Tigertail: Alan Yang’s deeply personal Netflix movie

A new Netflix movie is dropping in time for the weekend, and it has a very personal history behind it.

The morning filmmaker Alan Yang had to show his father the movie he had made, he was “nervous as hell”.

It was Yang’s first time as a director on a full-length feature in a career better known for his writing on Master of None (for which he won an Emmy), Parks & Recreation and Forever.

The movie is Tigertail, dropping on Netflix today, and the reason he was so nervous is it’s a semi-biographical story of his dad’s experiences moving from Taiwan to the US.

“You talk to anyone who knows me, I don’t tend to get that nervous about too many things,” he told news.com.au. “But I sent it to him and he told me he was going to watch it that night.

“Then he didn’t text me and I thought ‘did he hate it, are we not on good terms anymore?’. In the movie there are scenes where he’s a little stern – obviously the whole thing is a love letter to him and I think it treats him fairly, but I didn’t know. I didn’t hear anything.”

It wasn’t until the next day before Yang got his father’s verdict, and even then, the California-born, Harvard-educated writer and director had to be the one to make contact.

“Finally, I texted him, and he’s like ‘Oh, I loved it, I watched it three times, and it’s amazing how much you remembered and it reminded me of home’ and he went on and on.

“And I said, ‘Why didn’t you text me after you watched it? Why did you make me wait? That’s crazy!’. But it’s all good now.”

Alan Yang won an Emmy for his writing on Netflix series Master of None. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File)

Tigertail is framed by a present day story in which the main character, Pin-Jui (Tzi Ma, The Farewell), has lived in the US for decades but has a strained relationship with his daughter Angela (Christine Ko), a young, accomplished lawyer with a similar temperament to her father.

The emotional distance between the pair is revealed, in flashback, to be rooted in Pin-Jui’s immigrant story, leaving his hometown in Taiwan with a wife he barely knew, the daughter of his factory boss who provided the money for the move.

Tigertail is a story about regret, and the ache that comes from leaving behind a life, a family and another woman he loved for the promise of America.

The film isn’t a “carbon copy” of Yang’s father’s experiences.

“The fidelity to the actual story wasn’t that important to me, it was more about hitting the broad strokes and getting the larger emotional beats I the story, making sure the story is compelling and rich.”

The genesis for his movie was a trip Yang took with his dad to Taiwan for the first time in 20-something years, the first time since he was a kid.

“It unlocked a lot of themes of the movie. My dad and my mum left their home, moved to a new country and never went back to live. I was thinking about all the people they left behind, all the people they loved, all the experiences, the feelings, the sights, the smells, the sounds.”

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Tigertail is loosely based on Yang’s father (Chen Hsiang Liu/Netflix via AP)

Yang said growing up he didn’t know much about his parents’ personal histories, admitting he was “a pretty bad Asian kid” who wasn’t interested in learning Chinese and didn’t eat a lot of Chinese food.

“I rejected a lot of markers of being Asian early on because I wanted to fit in with the other kids at school.

“I think it’s a pretty common experience for Asian-American kids to not know that much about their parents’ stories because they probably never asked, and their parents probably never offered.

“But as I got older, I realised how shortsighted that was and how immature that was. I wanted to learn more, not just about my past, but my parents’ past.”

Yang said learning about his parents’ histories was a process, picking through it bit by bit and not prying too much at once. He told them he was working on something inspired by them and they started to open up in “drips and drabs”.

When he told his father he wanted to make a movie about what he learnt, Yang said his father didn’t have an issue with it.

“As depicted in the movie, he’s a quiet guy, a little bit serious. But he seemed to take it in stride that his son wanted to make a pretty decently budgeted movie about his life. He didn’t seem to think I was crazy.”

While he hoped the Asian community will embrace Tigertail, he also stressed that it’s a universally resonant story.

“This is a story that can be related to by people who aren’t immigrants. It’s very much a story lost love, regret and choices you wish you had made, whether you’re a Taiwanese immigrant or not. I think that’s very relatable.”

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Tzi Ma plays the present-day version of Pin-Jui and Christine Ko plays his daughter in Tigertail (Sarah Shatz/Netflix via AP)

The process of making this profoundly personal film has been a different experience to his previous work, including it being something that improved his relationship with his father.

“That he loved it was really important to me. My mum and my sister saw it and they loved it as well. That’s really the greatest thing I took away from the whole experience – getting closer to everyone in my family.

“The biggest thing I learnt is that people have this capacity to change, and you don’t often think that about who might not be 20 or 30 anymore.

“Watching my dad today, he feels like a different person from even five or 10 years ago – he feels like a more open person, someone who wants to share a little bit more about his life.

“It’s amazing, and it’s what’s in the movie. A lot of these characters have phases in their life and they keep changing.”

Yang said making Tigertail has been really meaningful for him and a part of him will be sad once the whole process of getting a movie out is over. But until then, he still has to “promote the hell out of it”, albeit in his house over the phone, appropriately socially distanced.

“It doesn’t feel quite done yet.”

Tigertail is available to stream on Netflix from 5pm AEST on Friday, April 10

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