Director Justin Lin’s
Better Luck Tomorrow
Digs Up the Dirt on the SoCal ‘Burbs
By Danny Gilbert

Fresh out of UCLA's School of Film and Television, Justin Lin has broken onto to the American cinema scene with a fresh and realistic portrayal of teen angst, centered around a group of overachieving Asian-American high school honor students in Better Luck Tomorrow. Having a cast and crew work for free and a budget under $500,000, "B.L.T.," (as the cast likes to refer to it), is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s early days. Whereas Mean Streets took place in an New York Italian-American neighborhood, Better Luck Tomorrow focuses on a suburb of Orange County, a place where the lack of adventure, that suburban teenagers crave, can easily lead a group of four exceptional students to criminal activities.

Born in Taiwan and raised in Buena Park, the notion of suburbia itself is what Justin was going for in the story. "Suburbia creates a lot of assumptions," Justin says. "People have goals but they don't know why and they have no directions of why they're achieving these goals, which could lead them to other activities. It's kind of a contradiction in meaning."

Justin also points to the fact that a lot of people move to suburbia to live in gated-communities, which aren’t really safer, but give the buyer the illusion of having their own freedom.  Yet homeowners must sign contracts agreeing to follow the community’s rules, such as not leaving their car parked outside of their garage for more than half-an-hour.

"It's something like a Nazi state," Justin says. "The whole notion of suburbia is supposed to be an ideal world to live in, but 'why do you want to live in that world?' is the question most people don't ever ask, they just assume."

In fact, when Better Luck tomorrow premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Justin received a backlash from some in the Asian-American community due to his characters not having a "positive portrayal." But Lin saw the controversy as a great opportunity to open up more questioning what it means to portray characters "positively."

"We need to re-define what (positive portrayal) means," he says. "Too often people misconstrue that as flawless and noble characters."

Parry Shen, who plays Ben, the bright-but-tragic overachiever, says that movies do not have to be preachy to tell a good story. "For the most part, Asian-American-themed films have one-dimensional characters and that's why they have trouble getting a distribution deal," Shen says. "When I see them, I'm like, 'I wouldn't pay to see those films either."

Justin says he is dealing with serious issues in Better Luck and felt it was important to humanize the characters. "Having people who are flawed, big or small, who are three-dimensional, that's always positive," Justin says. "It's easy to make a film that's a feel-good movie, but I can't do that with this film."

Fortunately, the cast shared Lin’s passion for the project and their three-dimensional characters. So much so that Shen turned down the chance to audition for Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending and Jason Tobin, who plays the volatile Virgil, turned down the chance to fly down to New Zealand to work on Xena: Warrior Princess. All Lin could do was thank the entire cast for making a pact not to take any other acting work until the film was done.

Sung Kang, who plays Han, the muscle of the group says they weren’t there to make a strictly Asian-American film. The story came from an Asian-American perspective and they just happen to all be Asian-American actors.

 "We were there for the right reasons," Kang says. "We weren't there for the money and we weren't there to be cool. We were there because we were passionate about this project and that was the universal theme for everybody."

With Better Luck Tomorrow opening in limited release, and a hopeful wider release, more backlash is expected from some in the Asian-American

Community. Justin only looks forward to it.

"The backlash is there, but I'm glad that it does exist because it opens it up for dialogue and that's something that I feel we are missing overall as a society," he says. "We don't have enough dialogue."