Leading Man
Finally, a mainstream film with real roles for Asian-American
actors.
By Jake Miller '91
http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?ID=1942

Q&A: Scheduled for a February release, Justin Lin's low-budget
movie, Better Luck Tomorrow, took last year's Sundance Film Festival
by storm. In it, Roger Fan '94 stars as Daric, a high school
valedictorian who leads a street gang of overachieving young Asian
Americans on a downward spiral of sex, drugs, and violence.


(Cherry Sky Films)
Sung Kang, Parry Shen, and Roger Fan
BAM What was it like working on this film?
Roger Fan It was completely unglamorous. The audition was at Justin
Lin's alma mater, UCLA. Justin wanted to make the film that he
wanted to make, and he wanted to stay true to the characters in his
script. He was offered a significant amount of money to cast the
film with specific stars, but that went against his vision.

BAM Did they want to do it with white kids? Or Asian actors that
people had heard of?
RF They wanted to do the film with anything but Asians, because if
you did it Latino or African American or Caucasian, there are
bankable stars.

BAM There was some controversy at Sundance—objections to the film's
portrayal of Asian Americans.
RF You know, there's so little Asian-American cinema that when
something is made, I think the Asian-American community wants it to
say everything about them. It's natural. But Justin's job wasn't to
represent the ideology of the community; it was to make the best
film possible.

BAM Which is?
RF I think the most important thing is to show the characters as
human beings. As an Asian-American actor, I find it really nice to
be able to play a role that's three-dimensional and flawed, because
that's the underpinning of what it is to be human.

BAM What made you want to be an actor?
RF Ever since I was a kid I've had this overactive imagination. For
three days when I was a little kid, I seriously, seriously became a
bounty hunter. I lived in my parents' backyard, hid behind the walls
and the trees. Then, later in life, I realized that I didn't see a
lot of people like myself in the media. When I grew up, my biggest
role models on TV were Tom Hanks and Don Johnson.

BAM That's weird.
RF Yeah, I know. Bosom Buddies and Miami Vice. But what I was
watching on TV was fundamentally different from what I saw in the
mirror. I'm not thumping any big political thing—I'm not an Asian-
American Black Panther—but I always felt like there was a complete
lack of identification for a kid like me. When I was in junior high
I went to visit my grandparents in Taiwan, and I went to see this
Chinese movie—a John Woo film with a young Chow Yun Fat, called A
Better Tomorrow—and I started to cry. It was the first time in my
life that I saw someone on-screen I could visually identify with who
had heroic qualities.

BAM I gather that a short documentary you coproduced was a big hit
at Sundance.
RF The Quest for Length? The log line is: "The comical yet factual
quest of one man to increase the size of his penis."

BAM Was it based on your own, personal, you know …. Has this been an
issue for you in the past?
RF You know what, I think it's been an issue for every man in the
world. It all started for me a long time ago, when I was backpacking
through Pompeii in Italy. I saw this ancient medicine shop, and they
had a picture of this giant scale. On one of the baskets there was,
like, fifty bars of gold, and the other had a guy's penis just lying
there. And the penis was much heavier than the bars of gold.