Justin Lin

The Risk of Ten Credit Cards

Justin Lin racked up 100,000 dollars in debt, spread across ten different credit cards, to finance his first film. It was 2002, and Better Luck Tomorrow was a crime drama about Asian American teenagers that no major studio wanted to produce. Lin did not seek permission or wait for outside validation.

And the gamble paid off.

Sundance bought the film after a bidding war, and critics discovered a director who knew how to shoot violence without unnecessary flourishes. But the real jump in scale came in 2006. Universal Pictures handed him a franchise that was on its last legs, and Lin decided the solution was not the cars but the concept of family.

In 2006, he directed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and changed the visual rules of the franchise. He introduced moving cameras that tracked the tire drifts almost physically. Lin understood that action needed clear geography so the audience would never get confused.

Rebuilding a Worn-Out Engine

In 2009, he directed Fast & Furious and managed to bring back the original cast after years of disconnected installments. The studio then gave him complete creative freedom for the next phase. In 2011, with Fast Five, he turned street racing into a large-scale heist film on a $125 million budget.

It was his biggest commercial success.

Lin shot in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and showed he could handle massive productions without losing narrative momentum. But in 2016 he decided to leave the city behind and travel to space. He directed Star Trek Beyond in a complex shoot in which he had to contend with a script that was being rewritten on the fly.

The film grossed $343 million worldwide. But it fell short of the numbers Paramount had hoped for to keep pace with other major franchises. Lin then chose to focus on executive producing and on more personal television projects such as Warrior.

Walking Away and New Horizons

In 2021, he returned to his favorite franchise with F9 after several years away. The production was marked by delays caused by the global pandemic. But his relationship with the franchise ended abruptly shortly afterward.

In 2022, he walked away from directing Fast X just days into filming. The creative differences with Vin Diesel became unsustainable, and Lin chose to leave. His exit cost the studio close to a million dollars a day while they scrambled to find an emergency replacement.

But Lin prefers total control.

In 2024, he focused on the preproduction of The Last Days of John Allen Chau and on the adaptation of the manga One-Punch Man for Sony Pictures. The latter has a screenplay written by Dan Harmon and Heather Anne Campbell. Filming of the story about missionary John Allen Chau took place mainly on location in Thailand during May 2024.