“I read the second draft of the script, and I realized that they weren’t real—I had to try harder to make them real,” he says.

And how did he achieve this?

“I drew back on experiences in my own youth,” he says. “A lot of their humor, their timing, I remember from my own high school, my own friends. I can totally identify with the angst, the anguish, the shopping for identity. I’m just trying to stay true to this mentality.”

With its specific perspectives, it seems that Better Luck Tomorrow focuses on an extremely narrow microcosm of life. But Lin says he is confident that identifying with the characters—Asian or otherwise—will not be a problem, emphasizing that the complexity of life is a common thread that ties everyone together.

“Hopefully you see them as three-dimensional characters with flaws, not as caricatures,” he says. “They’re just kids—they just make decisions that lead to other decisions.”

Despite demands from MTV Films, Lin refused to alter the ending of his film.

“It’s set up so that you can talk among yourselves,” he says, without revealing the ending. “They have to live with everything that’s happened. It’s not about tying everything up—that’s not what happens in real life. At the end, you’ll ask yourself, ‘How the hell did these kids get to where they did, and what are they going to do now?’”

—Staff writer Tiffany I. Hsieh can be reached at tihsieh@fas.harvard.edu.