Episode Details

Ben walks the lake at Mueller with David Liu—director, editor, producer, composer, and until 2024, an AI engineer. Fifteen-plus years in hardware, software, product design and machine learning, and then generative AI showed up and he decided he didn't want his name on where it was going. So he went looking for the one medium the technology can't enter without destroying it… documentary filmmaking.

Here's the crazy part - he never wanted to be a filmmaker. He wanted to score films. A friend pointed out that nobody can stop you from composing your own movie, which meant he now had to go find a story worth telling. Enter Covid, four Austin restaurants and one pandemic. Seventeen shooting days spread across four years. Four years of grant pitches where everyone told him TO BE SEEN was impossible: four subjects, non-linear, no way.

He shot it with almost no lighting, no rehearsals, and a rule about never overstaying his welcome, because the second take is where the artifice creeps in. Fiore Tedesco of L'Oca d'Oro handed him the title in the first sit-down, "you don't need a restaurant to eat, you need a restaurant to be seen." Plus a three-hour interview that became the spine of the film. Then the assembly came back all talking heads, and he sat stuck for a full year, thinking he had made a huge mistake.

What unstuck him was filming chefs mushroom-hunting in the Pacific Northwest. That short—HIDDEN STORIES–FORAGED AND FOUND—went to DOC NYC, two hundred people went dead silent, and he had his formula.

Plus: cashing out the retirement account to finish, and finding out at the premiere— sitting next to chefs who had never seen a frame—that the thing is actually good.

DISCUSSION LINKS:

TO BE SEEN (2026) | HIDDEN STORIES–FORAGED AND FOUND (2024) | VALLEY UPRISING (2014) | FREE SOLO (2018) | CHEF'S TABLE (2015) | FIRE OF LOVE (2022) | THE FIRE WITHIN: A REQUIEM FOR KATIA AND MAURICE KRAFFT (2024)

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Sync, sync—and a thesis: "my job is to discover the answers" 00:22 Your job as an artist is to pose the question 00:40 Fifteen, twenty years of engineering, and a pretty big gamble 01:00 Riley, cue the music — David Liu, ladies and gentlemen 01:30 Toasty and muggy: Mueller, the lake, and the ducks 02:00 To Be Seen, four Austin restaurants, and the AFS Cinema premiere 02:40 The Bullock on the 13th, Austin Public on the 14th 03:00 L'Oca d'Oro, Foreign & Domestic, LeRoy and Lewis, Pho Craft 03:30 "I never tried to get into filmmaking" 03:55 A terrible idea: just make your own film and score it 04:20 A calling card for a production company that didn't exist yet 05:00 Failing at pop songs, accidentally good at scoring to picture 05:45 Play every instrument badly — that's a composer 06:40 Hoping for narrative, and what the industry decided instead 07:15 Hardware to software to product design to AI 08:00 2018, and a career that started taking off 08:30 The gut says hedge: what if it goes wrong? 09:00 Looking for the most opposite thing, and finding documentary 09:40 Use AI in a doc and it's no longer a doc 10:20 What he didn't like about where doc was going 10:40 Too lit, too rehearsed, too formulaic 11:00 Chasing celebrity, crime, cults — the three Cs 11:20 Four years of grant pitches: "you're breaking all the r