Sisi Liu Is Finding Her Voice in Hollywood — and She Has Plenty to Say
There is a particular moment in the life of an emerging filmmaker when the question changes. It is no longer simply whether you can make a movie. You have made one. Perhaps you have survived the impossible location, the disappearing daylight, the budget that requires everyone to perform minor acts of financial sorcery, and the weather that apparently did not receive the call sheet. You have sat through the edit, watched the film with an audience, collected a few laurels and discovered that finishing a movie is less a conclusion than permission to attempt something considerably more difficult.
For Los Angeles-based writer-director Sisi Liu, that moment appears to have arrived.
Liu has already written, directed and executive produced two narrative films, Walking on Thin Ice and SHIFT, established her own California production company, SisiLiu Pictures, and accumulated a substantial collection of festival and screenplay recognition. Walking on Thin Ice screened at Hollywood's TCL Chinese 6 Theatres during the 2025 Silicon Beach Film Festival and received Best Short Film recognition from the International Police Award Arts Festival. Her follow-up, the 21-minute SHIFT, arrived with an unusually developed life as a screenplay before becoming a completed film, collecting wins and placements in competitions internationally. Film Threat's Alan Ng subsequently awarded the finished film 8/10.
That is the résumé version. The more interesting story is what Liu is actually trying to build.
She is a filmmaker fascinated by institutions but increasingly convinced that characters matter more than institutions; a director interested in policing without wanting to make simplistic declarations about police; an independent producer skeptical enough about the festival ecosystem to question what all those laurels actually accomplish; and a writer who has reached the gloriously dangerous stage of deciding that the next logical thing to do is make a feature film.
She has even put her name on the company.
"There is something slightly terrifying and also motivating about putting your own name on a company," Liu says.
Welcome to Hollywood.
The filmmaker behind the badge
It would be easy to look at Liu's first two substantial narrative projects and decide that she is principally interested in law enforcement. Both Walking on Thin Ice and SHIFT inhabit that world, although they approach it from different directions.
Walking on Thin Ice, running just under ten minutes, follows a rookie officer investigating missing children who encounters evidence of a cover-up and turns to a veteran carrying his own history of loss. SHIFT expands the canvas to approximately 21 minutes and pairs idealistic rookie Ethan Hart with the much more jaded Riley Dawson, using their patrol together to examine what happens when moral certainty encounters the practical machinery of an institution.
Yet Liu's real subject may be less policing than pressure.
She is interested in the distance between what people believe about themselves and what happens when those beliefs suddenly become expensive. Institutions are particularly useful dramatic machines for creating that collision because institutions arrive with rules, hierarchies, histories and consequences already attached.
"I think I am naturally very sensitive to the problems created by social structures and systems," she explains. "As individuals, none of us really lives outside of society."
That sensitivity does not translate, in Liu's mind, into an obligation to make didactic films. She is wary of cinema that announces the correct answer before its characters have been allowed to struggle with the question.
"When something happening in society genuinely affects me," she says, "I think it is natural that I want to respond to it through my work."
Her chosen language for that response has always been fiction.
Liu grew up attracted to narrative crime films and thrillers, citing Se7en and Chinatown among the films that helped form her storytelling instincts. Documentary never exerted quite the same pull. Where a documentarian might enter reality and search for the story hiding inside it, Liu tends to notice something in reality and begin constructing another world around it.
"I think my brain naturally works through narrative structure," she says. "I like taking something I have seen or thought about in reality, creating characters around it, deciding what information the audience receives and when they receive it, and building an emotional journey through the story."
That distinction becomes important in SHIFT, because much of the fictional film has roots in things that actually happened.
Liu researched jurisdictions, departmental structures, staffing, recruitment, field training and the relationship between a rookie and an FTO before writing the film. She had already spent years consuming crime stories, body-camera footage, interrogation videos, police pursuits and case breakdowns, although she is quick to distinguish watching such material from genuinely knowing what it is like to do the job.
Almost every major incident in SHIFT, she says, nevertheless has some real-world foundation.
One convenience-store confrontation initially seemed so exaggerated that Liu's editor questioned whether the character was behaving unrealistically.
The joke was on reality.
The scene had been inspired by footage of an actual clerk refusing to provide surveillance material to police before screaming at the officers. According to Liu, the real person was more extreme than the character she ultimately put on screen.
That is perhaps the useful thing about being a crime filmmaker in contemporary America: occasionally reality will happily punch up your screenplay for you.
Idealists, cynics and everything between
At the center of SHIFT is the relationship between Ethan and Riley, two officers positioned at different points in their understanding of the institution they inhabit.
Ethan begins with the appealing confidence of someone who believes identifying the right thing and doing the right thing ought to be closely related activities. Riley has spent enough time inside the system to know how much territory can exist between them.
Liu refuses to make either man the film's official answer.
"I do not think SHIFT is saying that idealism is naive and that the institution is automatically right," she says. "What interested me was what happens when a very clear moral belief finally collides with a system that already has its own hierarchy, pressures, experience, and ways of surviving."
There is something autobiographical buried inside Ethan, although Liu resists treating him as a fictional stand-in.
She created the character during a period when she felt herself moving from a more innocent understanding of society toward an awareness of its harsher complications. She gave Ethan some of that uncertainty and then deliberately allowed him to become somebody else.
"Once I create a character, I try to treat that person as if they are alive," she says.
It is an illuminating statement because Liu's films repeatedly return to systems, yet when asked which of her recurring concerns — power, class, identity or institutions — is becoming most important, she chooses none of them.
"The thing becoming most important to me is the character arc."
The system supplies the pressure. The human being supplies the movie.
Film Daily talks with Sisi Liu
Film Daily: Police stories have a long history of dividing characters into the good cop and the bad cop. Did you consciously try to avoid that?
Sisi Liu: I actually do not think "good cop/bad cop" is automatically a bad storytelling device. A lot of police films I have enjoyed, including something like L.A. Confidential, use very different types of officers to create conflict and make the story more interesting. For me, the problem is not the archetype itself. The problem is when the character never develops beyond that label.
The person who appears to be the "good cop" may be compassionate and idealistic, but can also be inexperienced, stubborn, manipulative or full of terrible ideas. The person who looks like the "bad cop" may behave harshly but still have kindness, vulnerability, loyalty or an understandable reason for becoming that way. That contradiction is where characters become interesting to me.
Film Daily: Is Riley a warning for Ethan, a realist he needs to understand, or potentially a glimpse of his own future?
Liu: I think all of those possibilities can exist at the same time. Riley did not become that person for no reason. I see him more as someone whose edges have slowly been worn down by life and by years inside the same system.
Maybe when Riley first started the job, he was exactly like Ethan. Maybe he was not. We do not know, and I actually like that uncertainty. For Ethan, Riley is one of those people you encounter in life who forces you to confront a possible version of yourself.
Film Daily: How directly did real incidents influence SHIFT?
Liu: A lot. I am honestly not exaggerating when I say that almost every major incident in SHIFT has some kind of real-world foundation.
I do not copy those situations exactly. Usually I take something I have seen in footage, a reported incident or a real situation and then reshape it, combine it with other things and adapt it to fit my characters. Starting from something that has actually happened gives me a certain texture of reality, even after I fictionalize it.
Film Daily: Walking on Thin Ice was an ambitious subject for an early short. Why start with something involving missing children and institutional corruption?
Liu: Every time I make something, I have this feeling that I am throwing myself into the deep end again.
Sometimes I think of myself almost like a mirror. Society presents something to me, I absorb it, and then what comes back through the film is my own reflection of what I have seen.
Walking on Thin Ice was the first short film that, in a meaningful way, really felt like "my film" to me. Looking back, I was still very inexperienced in how I expressed some of those ideas. But even then, I did not think the size of the production or the budget should determine how seriously I treated the work.
Film Daily: What changed between making that film and making SHIFT?
Liu: Walking on Thin Ice was the first time I assembled what felt like a relatively complete crew and took a film all the way through the entire process, from the initial idea to casting, production, post-production and eventually putting the finished film out into the world.
By the time I made SHIFT, I was no longer encountering every problem for the first time.
But the biggest thing Walking on Thin Ice confirmed for me was that I do not want to do things halfway. Being indie explains why certain limitations exist. I do not want it to become an excuse for not caring.
Film Daily: You write, direct and executive produce. Why retain so much creative control?
Liu: At least at this stage of my career, I think I understand my own work better than anyone else, and every time an idea passes from one person to another, some degree of information is inevitably changed or lost.
There is a Chinese saying that roughly means, "Two tigers cannot share one mountain," and I think there is some truth to that in filmmaking. On an indie film, too many competing voices at the top can very quickly become one person's idea here, another person's idea there, until the movie starts to feel like a stitched-together Frankenstein.
That does not mean I do not value collaboration. Filmmaking is impossible without it. I just think there needs to be a clear creative center holding everything together.
Film Daily: How precious are you about your screenplay once shooting begins?
Liu: Almost immediately I stop protecting it.
Between the words on the page and the image that eventually gets photographed, there is an endless series of negotiations with reality. Locations, permits, props, cars, actors, schedules, weather, money — everything can force the movie to change.
For the exterior police-station parking-lot scene, we obviously could not fill an entire lot with picture vehicles. So we spaced out every car we had strategically and even used crew members' personal cars in the background.
That is independent filmmaking.
I do not really protect the literal version of what I wrote. I protect the reason I wrote it. If reality forces us to change the execution, then we change it. The important thing is that the intention survives.
Film Daily: And which negotiation with reality was the worst on SHIFT?
Liu: Definitely the rain sequence near the end. The rain in the film is completely real. We did not create it. So the weather was somehow helping us and sabotaging us at exactly the same time.
Visually, it gave the scene this dark, heavy atmosphere that I really love. Production-wise, it created an enormous number of problems. We were shooting at a film ranch in a fairly remote location, and once the rain started, the temperature dropped and it became incredibly cold. Everyone was wet, tired and uncomfortable.
That shoot stayed with me for quite a while afterward. But looking back now, I am strangely happy that the film contains those real rain images.
Film Daily: Film Threat gave SHIFT an 8/10. What interested you about the response?
Liu: What pleasantly surprised me was how much attention Alan Ng paid to the filmmaking itself rather than treating SHIFT only as a film about policing.
Because the subject can be controversial, it would be very easy for a review to become entirely about whether someone agrees or disagrees with the characters' views. Instead, he noticed the procedural structure of the film, the way one event leads into the next, and the fact that the characters still retain an emotional life without needing a huge amount of explanatory dialogue.
Of course I want the social questions underneath the film to stay with the audience, but first I still have to make a movie.
Film Daily: You have had dozens of festival and competition outcomes. Do filmmakers sometimes overestimate what festival recognition can actually do?
Liu: I am actually very glad you asked this question, although I am also going to try not to offend every film festival in the world.
From my own experience, yes, I do think the value of film festivals can sometimes be overstated.
For independent filmmakers, one of the things we need most is simply the chance to be seen. What can be frustrating is when a festival, sometimes even a very prominent one, uses a significant amount of its limited space on people who already have enormous industry visibility and access.
Some of my best experiences have come from smaller festivals organized by independent filmmakers or genuine film lovers. Sometimes you can actually feel that somebody watched the film, cared about it, communicated with you, and wanted the filmmaker to feel welcomed rather than simply processed.
Film Daily: So what makes an award professionally valuable rather than simply another laurel?
Liu: Does the festival actually help the film get seen?
Independent filmmakers usually do not lack the desire to make films. What we lack is access: access to audiences, industry people, press, distribution, financing or simply the next person who might be willing to open a door.
If a festival screens the film, helps put it in front of audiences, talks about it, promotes it or creates connections, then I think that recognition has real professional value.
Film Daily: Walking on Thin Ice screened at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres. What was that moment like?
Liu: It felt incredible.
You can spend months staring at your film on editing monitors, laptops, private links and review screens. Then suddenly the same image is huge, the room becomes dark, the sound fills the theater, the color is being presented the way it was intended, and there are other people sitting around you experiencing it at the same time.
It influenced how seriously I think about theatrical presentation now. For SHIFT, we created a 5.1 surround mix because I wanted the finished film to be genuinely ready for a cinema environment rather than only designed to work on a laptop.
Seeing Walking on Thin Ice in a theater made another goal feel much more concrete: someday I want to sit in a cinema and watch one of my own feature films with an audience.
Film Daily: Is that what led to SisiLiu Pictures?
Liu: I finally became very clear about what I want to be: a writer-director.
When I first entered the industry, I was honestly very confused. I knew I wanted to make movies, but "I want to make movies" is an incredibly broad answer.
I started with acting and spent time around theater. Later I studied cinematography and lighting. I have also worked in art department, done boom operating and tried different crew positions.
Then I started writing. Writing was one of the things that could genuinely put me into a flow state. While I was writing, I realized I was already seeing the movie in my head: how a scene should look, how it should feel and how information should be revealed visually.
Eventually I thought, "No, I have to direct this too, because I already know how I want this story to exist on screen."
Film Daily: And what do you want the company eventually to represent?
Liu: I want it to become a name that represents me and my work.
My immediate goal is to make a feature film through the company that genuinely feels like my film.
There is something slightly terrifying and also motivating about putting your own name on a company. If I had the nerve to do that, then I think I should also have the ambition to make that name eventually mean something.
Film Daily: What changes when you move from shorts into features?
Liu: Money.
That is the simplest answer, and probably the most realistic one.
On a short film, there are many things you can still solve through creativity, favors, very compressed schedules and people generously giving you their time. Once you move into a feature, everything becomes larger at the same time: more shooting days, more locations, longer cast commitments, more equipment, more transportation, more insurance, more post-production, more everything.
But there is also a creative challenge. A short can sometimes be built around one strong situation or one major turning point. A feature cannot survive for ninety minutes on that alone.
I do not want to make a ten-minute idea and simply stretch it until it becomes ninety minutes. If I make a feature, the story has to genuinely deserve feature length.
Film Daily: What would make somebody recognize a Sisi Liu film?
Liu: I think the most important signature would probably be the characters.
I tend to imagine much more of a character's life than the audience will ever actually see. I want to know what kind of person they were before the story begins, what happened to them, what they believe, what they are afraid of, and why they react to something in the particular way that they do.
One of my biggest dreams is to make films that do not completely disappear from the audience's mind when the screen goes black.
Film Daily: And ten years from now?
Liu: Honestly, if ten years from now somebody sees my name and their first reaction is, "Oh wow, Sisi has a new movie coming out. I need to go see it!" I think I will be very happy.
I want to reach a point where people are interested in the next film because they trust the name behind it, even before they know exactly what the story is.
Making the name mean something
There is an appealing contradiction in Liu's ambitions. She talks frequently about uncertainty in her characters, but there is increasingly little uncertainty about what she wants for herself.
The path to that certainty was not particularly direct.
Before identifying herself firmly as a writer-director, Liu explored acting and theater, cinematography and lighting, art department work, sound and other crew positions. Rather than representing a collection of abandoned careers, those experiences appear to have helped her understand the film set as an interconnected organism. Eventually writing became the place where the pieces converged.
She could see the movie while she wrote it.
Directing became less an additional ambition than the inevitable consequence.
Now she is preparing to make the considerably more treacherous jump into feature filmmaking, where the charming guerrilla solutions available to a short production encounter a much less charming economic reality. A feature requires not merely a larger version of the same resources but sustained resources: actors for longer, locations for longer, equipment for longer, insurance for longer and a story capable of holding an audience for something approaching 90 minutes.
Liu's answer to the biggest obstacle — "Money :)" — may be the single most universally comprehensible statement ever made by an independent filmmaker.
Yet the creative problem interests her just as much.
Her shorts have allowed her to enter characters' lives at moments of extreme pressure. A feature offers the luxury of consequences. Instead of meeting a character as the crisis arrives, she can show the chain of decisions that brought them there and remain after the decisive moment to discover what those choices cost.
That is precisely the territory toward which her work seems to be moving.
The striking thing about Liu's catalogue of festival results is not simply its length. Her materials list 17 wins alongside finalist, semifinalist and quarterfinalist placements, nominations, an honorable mention and official selections across her film and screenwriting work. SHIFT alone received screenplay recognition from competitions in Las Vegas, New York, London, Bangkok and elsewhere before the completed film began its own festival run.
Liu is appreciative of recognition without being seduced by its arithmetic.
That is a healthy instinct in a corner of the film business where an emerging filmmaker can collect an impressive rectangle of tiny laurels without necessarily moving one inch closer to financing the next movie. Her measurement is considerably more practical: Did somebody watch it? Did it reach an audience? Did the festival create a relationship, generate coverage or introduce the filmmaker to someone who could open another door?
The question lurking beneath all of this is access.
Hollywood is filled with talented people trying to obtain enough access to demonstrate that they deserve more access. The absurd circularity of that arrangement has sustained several generations of therapists, bartenders and entertainment lawyers.
Liu's response has been to begin building her own infrastructure.
SisiLiu Pictures was established in California in 2025, and Liu says her immediate ambition for the company is straightforward: make a feature that unmistakably belongs to her.
Her reference point for the longer game is Christopher Nolan — not because she imagines herself operating at Nolan's scale today, but because his name communicates something before an audience knows much about the next film. She wants, eventually, to create that kind of relationship between filmmaker and viewer.
It is an audacious goal. It is also exactly the sort of goal a filmmaker ought to have before budgets, schedules, development notes and the hundred practical indignities of production begin politely negotiating it downward.
Liu has already learned something essential about that negotiation.
She tells a wonderful story about the exterior police-station sequence in SHIFT. An independent production obviously did not possess an entire parking lot of picture vehicles, so the available cars were carefully distributed through the frame, with crew members' personal vehicles recruited into service. Elsewhere, real rain transformed a scene aesthetically while making the physical shoot miserable.
Neither image matched the pristine version that existed when Liu sat alone writing.
That, she has decided, is fine.
She is willing to sacrifice the literal manifestation of an idea to preserve the reason the idea existed.
It may also explain why her increasing focus on character feels significant. Production circumstances change. Budgets change. Locations disappear. Rain arrives. Institutions bend people. Experience changes idealists. A person who begins a story believing one thing can finish it believing something entirely different.
The interesting question is what survives.
For Liu, that question now applies to her own career. She has made the shorts, seen one of them glowing across a Hollywood cinema screen, accumulated the festival notices, formed the company and discovered the kind of filmmaker she intends to be. The next experiment is larger.
Someday, she says, she wants audiences to see the name Sisi Liu attached to a new movie and decide they need to watch it before they know anything else.
For the moment, there is a feature to make first.
And, as Liu has already discovered, two tigers cannot share one mountain.
