{"id":187165,"date":"2025-10-03T09:07:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T09:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/187165\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T09:07:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T09:07:09","slug":"last-days-is-justin-lins-return-to-indie-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/187165\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Last Days\u2019 Is Justin Lin\u2019s Return to Indie Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"

After 20 years directing big-budget tentpoles like Star Trek Beyond<\/a> and several Fast & Furious sequels\u2014from Tokyo Drift (2006) to F9: The Fast Saga<\/a> (2021)\u2014Justin Lin<\/a> is drifting back to his indie roots. Last Days, in theaters October 24, dramatizes the life and death of Christian missionary John Allen Chau on North Sentinel Island. <\/p>\n

While Last Days sees Lin shift into a different gear from what audiences are used to from him, the Taiwanese American filmmaker tells me he couldn’t make a new indie, his first since 2007, without a few blockbusters under his belt. “We romanticize the notion of indie movies, but the reality is, you don’t get to make movies by yourself,” Lin says over a Zoom call. “I’ve been fortunate to work with amazing people from around the world, and they all came to help me tell the story. When you have a point of view and passion, and you need to communicate that to your team\u2014that has always been the North Star, and I didn’t know it.”<\/p>\n

In 2002, Lin broke into Hollywood after the success of Better Luck Tomorrow at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2007, Lin made his most recent indie feature Finishing the Game, a mockumentary that lampooned the movie industry’s restless search for the next Bruce Lee after the martial-arts icon died during the making of Game of Death. Now, after leaving the Fast & Furious series behind, Lin is back to telling grounded stories of identity, conviction, and purpose, where the answers to life’s questions aren’t a well-timed NOS boost.<\/p>\n

Esquire can exclusively reveal the trailer to Justin Lin’s Last Days, which you can watch below.<\/p>\n

Lin’s origins with John Allen Chau date back to when Chau’s story broke in 2018. While at an airport, Lin sat watching CNN anchors report on the death of a 26-year-old missionary who tried to convert the Sentinelese, a willingly self-isolated indigenous community living on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. It is illegal to visit the islands without government permission, which Chau did not have. <\/p>\n

Upon hearing the story, Lin dismissed Chau as a foolish man, “and then they popped on this Asian American face,” he recalls. He had a face like Lin’s own. “I’m now projecting all my issues onto John. Something really hit me: That’s somebody’s son, somebody’s brother. For me to judge him and dismiss him in 20 seconds, it didn’t sit well with me.” <\/p>\n

A year later, Lin read Alex Perry’s Outside article “The Last Days of John Allen Chau,”<\/a> which dug deeper into Chau’s story than a CNN chyron allowed. “It really moved me,” Lin says, “because he was able to get this window into the relationship between John and his father, Patrick. It stayed with me. I felt like: God, I’ve been making all these big movies, but there’s something about him, this character, the article, that I really wanted to see if I can connect with someone so alien to me. I wanted to get to know his humanity.”<\/p>\n

Last Days stars newcomer Sky Yang\u2014whom Lin calls “unbelievable” and a talent about to have “a huge career”\u2014as John Allen Chau, a devout missionary who embarks on a self-imposed mission to convert the elusive Sentinelese to Christianity. Industry’s Ken Leung costars as John’s father, Patrick, who tries to convince his son to abandon his journey, and Radhika Apte as an Indian police officer assigned to Chau’s case.<\/p>\n

Although the movie is scripted by Ben Ripley, whose credits include the 2011 sci-fi film Source Code and the 2014 drama Boychoir, Lin says much of the film stems from Chau’s own journals. Chau’s accounts border on the impossible\u2014he once claimed to have stopped an archer’s arrow with a Bible\u2014but Lin took that as permission to let his Hollywood instincts steer the project. <\/p>\n

\"skyTomaso Lisca<\/p>\n

Last Days also stars Ken Leung (Industry) as John Allen Chau’s father, whose tense relationship with his son heavily informed the movie.<\/p>\n

“When I read Ben Ripley’s draft, I remember going, ‘Wait, did that happen?’ I realized the exercise was: Can we make a movie where we honor what he’s telling us? It was very obvious he was inspired by adventure novels and Hollywood films. Can we connect with his humanity by using genre tropes to define him? There are sequences that feel like an adventure movie or like a romantic comedy. It ultimately is a character study, but because of that choice, it had to feel like a big adventure movie.”<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Lin hopes audiences don’t make the mistake that he did after hearing his story at that airport years ago. “I went on this two-year journey with Ben, just making sure that our point of view is to have empathy for these characters,” Lin says. “Let’s not judge these characters. Let’s be these characters.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 20 years directing big-budget tentpoles like Star Trek Beyond and several Fast & Furious sequels\u2014from Tokyo Drift…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,428,119251,430,134,2387,344,119250],"class_list":["post-187165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-d0447b5d-0cbf-4e80-a280-104d446b5cd3","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-entertainment","tag-locale-us","tag-movies","tag-shorttitle-last-days-is-justin-lins-return-to-indies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}