is on the producer.”
That’s especially true with her newest project. Liu originally discovered “Student Body” while looking for a movie a friend’s production company, but when they opted not to make it, Liu loved Lee Ann Kurr’s screenplay so much she decided, “screw it, we’ll do it ourselves and it will be great.”
Liu said she was hands-on for the film — including standing in as an extra when the mountains of Georgia didn’t offer enough people for the shoot — but that thanks to her production staff, this was the first film she worked on in which she was able to eat three meals a day and get an adequate amount of sleep. But aside from the production staff, “Student Body” itself is actually supposed to help Liu’s sleep habits. Sick of making rom-coms, Liu looked to horror, in part, as a way to keep from being so terrified of those movies — and after her long peek behind the curtain, reports she now sleeps fine after watching one.
Instead, Liu’s nightmares now likely revolve around the long post-production delays she had to deal with due to COVID-19. Liu says a process that would usually be quickly handled in person became a lengthy hassle of swapping huge files back and forth over the internet for every minor alteration. Still, she believes, all things considered, that they made great time, and are happy to be distributing the film on-demand, seeing what COVID has done to theatrical releases. She may also have gotten lucky as over the summer, one of the film’s stars, Kevin Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, blew up with her role on the hit show “Cruel Summer.”
But since seeing film shoots in Massachusetts has gone from hugely exciting to borderline routine, the question arises as to whether she plans to do any shooting in our neck of the woods. Liu noted there’s some local flavor to “Student Body”. Co-producer Sandra Leviton hails from Worcester; her brother, Henry Bai Liu (DSHS ’18), made an appearance in the film; and her brother, Dr. Roland Bai Liu (DSHS ’08), served as a consultant. She says it’s a dream of hers to bring a move to Massachusetts at some point. In fact, in high school, she remembers what a big deal it was when “Shutter Island” filmed on the Medfield Hospital grounds, and would specifically love to do some filming where she wasn’t allowed to go back then.
Hopefully the filming locations have private bathrooms. Otherwise, who knows what kind of career Rachel Liu could launch next.
“Student Body” can be streamed on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube, among other outlets,.
