The Sundance Film Festival is usually a jumping-off point for a director. A great premiere in Park City is meant to be a harbinger of calls from studio executives offering bigger budgets and A-list casts. This was, more or less, the trajectory Justin Lin found himself on when his feature debut Better Luck Tomorrow premiered at Sundance in 2002.
The movie, about a group of high-achieving suburban Asian American students who try their hand at some criminal activity, screened to positive reviews with a particular boost from Roger Ebert. “Justin Lin […] reveals himself as a skilled and sure director, a rising star. His film looks as glossy and expensive as a megamillion studio production,” reads Ebert’s review at the time.
Condensing twenty years’ worth of work into one paragraph: What followed Sundance for Lin was a flourishing career as a studio director, taking the Fast & Furious franchise from a B-movie muscle car manifesto to a certified globe-trotting franchise. (Lin’s first Fast outing, Tokyo Drift, saw Better Luck Tomorrow star Sung Kang reprise his role as Han Leu.) In between five Fast films, there was also Star Trek Beyond and plenty of television (True Detective, Scorpion, Community). Says Lin, “When Better Luck Tomorrow opened that door, I just wanted to try everything and get a perspective of this business.”
The Sundance-to-studio pipeline is a well-trod path — other notable graduates are Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi — less common are filmmakers who take the journey back. But the 2025 festival sees Lin return to his indie roots, with his latest feature, Last Days.
Last Days, which bows at Sundance on Jan. 28, tells the story of John Allen Chau, a Christian missionary who in 2018 illegally traveled to the North Sentinel island in a misbegotten attempt to convert the Sentinelese only to be killed by the island’s isolated tribe. Chau’s death, with its sensationalized elements, became tabloid fodder.
Lin, who describes himself as not particularly religious, admits to initially being judgmental of Chau when he first learned of his story from the news on an airport television. But in reading Alex Perry’s report in Outside Magazine, where Perry talks to those who knew Chau (in particular his father, Patrick), Lin gained a greater respect for the totality of the story. Chau, while misguided, was a young man who was looking for purpose and connection amid the uncertainties of the world. Lin connected with Patrick, who felt like he tried but failed to stop his son from going down a treacherous path. Lin says, “I have a 15-year-old son. As parents, we never want our kids to feel pain, but at the same time we can’t impose.”
As for finding for the right actor to play Chau, it was the right actor that found Lin. The director was screening Better Luck Tomorrow in 2023 at the BFI in London when he met Sky Yang, who was performing a spoken word poem ahead of the film. Remembers Lin, “I’m thinking, ‘He looks like John Allen Chau. It can’t be this easy, right?’” Yang, best known for the Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films, did end up landing the role after several rounds of auditions and is joined on screen by Ken Leung as Patrick.
Last Days is Lin’s first directorial effort outside of the studio system in over two decades. “The indie always gets pushed because that’s the lowest priority,” says Lin. The filmmaker needed production to happen in a specific time frame, in between production on television projects, so, he says, “I have great relationships, but it was very clear to me that, for me to make it, this journey had to be independent.”
Even though it was an indie, the scope of the story was still large, netting a 38-day shoot with filming taking place in Thailand, London, Iceland, India and central California. “We found out very quickly that a gust of wind coming from the east could wipe out half the day,“ says Lin. “We were shooting inside a hangar [in Thailand], and this monsoon rain hit. And it doesn’t even feel like rain, it’s like a force. I remember sitting there and lights are being taken away by the wind, and I’m thinking, “Oh my god, like, we have three sets across town.” Within 20 minutes, it was wiped out.”
The director adds, “It sounds stressful but, even in the moment, we knew we were going to make it happen no matter what.”
Last Days is Lin’s first feature after a high profile exit from the Fast franchise, which saw him leave the production of Fast X just days into shooting. Now, Lin doesn’t rule anything out — from studio projects to indies to television. “When I started off in 2002, I didn’t even think I was gonna have a career as a filmmaker,” says the director, whose movies now boast a couple billion in global box office sales. “The one thing I didn’t count on is, on this side of 50, everything is a little bit more precious. I need something that I get excited about because that’s two years of my life.” Next up for Lin is the Amazon adventure series Seven Wonders that stars Simu Liu and the heist thriller Two for the Money, starring Charlize Theron and Daniel Craig.
“The cool thing is that I’m in a place in my life where it doesn’t have to be business,” says the filmmaker. “I do think this is the beginning of a new chapter.”
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