Meet Jaye Liu | Student Filmmaker, Director, Writer & Producer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jaye Liu and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jaye, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
As a girl who was born and raised in China and then came to the United States and Europe to study films, I always see how my peer filmmakers from all over the world come to the city of Angels to pursue their Hollywood dreams. Spending tons of money to get the permit to film at an LA garage happens usual. I started thinking why not set our stage back in my hometown Chongqing, China–one of the most viral cities on TikTok, famous for its cyberpunk and maze-like architecture. Get some cool shots that we cannot make in Los Angeles, and bring them back to LA. I believe the huge location contrast would intrigue a lot of filmmakers in LA, and that is how it started.

Storywise, I was inspired by the idea that I always feel like workers under pressure all have hidden desires to take off their mask. Being tortured by your tiring job, hating your freaky boss, and fantasizing about murdering someone you really hate– these are all a common nature across the world. Human nature is the same, and we all face the same problems in the modern world. As David Fincher said, everyone is a pervert, and he establishes every work based on that. Yes, I do believe that we all have a dark side, a beast inside everyone in the world, that is how I came up with the story– A corporate slave working, selling refrigerators, tormented daily by her obsessive-compulsive boss, accidentally obtains a bewitching mushroom, and starts a shroom journey escaping from reality and propelling a sacrifice in the end. Tell a story that is universal, make a theme that everyone understands. These are my aspirations motivating me to kick off the project.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
This Fridge Won’t Sell is a 10-minute short film shot in July, 2025, Chongqing, China. It is a high cost, well shot, surreal absurd body horror. I am most proud that all of the people in our film process come from different places in the world. It is very international — the production team mainly from China, post production team mainly from the United States (my editor Maria Bautista is a Venezuelan immigrant, and my composer Anastasia Listopadova is from Russia and the Netherlands, my producer Benjámin de Bohun originally comes from Hungary). It is such a cool project that connects so many different people together and to fight for the same end goal. I am proud to see film as a language itself, transported from China to the United States.

It is definitely not easy to run such a long-time project with so many different cultural backgrounds. The biggest challenge is building the bonds between people and people, people and project. As the initiator of the project, I am the one who treats it like my baby without doubt, but how to make other people who are also part of the project but did not get the chance to be involved with other people and other parts of film still have the same intimate bond with this project is difficult. For example, my editor Maria did not take part in the production process and never met my DP, actors and a lot of other crew members before, but she will take over the post production task. Since this is the case, we meet twice a week, and I will tell her a lot of behind the scenes stories while we are editing our film. We sat down and watched all of our footages while telling her how did it work in China, what my actress was thinking, and what was missing in our production process. Sharing stories is just such a simple but efficient way to break the barriers of our different cultures and bring people more involved into our project.

Forget about your previous mindset, learning about people is a way to learn yourself.

As a filmmaker, I love gory thrillers. As an international student, I have made films in China, Europe, the United States. I want people to know film as a language telling universal human nature, and horror as a style to unravel morals behind.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Road trip in Los Angeles might be the most interesting one. Drive all the way from downtown LA to Hollywood, seeing those creative and goofy billboards on the road. Drive from Santa Monica beach to Joshua Tree, feeling the power of nature in LA. I am surprised that LA has so many authentic Asian cuisines–Little Tokyo and Koreatown are places I have been most for good food.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Filmmaking is a team project that is based on people. Speaking of naming credits, I could list hundreds of names. There are people that I met only once but still willing to offer their hand. I learned, and was touched by mankind.

Firstly, I deeply appreciate my producers– Serina Li and Benjámin de Bohun, a Chinese girl and an American born Hungarian boy. We have different backgrounds, and we have different personalities and career goals. It is very interesting to have this trio, a group that is small, but planning something this grand. It was a perfect trio, big enough to make up each other’s deficiencies. Without Serina, I would not have survived through Chongqing’s extreme filming conditions–104 degrees Fahrenheit, climbing steep stairs back and forth with loads of equipment. Without Ben, I am not going to make it to a public pitch event, standing in front of so many people and then brag about our film like it is going to win an Academy Award very soon. This is a project across multiple countries, and we are all at a very early stage in our career. We face problems we never imagined, dream the same dream, learn the same lessons, and watch the magic actually happening on the screen. These are moments film gave me as a present and I will remember them for times to come.

Besides countless crew members, friends, families who all gave me big encouragement, there is a very special experience that tells me “dream big”, and that everything could be possible. I was deeply inspired by Fight Club (1999) when I crafted the world of my script. I could not agree more on these words: “We’re in the middle of history. Our war is a spiritual war. Our depression comes from our lives.” The way that Tyler Durden employs violence to revolt against societal rules somehow mirrors my character, who chooses to take shrooms against her mundane society and chooses to get lost in a hallucinated world. However, I was in a state of high tension when post-production and marketing were about to come. I could not sleep well and pushed everyone around me. The turning point was when I reached out to the editor of Fight Club, James Haygood due to my film course, and he said he is willing to take an interview with me. The first time of actually sitting down and talking about a film that changed my life with such a successful filmmaker seems to be insane for a college student. I was thrilled and nervous. We talked for about an hour. He asked a lot about my film, including perspectives. He also shared a lot of insider opinion about Fight Club. Most importantly, the very kind way he shared personal filmmaking experiences — anecdotes about David Fincher, Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, a lot of his own personal thoughts involved with one of the most iconic films –made me believe that I am still in the same world with those film legends, and they are not far away, not only on screen. At that moment that he is right in front of me on Zoom, talking to me and asking me about my life, it was a surreal dream. This gave me big support and he told me I should keep dreaming about something big.

Website: https://www.jayeeee.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisfridgewontsell?igsh=dzJpbzlnMXl5N3hy (just registered and will build up soon). personal handle:https://www.instagram.com/ja.yeeee?igsh=OGg1aTZxanJkYnli&utm_source=qr

Image Credits
Shot by Rui Wang/ Serina Li/ Shuaiqi Huang