From Duxbury to Prague to New York City, one Duxbury native is following his filmmaking passion – without a backup plan.

Liam Billingham, University of New Hampshire ’05 and DHS ’01, credits Duxbury for his love of theater and passion for film that landed him in New York City. “It’s all Duxbury’s fault that I’m poor and in New York City,” Billingham said, reminiscing on his breakout theater career at 13.

Billingham is currently in post-production for his most recent short film “Future Perfect,” the story of a student’s struggle through an English as a Second Language program in New York City. Inspired by his experience teaching ESL classes in the city, the film follows Xia, an aspiring writer from China who is trying to get into a graduate school in the United States. A classmate of Billingham’s, whose name remains the same in the film, plays the lead character. The film is 90 percent fiction, 10 percent documentary, Billingham said.

“I was teaching in this idiosyncratic corner of the universe and I thought it would make a great film,” he said

Billingham previously taught ESL in Prague and moved back to the States under the impression that he would not teach ESL again. He stumbled into a teaching job after moving to NYC with a friend and discovered an inspiration for a film.

After working at the school for four years, Billingham realized the story was less eccentric and more realistic than he had originally thought. He saw many of his students struggle through the classes and head home. He decided to get serious about documenting his experience and went back to school to get his master’s degree.

Billingham wrote the pitch for his film in April 2011 and struggled to leave his theatrical background behind. For nearly six months he worked to rewrite his script into one that would translate well to film. In April 2012, he started assembling a crew with producer Lars Fuchs and production design director Aria Chiodo. As he continued to grow his production team, he scouted locations in May and June of 2012 and scheduled the first shoot for late October.

“It was the first major production for many of us and that made it a lot more difficult,” Billingham said. “We had to figure out how to do all these things we really had no idea how to do.”

After shooting a kick-starter video in September to spark fundraising, Billingham hired the rest of the crew and got ready for the late October filming. Filming began on Oct. 26 and continued through Oct. 28, but production was seriously interrupted as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the city. With a rented RED camera being used for this production, Billingham was faced with extending his rental agreement, which cost a significant amount of money and affected producers from other films who had rented the camera after “Future Perfect” was set to finish filming. 

With filming wrapped up, Billingham and his editor, Matthew Fleischmann, were faced with editing over eight hours of footage down to a 13-minute short film.

“We have had moments when the film worked with only one or two edits and some which had to be edited nearly 20 times,” he said. “There are definitely things I wish we had done differently, but we were very lucky in that we didn’t have any major problems.”

“Future Perfect” is set to be picture locked, or finished cutting scenes, by March 10. Billingham will be screening the film at the Duxbury Free Library on March 17 as part of the DFL’s Sunday Salon Series. More information on the film can be found at futureperfectmovie.com.

“It’s hard to get the word out about any short film,” he said. “It’s unusual to screen a rough cut of a film and I’m hoping to generate a conversation about ESL to help the film.”

For aspiring filmmakers, Billingham has three pieces of advice: study film, move to where films are being made and make your own film.

“Today, you have no excuse not to make a film,” he said. “I don’t consider myself particularly hard working. I just do it and I don’t have a backup plan. If there’s nothing else you want to do, make films.”