Justin Lin points at the long slender neck of the Enterprise on a monitor. It’s spindly, that diagonal piece leading up to the saucer section, vulnerable. As a kid, he always wondered, why wouldn’t you just attack there?
In a gobsmacking action sequence from Star Trek Beyond, directed by Lin, a fleet of ships attack in a swarm—shredding and slicing the Enterprise until it’s decapitated. Even though the frenzied scene is set in the vacuum of space, the action feels visceral, painful, and scary.
But in the editing bay, Lin is finding all sorts of minuscule problems. He asks to see multiple iterations of the swarm ships: 10,000, 20,000. His team animates the sequence, then reanimates it, over and over, as Lin adjusts the ships’ flight paths. Then he zooms in and critiques the exact locations of tiny thrusters and running lights, the smoothness or roughness of nozzle heads. He’s relentless.
Lin is Hollywood’s Racer X: a spectacularly skilled wheelman with a perplexingly low profile that belies his blistering box office track record. After making his name with the indie hit Better Luck Tomorrow, he supercharged the moribund Fast & Furious brand into cinema’s most inclusive, multibillion-dollar global franchise.
J.J. Abrams asked Lin to pitch him something bold. He told Abrams he wanted to destroy the Enterprise.
In late 2014, with the 50th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise and Beyond’s July 22 premiere date looming, Paramount Pictures and producer J.J. Abrams were looking for a new captain, a director known for pushing the pace.
“It was like, hey, this is a rescue mission,” says Lin, a trim 44-year-old with a neatly cropped beard and a quiet, confident manner. Over lunch at an outdoor restaurant in downtown LA, he grins wryly: “It was, ‘You’ve got six months.’”
Abrams, like many Hollywood insiders, knew Lin had, as he puts it, “command of a large cast, a great sense of action, a sense of humor,” and “an ability to tell stories that would speak to cultures all over the world.” Just as important, he knew Lin was fearless—and had an uncanny ability to pull off ambitious shoots with big stars under extreme stress. So he asked Lin to pitch him something bold. Lin told Abrams he wanted to destroy the Enterprise.
Still, Lin had to think carefully before taking the big chair. The sci-fi blockbuster would have to get from script to special effects at warp speed. And Lin had just turned down the most lucrative offer of his life—to direct Furious 7—partly because of a similarly rushed shoot, but mostly to prove he was more than just a franchise doctor.
In between Fast films, the mogul-in-the-making has shown he can drive anything from comedies (Lin directed the Community episode Dan Harmon calls “our biggest triumph”—the first season’s paintball odyssey, “Modern Warfare”) to hit network dramas (the pilot of Scorpion, which he produces through his company Perfect Storm). When Abrams offered him Trek, Lin had just launched a content studio, Bullitt, specializing in virtual reality, with directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Captain America: Civil War) and, in conjunction with Google, had shot the groundbreaking 360-degree interactive monster movie Help. Lin was also directing two episodes of True Detective season two—even as he was lining up a childhood daydream, his own fresh take on Air Jordan’s Space Jam.
But this was Star Trek. Lin kept thinking of how, when he was a child, his father would come home from his 12-hour workdays and the two would watch reruns of TV’s most trailblazingly diverse show—one of the only to feature an Asian American actor (George Takei).
Lin drove to his parents’ house. “I just remember looking at them and thinking, ‘I should do it.’”
Early on a crisp February morning, over a breakfast of egg whites and oatmeal at the deli in a low-key grocery store near his editing room in Pasadena, California, Lin tells me about his Trek pitch. Instead of recycling old enemies (as in the controversial yet wildly successful Star Trek Into Darkness), he wanted to take away every familiar comfort of Starfleet, the bridge, and the recent films to “make the characters as raw as possible,” Lin says, “and build them back up.” He wanted to refocus the franchise on how the crew would react as underdogs, in an unfamiliar world, facing unknown enemies.
It sounds a bit like the immigrant biography of Lin, who learned to hustle by watching his parents start over in a new country. He spent his early childhood on a family farm in Taiwan, where he remembers that his father, an airline pilot, would bike three hours to work to save money on the commute. When he was 8, the Lins invested their life savings in a fish-and-chips shop in Anaheim, California, and moved to nearby Buena Park, where they worked nonstop, overstayed their visas, and lived in fear of deportation until President Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act granted them amnesty in 1987.
In that greasy shop in the shadow of Disneyland, Lin saw the way customers either respected his father, his hero, or regarded him as “just an Asian immigrant, and they’d treat him like shit.” One night, a violent customer called Lin a “fucking Chink” and shattered the shop’s glass door with a punch—at a time when any repair was a precious expense. His father worked 364 days a year, taking only Thanksgiving off.
Then Roger Ebert stands up and shouts: “Nobody would say that to white filmmakers.”
Unable to speak English, Lin was sent to the Boys Club of Buena Park, where Coach Bob tapped him and his younger brother, John—the only Asian kids—for the basketball team. They rode the pine, but in the season’s last blowout Lin played junk minutes and managed to make one shot.
“It changed my life,” he says, grinning.
At the library, Lin learned English by reading biographies of famous Lakers. At the playground, he learned that, in America, even assholes respect you when you put points on the board. A bully called him “fag” and “gook” every day—until Lin beat him at a game of one-on-one.
Lin—5′2″ in fifth grade, 5′4″ today—played center, then forward, then point guard in high school. He grew up wanting to be a playmaker like his idol, Magic Johnson, after whom he would name his first film company, Trailing Johnson.
Off the court, wearing much-mocked bowling shoes from Goodwill, he also wanted to prove himself. He envied his neighbors, the Klug brothers, who had “a trampoline and all the Hot Wheels cars I couldn’t afford.” So one day, like a pint-size version of Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto, he stole a little toy car from a store—and got caught by his brother, who called Dad.
After that, Lin started making knockoff cars out of tinfoil. One day in the garage, he built a ramp out of scrap wood and drew a checkered flag with a Sharpie. “Ray Klug goes, ‘I’ll give you three cars for that,’” Lin recalls. They weren’t great cars—one was a garbage truck—but when he looks back at his career now, “it all goes back to that ramp,” Lin says. “I realized I could create things and people might actually want them.”
Today, when that kid who couldn’t afford toy cars walks out to the parking lot, he unlocks a preposterously beautiful black Aston Martin Rapide. “I think it’s the only one with a car seat,” he says, shrugging as he points to the seat in the back of the family car for his 6-year-old son, Oqwe.
For Lin, Star Trek Beyond will be a chance to remind people that there’s more to him than car chases—and that the global appeal of his Fast franchise was earned honestly, not cynically.
Lin’s rise comes at a critical moment in Hollywood: Just as the global marketplace is becoming more important than the American audience, the industry’s systemic discrimination has never been more painfully obvious, from #OscarsSoWhite protests to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation into gender discrimination among directors. Lin worries that Hollywood these days sees diversity as a fad. “A casting director told me every person of color she works with is being cast this year in pilot season,” Lin says. “But I’ve been in this business long enough to know there are ups and downs.” While woefully out-of-touch filmmakers have shamelessly pandered, pairing white stars with token minorities, Lin has been a genuinely inclusive pioneer, bringing the cocksure diversity of his scrappy indie films to the multiplex.
As a kid, he saw just two films in a theater—E.T. and Rocky III. But two movie rentals led him to UCLA’s film school: Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker blew his mind, and Do the Right Thing made him angry in a way he didn’t understand. When Spike Lee’s Mookie threw that garbage can through the window of Sal’s mom-and-pop pizzeria, “I was just shaking, I was so pissed,” he says, thinking of his father’s store. As he grasped the full power of the film, “it unlocked something in me.”
Lin became determined to tell his own stories. His first codirected film, 1997’s Shopping for Fangs, was an offbeat Asian American SoCal werewolf tale made for about $80,000 and notable as the first screen credit of Star Trek Beyond’s Sulu, John Cho. Roger Ebert showed up to a festival screening—but left before the end.
For his solo debut, 2002’s Better Luck Tomorrow, Lin needed $250,000, a small but impossible sum. One financier offered him $2 million—if he replaced his Asian American lead with Macaulay Culkin. Lin said no, racked up $100,000 on credit cards, and, in the end, was saved by a crucial $6,500 investment from MC Hammer, whom Lin randomly met at a broadcasting convention.
Growing up in the 1980s, Lin endured a barrage of racist references to the Indiana Jones sidekick Short Round or Sixteen Candles’ sexless goofball Long Duk Dong. Better Luck Tomorrow blasted past such stereotyping: It was a coming-of-age crime tale about straight-A Asian American teens who ditch the model-minority myth and sell test scores, then drugs, while partying and snorting more coke than Charlie Sheen. He cast Parry Shen as the basketball-obsessed good kid gone bad, John Cho as the unhappy rich kid, and Sung Kang as the effortless stud Han.
“It was daring even in the Asian American community,” says Cho, noting that the film flew in the face of respectable family melodramas like The Joy Luck Club. “This was youth-oriented and breaking a lot of rules about how Asians were supposed to present ourselves to the world.”
Cut to the 2002 Sundance Film Festival: The premiere kills. The movie is stylish and brash, and nobody knows how to sell it. Fox Searchlight execs worry it will set a bad example for Asian American teens and suggest Lin add a moralistic, crime-doesn’t-pay ending. A Paramount Classics executive is utterly dismissive, trashing the film in front of Lin and saying “over my dead body” will the studio touch it.
At a Q&A after a midnight screening, an older guy accuses Better Luck Tomorrow of being “empty and amoral”—but Roger Ebert (who stayed till the end this time) stands up and shouts, “Nobody would say that to a bunch of white filmmakers: ‘How could you do this to your people?’ Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be!”
Ebert dubbed the movie a “coming-of-age film for Asian Americans in American cinema.” He went on: “Lin is making a movie where race is not the point but simply the given.” MTV Films bought it. Then, months later, Sherry Lansing, head of parent studio Paramount, called Lin into her office with good news. She wanted to release it through her prestige division, Paramount Classics.
Lin refused. He told Lansing there was no way the film could be released by the executive who had dismissed it. “If it fails, I don’t want to feel like it’s because she hates the movie,” he said. “And if it succeeds, I don’t want to contribute to her career.”
The tiny film was released under the big Paramount logo, just as Star Trek Beyond will be, and grossed a very profitable $3.8 million: Lin had sunk his first basket in Hollywood. He’d put numbers on the board.
Lin’s Aston Martin rumbles to a halt outside a nondescript brick building in Pasadena. He set up his office just two minutes from home to save time. Lin takes meetings over meals, says he sleeps very little, and wears variations on the same uniform every day, like he’s in Starfleet: functional gray technical pants, a long-sleeve white sport shirt, pristine white Nike Air Force Ones.
The office is Lin’s court. He aspires to be a visionary leader like Magic, dishing to his creative team, which eats communal meals and takes play seriously: In the common area, there’s a foosball table—and, on the wall, an elaborate double-elimination, seeded tournament bracket. Lin even invented his own complex, salary-capped fantasy basketball league, which lured in Lakers vet Rick Fox and sports columnist and analyst Bill Simmons, who calls it “the greatest fantasy league ever created.”
Lin’s production team took him a decade to build. “People I work with are part of my family now: I feel like that’s the new sense of family around the world.”
Family, of course, is the tagline, theme, and throbbing backbeat of the Fast franchise, which Lin saved from the junkyard. The Fast and the Furious (with Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster) in 2001 and its horrifically titled 2003 sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, were $200 million hits, made on the cheap. But Universal wanted to go even cheaper. When Lin was offered the third Fast
film in 2005, the offer came without any stars: Diesel, Walker, Rodriguez, and Brewster were all gone.
“The franchise was at a point where we were talking about going direct to video,” former Universal executive Jeff Kirschenbaum says. Lin first turned it down because the script, set in Japan, included clichés of geishas with white studs.
Instead, Lin pitched a fresh vision of a Tokyo that was defined more by familiarity than difference: a global youth culture united by hip hop, street fashion, and speed. The studio gave Lin just two months to prep, but he delivered an underbudget action film with spectacular stunt work: beautiful shots of import cars speeding and gliding through parking lots. Instead of pandering with tokenism, Lin flexed his natural feel for diversity—and brought back Sung Kang’s Han, Better Luck Tomorrow’s understated, handsome rebuke to Hollywood’s racist Asian retinue of inscrutable villains and sexless sidekicks.
Lin screened a rough cut for Vin Diesel, who agreed to a cameo, promising a reboot if it went well. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift earned $62 million domestically and $95 million globally: the first film of the franchise to earn more abroad than at home, proof of Lin’s international vision.
“Justin’s the transformer,” Rodriguez says. “He’s the one who got together with Vin and said, ‘We can turn this into something powerful.’”
Though cast and crew freely admit that Fast scripts are often written on the fly, Lin took the franchise seriously. He topped his own stunts every time, from spectacular train heists and tumbling tank flips in the Dominican Republic and Spain to a wild race through Rio, with two muscle cars tethered to a giant safe. Lin and Diesel also gave the films a singular, propulsive sense of mission: inclusion.
Before Lin took over, the first two films pitted ethnic clubs against each other. “It was separate families: the Mexican crew, the homeboy crew,” says Diesel, whose production company is called One Race Films. “You didn’t see a multicultural family. The idea that Dom’s brothers are Han and Brian and Roman and Santos—that’s a pretty intense idea.” The franchise takes on “the lack of diversity in Hollywood with a grin and a popcorn smile,” Rodriguez says.
Under Lin’s guidance, the franchise leaped from $158 million (Tokyo Drift) to $363 million (Fast & Furious), then $626 million (Fast Five) and $789 million (Fast & Furious 6). After Furious 7, directed by James Wan, earned $1.52 billion, Universal green-lit three more.
“I’m going to bring him back,” Diesel says, when asked if Lin will direct the finale. “Whenever we had a day off—even on Thanksgiving, his favorite holiday—it was Justin and me working on how far we could take it. Success comes from 10 years of that mentality.”
Lin, who says he works Thanksgivings because he’s thankful that his father only ever took that one day off, laughs when I ask him if it’s true.
“Vin says you finish what you started,” he says, “and he’s very persuasive.”
On the Beyond set, Lin shot all day and spent all night in the editing bay, Cho says, assembling a cut on the fly. “At some point, it becomes like a psychological problem. Have a glass of wine with us!”
This is why Lin was hurt when some fans—including the original Sulu, George Takei, who voice-acted on Lin’s Bruce Lee mockumentary, Finishing the Game—bashed the 30-second Star Trek Beyond teaser that leaked a year ago. Some complained it looked like Fast & Furious in Space because Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk jumps a motorcycle (even though Pine also rode a motorcycle in Abrams’ 2009 reboot trailer). “George has always handled things with class,” Lin says. “He was a huge part of my life, so for him to swing a sucker punch, that hurt.”
He expected snark. He just didn’t expect it to sting. “On Fast, I wasn’t a car guy,” Lin says. “I guess it hurt more because this is something that is a part of me.”
His cowriter, Simon Pegg, is less diplomatic. Pegg says he was “disappointed that Wil Wheaton, Patton Oswalt, and George Takei were slagging off the trailer, because they know a finished trailer is never a reflection of the finished film. Get a fucking clue! It’s really good fun: thrilling and heartfelt.”
In preproduction, Lin was constructing sets—and worlds—where something would happen, while Pegg and another writer, Doug Jung, were simultaneously working on the script. For his part, Lin says he’s learned to tune in to all that buzzer-beating pressure, so that stressful urgency bleeds into the film itself.
“I always end up in these volatile situations,” he says quietly. “It’s funny. They say people with lower heart rates tend to be criminals—that’s how they get that jolt of adrenaline. The joke is that my heart rate is really low, and this”—he gestures at the frenzy of the office—“is how I stay alive.”
Even as he’s wrapping Star Trek, he’s mapping out his next moves. His whiteboard is marked up with character arcs for Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny in the new Space Jam, which Lin is giddily excited about writing, not least because they’re in talks with LeBron James.
On his dinner break from Star Trek, he packs in an ideas meeting with his production team. Last year, Lin coproduced Hollywood Adventures, an American action comedy about Chinese tourists in LA, created for a Chinese audience. Now the team has set up a comedy with Jeremy Renner at HBO and a Bruce Lee-themed series at Cinemax, and they’re developing the classic samurai graphic novel Lone Wolf and Cub, among many other projects.
Lin also checks in on the witty Asian American pop culture website he coproduces, YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family), which takes on everything from NBA star Yao Ming to Sikh army officers, and sponsors short-film contests for young filmmakers. Lin doesn’t beat the drum for inclusion, but he’s embracing the fact that, at 44, he’s a Hollywood player.
Next, Lin could direct more and bigger blockbusters, more TV, or a controversial drama he’s developing, or he could focus on his passion project, 32 Miles, a coming-of-age film he’s writing about a young Asian kid, obsessed with Magic Johnson, who faces his greatest fear—being left alone in Los Angeles without his parents.
Whatever Lin chooses, he says he’s determined to make the most of the opportunities his family created. “Film is similar to a basketball game,” he says. “When that buzzer sounds, win or lose, the only thing you can control is how much effort you put into it.” In Hollywood, the playing field is hardly level. But like his hero Magic, Lin works hard to create his own shots—and he’s determined to leave it all on the floor.
Logan Hill (@loganhill33) wrote about Mad Max: Fury Road in issue 23.05.
This article appears in the June 2016 issue.