Better Luck Tomorrow (2003)

Wissenswertes

• Gedreht in: Los Angeles

Better Luck Tomorrow is a 2002 American crime drama film directed, co-written, co-produced, and edited by Justin Lin. It follows a group of overachieving Asian American teenagers who become bored with their lives and enter a world of petty crime and material excess. The plot is loosely based on the 1992 murder of Stuart Tay. The film stars Parry Shen, Jason Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Karin Anna Cheung and John Cho.

Production

Justin Lin said that the title Better Luck Tomorrow refers to how the film explores "the whole youth culture of today, specifically Asian-American, but also just the general mentality of teenagers today. I mean, I work with teenagers, I grew up in the 80s, and already it's very different, the mentality. You go to suburbia, you look at upper-middle-class-kids, and through the media they've literally adopted an urban-gangsta-mentality."

The plot is inspired by the 1992 murder of Stuart Tay. Tay, a 17-year-old Chinese American high school student in Orange County, California, was killed by several peers following a failed petty crime scheme. Tay and the perpetrators were all high-achieving students who intended to attend elite universities and college, which led the media to dub the crime "the Honor Roll Murder." While Lin had followed media coverage of the Tay murder, he conscio…

While writing the script, he found inspiration in his work as a youth basketball coach and teaching high school students how to make community documentaries.

Lin's original investors wanted a white cast with Macaulay Culkin as the male lead if he wanted a million dollar investment for his movie. Lin objected and continued to fund the project with his 10 credit cards and life savings. He said knowing the film "potentially could've been the last film I ever made" he wanted to make it "about issues that were very important to me."

After those funds were depleted, finishing funds equivalent to one third of the film's budget were provided by Cherry Sky Films for post-production, preparing the film to submit to Sundance, after producer Joan Huang reconnected with Lin at the LA Asian Pacific American Film Festival.

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