The movie focuses on Pin-Jui’s relationship with Angela. It alludes to a son, who never makes an appearance. Why did you scrub yourself out of the picture?

Well, in some ways, Angela (played by Christine Ko) is a proxy for both me and my sister. There are a couple reasons to make the character a daughter. In some ways the movie is about Pin-Jui and his relationships with the four most important women in his life: his mom, the woman he loved, the woman he married and, finally, his daughter.

I also wanted to lightly allude to the fact that not just in Asian-American families, but in many families, I think the daughter often has a more difficult time. There’s many cases of the son being the golden child and he can do no wrong. So I thought it was a little bit more realistic and a little bit more interesting to have it be a father-daughter relationship.

From “Master of None” to “The Good Place,” your past works have generally been comedies. “Tigertail” isn’t funny. Why take on a serious tone for your directorial debut?

Quite honestly, it was just the story I was most excited about. So I started thinking about this story, these characters. And it became clear pretty early on that this would be a drama, the sort of restrained drama I had seen in Taiwanese films like “Yi Yi” [by Edward Yang] and “A City of Sadness” [from Hou Hsiao-hsien]. That sort of measured drama without melodrama, being able to express a broad range of emotions without resorting to sentimentality. I guess you could see it as a pivot, but it wasn’t a conscious one in my mind.