At home with Alan Yang

Master of None walks that fine line between reflective character development and laugh out loud comedy. Which is more important when you are writing?

I actually go back to something that I heard on South Park, when I was writing over there. One of the things I will never forget is what Trey Parker, one of the co-creators of the show said: no one is laughing unless you care about the characters, you got to care what’s going on! Similarly on Parks and Rec and Master 2, we always came from a philosophy that you got to develop these characters, you got to develop the story, you got to develop what happens and why we care about everyone involved. Once you build those characters, hopefully you can put them in comedic situations and show their flaws, their foibles and the ways they screw up. The most challenging thing is creating characters that are really compelling, interesting and three-dimensional. That’s more and more what we have all become interested in from our work and that goes for the television shows I have worked on and the movie I directed. It’s getting into the motivation and psychology of these characters, and ultimately that is the fundamentals of all drama: following these people and the conflicts they get themselves into. Don’t get me wrong, a great joke is a great joke and it is very difficult to write great jokes! Believe me, it is really REALLY challenging! It is an art form of its own, but in terms of the shows I have worked on, I am definitely drawn more towards character based story telling.

You have been able to pivot from writing to directing and producing. Tigertail is a beautiful story about the unspoken sacrifice of immigrants. What motivated you to develop and tell that story?

The story of Tigertail was really inspired by my family. It is an idea that I’ve had for a while and was working on for a long time in screenplay form. I had all of these different versions of the script where I was writing about all these different members of my family and I started honing in on my dad’s story and his relationship with the most important women in his life: his mother, the one he was in love with, the woman he married, and his daughter. Obviously, while a lot of it is fictionalized, there are some elements of emotional truth to it too. I thought it would be interesting to see a movie that gave life to our parents’ generation of immigrants and how you don’t realize the lives they have lived unless you have talked to them about it. Oftentimes they haven’t shared with us their stories and at least in my experience, it is difficult to get our parents to share their experiences with us. So, the movie is a result of a lot of conversations that I had with my parents and beyond that, visits to Taiwan. I, myself, was fairly distanced from my heritage. I had only gone to Taiwan once before I started thinking about the movie, and so I went back there with my dad, went back there to scout, and tried to learn a little bit of Mandarin. I was a very bad Asian kid and never learned Mandarin growing up so all those things kind of converged. I put a lot of work into trying to make the movie authentic. Shooting in Taiwan, shooting in the Bronx where my parents lived, and just trying to pack all that into one 90 minute experience. 

Tigertail captures a miscommunication that is quite common in Asian American households. Many children feel distant to their parents due to a generation gap and growing up with different experiences. What is one piece of advice you have for people who feel this way? 

It’s never too late to connect. It is never too late to connect to your parents or to your children. It goes both ways as a two way street. Pick up the phone and call them. You get a limited number of chances to see them. I don’t want to take it too dark, but you’d be surprised at what people are willing to say to each other and open up to, if you just ask. Sometimes, it is not in our nature, not in our culture and not in our upbringing—it certainly wasn’t in my family—but if you are interested in that connection, just ask. Just say hi, just call, just text, just do something! Even if it is not day one, or like people with their white parents giving hugs, saying I love you or calling them by their first names or whatever, you will get somewhere! This is obviously not for all Asian people as we are not monolithic in nature, but I think it is common in our various cultures to be a little bit more reserved and sometimes, it is not reflexive for us. However, if you reach out, I think there is often a good result in store.