East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Kathy A. McDonald

Behind all the glamour and hype of Hollywood is a tough, competitive business where the odds of being successful, even with talent, are poor. Factor in an Asian American heritage, and the list of major names above the title is slim indeed: Ang Lee, Wayne Wang, John Woo and Justin Lin are the best-known Chinese-born directors now working in Hollywood. As the youngest on the list, Lin is in a category of his own: born in Taiwan, the 34-year-old director grew up in Buena Park, a working-class suburb of Orange County, Calif.--and definitely not the one depicted in “The OC”.

After studying and making student films at both UC San Diego and UCLA, Lin broke into features with the independently-made hit Better Luck Tomorrow, a story of disaffected Chinese American teens living in a monochromatic suburb – not unlike Buena Park. The feature, a hit at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and nominee for an Independent Spirit Award, was Lin’s Hollywood calling card. From a film financed through his own credit cards, Lin went on to direct two polished studio productions: Annapolis and the summer–popcorn flick The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, featuring up-and-coming actors, including Roger Fan and Sung Kang, who also star in Lin’s latest project, Finishing the Game.

“What I’ve learned in the last five years is having choices is a real luxury,” Lin explains. “If you get into the position and have choices, you get to have the chance to have perspective to be a filmmaker,” says Lin, now based in Los Angeles. Although a rising star in the film business with his own production company, Trailing Johnson Productions, Lin is self-effacing and unpretentious, with a great sense of humor—more college bud than pretentious artiste. 

Finishing the Game was a total passion project for Lin. He co-wrote the script and co-produced the comedy, raising the $500,000 budget independently. Shot documentary style, with some very entertaining ‘70s-style films within the film, the bittersweet story centers around the casting of an actor who will play martial arts master Bruce Lee’s body double and finish his final film, Game of Death. Only a 12-minute fight sequence slated for the picture was completed prior to Bruce Lee’s premature death at age 32.

While the premise is based on reality, Finishing the Game is Lin’s creative imagining of the process to find Lee’s double. It weaves together several serious themes while wryly observing many Hollywood truisms—the differing levels of denial—and stereotypical casting of Asian actors–notice who always portrays the delivery boy. “I have a sense of what it means to be an Asian American actor from a director’s point of view,” Lin says. “I’ve been in audition rooms, and I know it’s not an issue of talent; it’s very clear that it’s an issue of opportunity,” finds the writer-director.

Lin contends that the idea for Finishing the Game has been rattling around in his brain since he was a kid and a fan of TV’s “Kung Fu Theater.” Watching his first Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon, was an awakening, he says. “It was the first time I saw an Asian face on screen who was someone who was empowered and sexy and complex. I thought, ‘That’s so cool!’ But then you go on the schoolyard and people are calling you ‘Bruce Lee.’ It’s a pull-and–tug relationship with Bruce Lee that I think all Asian Americans have,” Lin theorizes.

Growing up in suburban Buena Park, Hollywood blockbusters were the norm at the local multiplex. Lin never considered filmmaking as a career possibility until he saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. “The final scene when the trash can went through the window got me so angry at the movie. It stayed with me for two weeks. It opened my eyes to how films could be made differently.” He also credits Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream, the classic tale of the underdog, as an influence. At UCLA’s film school, Lin was immersed in auteur cinema and developed an admiration for directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman. His cinematic guilty pleasure: comedies, among them Tommy Boy, which he describes as “pretty brilliant,” without a hint of irony, as a true film fan.

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FINISHING THE GAME had its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and went on to open the San Francisco Asian Film Festival, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Chicago Asian Showcase. The movie opened in theaters on October 5th in New York and opens in various other cities nationwide throughout October and November. 

*Photos of Finishing the Game by Hosanna Wong/Trailing Johnson

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