Amy Williams on the design of Tigertail and the importance of visual storytelling

Emmy-winning production designer Amy Williams lays out the beautiful design of Alan Yang’s Tigertail and the importance of visual storytelling.

Just last month, Alan Yang made his directorial debut with Tigertail, a film loosely based on his father’s experience immigrating from Taiwan to the United States. The film centers on three distinct and disparate periods in the lead character Pin-Jui’s life and portrays his joy in Taiwan, the struggles he navigated once in the U.S., and his estrangement from his daughter, Angela, in the present.

There is an understated beauty to Tigertail that pairs well with its initial vibrancy to its slow descent toward the sterile quality of modernity coupled with the emptiness of Pin Jui’s life in his later years. Speaking with Amy Williams, the production designer for the film, provided further insight into the design that captures Pin Jui’s story and Alan Yang’s vision.

One of the most striking thematic themes in Tigertail is its color palette. Red and green are two colors featured heavily in the film, and it’s a choice that came naturally to Williams after scouting locations in Taiwan with Yang and cinematographer Nigel Bluck.

While William says, “I generally try to stay clear of [red] with most of my other projects because it’s such a strong representational color,” it kept popping up as they scouted in the cities and rural areas from farms to factories. Red and green are so much a part of Taiwanese culture that, when Williams asked what the significance of the color dominance was, the Taiwanese weren’t sure what she was talking about.

Williams, however, knew exactly how she wanted to use color to tell Pin-Jui’s story. As she says, “The color drains as you move chronologically through the film. So [Pin-Jui’s] youth is so funky, so color filled. It’s alive almost,” which you can see in his childhood in the rice fields living with his grandparents and his romance with Yuan as a young factory worker.

When Pin-Jui leaves Taiwan and Yuan behind to live out his dream of going to America, the color transitions from red to yellow. Williams was drawn to mustards and blues for the New York setting. It’s a palette she embraced in reference to 1970s Bronx street-life photography as a “more gritty, rougher, tough Bronx style version of color” showcasing the hardships Pin-Jui was enduring with his wife, Zhenzhen, in New York. But the red was still there with the color’s impact being at its peak in the red neon lighting bleeding into Pin-Jui’s apartment, a reference to Wong Kar-wai‘s work.

Pin-Jui’s present bears the most contrast to the previous periods in his life. It’s very clean and tidy, almost sterile. Williams description of Pin-Jui’s present day life speaks to how much his life has changed from his youth:

"“It’s an aesthetic that isn’t completely ugly, there’s something very pleasant about it, but it doesn’t have that vibrancy of youth, that enthusiasm in it. It’s a little more stayed and structured.”"

So the colors you see in this sequence of the film are earthy in tone. It’s a choice Williams tied into the clothing for the period, coordinating with costume designer, Olga Mill, to develop looks that captured this cool, reserved aesthetic.

The ability to play with a huge array of color palettes was fun for Williams because it allowed her to give an air and a feeling to what was happening as time shifts in the film. The transition from 16mm film in the Taiwan and ’70s New York sequences to digital in the present also captured the mood and feeling of each portion of Tigertail.

History played a part in the film as well. When discussing Williams’ favorite locations in Tigertail, she mentioned the sugar refinery factory that Pin-Jui works at with his mother. The factory, located in the city of Huwei (tiger tail), is the same refinery that Yang’s grandmother worked in, so the location was both visually arresting and also has a personal connection to the film.

Connection — the loss of it, navigating what’s left of it, and attempting to establish it — is a narrative thread throughout Tigertail shown through pieces of the past making their way into the present and informing dynamics in relationships. A prime example is the piano Pin-Jui buys for his apartment with Zhenzhen. It’s a moment in which he reaches out, trying to establish a connection with her by positing the opportunity for the two of them to learn something together.

Pin-Jui and Zhenzhen have nothing in common. Their marriage was arranged. Zhenzhen’s family wanted a husband for her, and Pin-Jui wanted to come to America. The piano was supposed to be their first connection to each other outside of their marriage, but it goes to ruin. Piano playing, however, does get picked up with their daughter, Angela, Pin-Jui’s narrative twin.

Angela’s youth is not visually arresting like her father’s was, but her adulthood matches his in its modernity. Her wardrobe is filled with beiges, greys, and blacks, and she struggles with the strained connection between herself and Pin-Jui. According to Williams, “Angela’s story represents a lot of the pressures modern-day first-generation, second-generation kids feel. The pressure to succeed because of the sacrifice their parents have made, because of the pressures of society,” which results in a kind of truncated youth.

For Williams, the tricky part of allowing emptiness and absence to play a role in visual storytelling is quelling the desire to “give something visually interesting to the audience” when “sometimes an empty space speaks the most for the story.” In Tigertail, absence is representational of sacrifice, what was given up such as culture, family, or love for new opportunities in a foreign country.

Pin-Jui and Zhenzhen’s sacrifices had an effect on Angela. They drove her to work and sacrifice in her own ways. While Williams laments the loss of the sequences in the film regarding the law firm Angela works at (a portion of the film John Cho was a part of), she does think there’s enough material there to warrant a short film for her.

Originally, there was a section in the film that focused on Angela’s desire to become a writer. In his youth, Pin-Jui had gravitated toward music. He collected records and danced often with Yuan, the two of them singing Otis Redding together and bonding over musicians. Angela, however, gravitated toward the written word. In the finalized version of Tigertail, there is no mention of Angela giving up her dream of pursuing writing in order to concentrate on law, but she has a huge bookcase and boxes full of books, which is reminiscent of her father’s record collection.

Vibrancy comes into Angela and Pin-Jui’s lives when their connection begins to grow, allowing them to communicate with one another more effectively. When the two visit Taiwan, the sequences sing. They are beautiful and bright in their modernity and in the change Pin-Jui sees of his hometown and how the world of his youth is seen through a different lens; figuratively for him, but literally for the audience. It’s a wonderful, full circle visual narrative from the film’s start to its end.

Williams’ work is the through line that holds the film’s visual narrative together, accentuating tone and mood through her color palette and showcasing Pin-Jui’s journey through life and Angela’s desire to understand him. Tigertail is the kind of story that Williams is most interested in working on. As she says:

"“I gravitate toward stories that I feel are important to be told — narratives that haven’t been explored as much as some others — and I think that will evolve as I evolve and as the world evolves. I don’t want to pigeon hole myself into exact narratives, but right now I find immigrant stories really interesting as a designer because I get to design things that are familiar to me but then I also get to explore cultures and countries and worlds that are not.”"

For more of Amy Williams’ work with immigrant stories be sure to check out Apple TV+’s Little America.