So what was shooting actually like? So much of the movie is you in front of a screen looking concerned.

Shooting was weird. My favorite stuff was the stuff that was more traditional, like when we were creating all those memories with the daughter. Those were—

The first 10 minutes of the movie?

Yeah, that was acting as I knew it. Then we went into the computer stuff, and that was very strange, because it was very specific. But there was nothing there. Like these tiny movements with your eyeballs would be a plot point.

I guess the camera was pretty close?

It was the distance of a laptop. We used a GoPro, not an actual laptop, but they had a dummy laptop so I could mime typing.

And all the UI and stuff, that was just animated later, probably, right?

Yeah. They had very rough stuff, and [Aneesh] would show me. But it got refined later on and they built it out, so that's why it took so long to edit. Just getting rights from all these photographs, and then building out every Facebook profile, and every Google search, all those drop-downs.

The animations feel very authentic. Just little small clicks and things like that feel just like your computer.

I realized we couldn't have shot this 10 years ago, because we didn't have a collective nostalgia for devices yet. But now we're at this point where we do, and those sounds have meaning for us. Not only are we living inside these things more and more, but we also are on the sixth and seventh generations of stuff so that we have memories that are inside the devices. We have a present tense that's happening inside the devices, and we also have fondness for the hardware, which is weird. Like clicks that the Windows keyboard makes versus the Mac keyboard, all those sounds mean something, and blue text or green text mean something. All those connote things that had not been expressed in cinema, and I didn't know that could be expressed in cinema.

Was the family always supposed to be Korean?

Yes. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do it. Aneesh is from San Jose. The movie is a valentine to his family. That was one of the payoffs of the movie for me, as well. There is a whole Asian-American family, and no one is running away from their culture. They love one another. The family looked a lot like mine, especially the dad, and so it was unexpectedly meaningful to me.

Yeah, I think it's like they're represented without trying to say anything other than here they are on the screen.

Right, and it's ironic, because it's not saying anything about it, but not saying anything about it is saying a lot about it, you know?

Does it feel weird to you that you’ve become the symbol of Asian-American representation?

I try to burn as few calories thinking about that as possible because I don’t want to lose sight of the fun. If I do, then I think the work suffers. If you start thinking about representation too much—and you think about what movie should exist for an Asian-American person, and for an Asian-American male, or what you would like to see an Asian-American male doing on TV or in movies, even though that’s a legitimate thing to think about—it clouds my ability to go, “Oh, that’s just a fun thing. I’d like to throw myself into that situation.”

I make decisions based on much dumber stuff. Like if someone offered me a movie where I could punch someone on a moving train, maybe I would consent to being called a chink in that movie, because I would like to do that so much.