Tiger Ji on Death & Ramen and the Diaspora of the Asian American Experience

INTERVIEW

At just 24, Tiger Ji is making a name for himself in Hollywood as a rising screenwriter and filmmaker. Making waves and casting comedy stars like Bobby Lee in his emotionally layered short films, Tiger brings a deeply personal lens to stories about identity, culture, and grief. Raised in Hong Kong and spending his adolescence in the West, his diasporic identity is central to his cinematic voice, juggling experiences of humour and heartbreak which he seeks to meet hand in hand. Through his work, he unpacks the intricacies of identity, the longing to belong, and the quiet struggles that shape us. His latest film, Death & Ramen, captures this delicate balance in a dark comedy that becomes a moving mediation on life, loss, and everything in between.

In a candid conversation with CSP Times, Tiger Ji opens up about his creative journey from backyard skits to celebrated cinema, and reveals his next steps as a creator to watch.

Image courtesy of Roeg Cohen

You are 24 years old and already casting the likes of Bobby Lee and Matt Jones in your short films, congratulations. Where did your passion for film writing stem from?

As a kid, I dreamt of being a manga artist—I always wanted to draw and was really into comic books. Then, the first iPhone came out and I began filming little skits in the backyard with my friends and create these characters. I would start a recording and then have to stop it at a specific time because it was so low-fi—bear in mind, this was pre-iMovie—and that's where my storytelling started to take a different form.

Since then, I have always wanted to be a director who creates movies that make you cry and laugh, sometimes at the same time. I remember watching Adam Sandler's Click with my mother—it was one of the first films that I cried watching, and the film that made me want to make movies. Although it’s recognised as a broad comedy, it's a lot more profound than that... more like an art film in disguise. That's the type of movie I want to make.

How does the writing process compare to the creative process when you are on set behind the camera?

I have always found filmmaking to be a holistic process. It's really the same part of my brain that's being activated—while the context in which it's activated is different, it's really the same. Obviously, when you're on set there is higher stakes as a lot of people are looking to you, and depending on you. But really, I believe it's part and parcel of the same process. I've always just seen it as filmmaking.

Where do you find your influences for screenwriting?

There are a lot of writers that I love, but there's also a lot of filmmakers whose scripts are not scripts at all. David Lynch for example, he wasn’t a very dialogue driven filmmaker and he's influenced me so much. As far as screenwriters go, I take inspiration from Charlie Kaufman, David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin and Noah Baumbach.

What is your favourite part of the filming process?

Rehearsal is really important to me... but I guess that's not part of the filming itself. I find that I am most creative when the stakes are low and the set feels intimate; there's this notion where you can just kind of "throw spaghetti against the wall" and test things out to see what lives.

Your short films heavily lean into Asian inspiration. What do you think is the most important part of translating the Asian experience?

For the past century Asian representation in Western media has been reduced to a specific vessel of caricature and bit players, yet their story is never told through the perspective of the emotional truth of that reality. We're at a kind of breaking point in Asian culture and in the media. I think that's something I'm wrestling with myself as well, having shied away from it in the past. But then during COVID, I was living in New York and there was this man who walked out of my apartment building and said something to the effect of, "go eat a bat." At first, I found it funny because of the absurdism of it all. But slowly, I started to grow more self conscious about it and began interrogating within myself what it means to be within this world. That's when Wuhan Driver came about, and it's just evolved since then.

As someone who exists in the Asian diaspora and grew up in the East but whilst there was a part of many international circles, then moving to the US at 12 years old, I have found a unique third culture experience that I haven't ever seen renditioned on screen. It’s very heartening to think about the prospect of being the first to do that, and having the honour to represent that in a very specific way.

But, I would say I'm still finding my place in this space.

You grew up in Hong Kong. How do you remember your childhood there and does this translate into your cinema?

I loved my childhood in Hong Kong. It was pre-2008 financial crisis which was the best time to be in the city. It's forever changed now, and I think I've been grieving this for the past decade.

My upbringing definitely influences my cinema now—as a really young kid, I fell into an international student scene who were kind of delinquents and thought we owned the world at 12 years old. It was like Jonah Hill's Mid Nineties, but instead of skateboarding, we were scaling abandoned buildings and putting our lives in danger for a GoPro snapshot. I would love to explore this specific time of anarchy and emotional underpinning of what drives a group of kids to put their lives in danger.

I also see my upbringing influencing my future cinema. After I left for the US, there was a very big current of kids in the international school community that were falling victims of suicide. I'm interested in interrogating what drove that. Was it part of being lost in culture? I think being a Hong Konger is this eternal lostness that we feel, of not being Eastern enough yet not being Western enough. Feeling that you don't really belong anywhere but puffing up your chest. At the same time, there's this deep desire to belong that drives everything we do, and it is that hunger that drives my work.

How do you take influences from your Chinese American heritage in your work?

I'm still figuring out whether or not I am Chinese American. I find it really hard to relate to Chinese Americans sometimes because I didn't grow up feeling self conscious about my race, until that brief second in COVID that I quickly untangled the roots of. I don't feel particularly burdened by the “lunchbox situation” where you feel like you don't belong—my stories are definitely different from those, but at the same time I feel a great deal of empathy for that. Still, I find it encouraging to engage with it as an outsider, but also as someone who deeply lives within that. I’m sort of one foot in the door and one foot out, and I think that's an interesting position to be in.

Do you have any particularly fond memories of your upbringing in Hong Kong? Any restaurant favourites?

This fishball noodle shop in North Point that I actually don't know the name of, but they would join all the tables together because it was such a popular spot, it was so tiny.

Under Bridge Spicy Crab in Wan Chai was an amazing spot. Nothing fancy.

There was this bar in Stanley that's now closed, but we used to flock there because they’d serve underage kids. Looking back, it was so cringey how we thought we were so cool. But, that was a really wild time and there are so many fond memories there.

You knew Bobby Lee was going to play a part in your short film Death and Ramen from his

appearance in the 300th episode of Tiger Belly. Can you talk about your inspiration for the film, and how you knew your first time meeting Bobby that this casting was going to be the right decision?

I decided Bobby was going to be in Death and Ramen before I even wrote the film. I had the movie’s basic premise, involving a midnight journey that starts off as a comedy and then becomes something much more gentle. I was thinking about Bobby because I'd always felt like he was an incredibly sad person and this undercurrent of sadness set against the chaos of his humour is something that he wears on his sleeve. He is one of the first Asian American stand-up comedians and has built his entire early career off of stereotyping himself with a humour that pervaded the time. But in a way, Bobby is also a person who’s filled with contradictions, to love him or hate him.

In the 300th episode of Tiger Belly, that was the first time where David Cho didn't let Bobby use his humour to escape the pain he had been experiencing. Knowing that Bobby can perform all the comedy elements, in this moment I saw him as emotionally bare as he was in front of a screen, and I was blown away. 

After I had emailed his agent incessantly for six months straight, they eventually gave me a shot to talk to Bobby, and we hit it off over Korean Barbecue.

I love the comedically dark tones of the film, mixed with some pretty violent and sad scenes. Did you think it was important to cast a comedian to play the main role?

The only way to allow for such a dark theme to come across in this film is to start it off with humour. You know? A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say—it's about bringing around that balance between. It's like Adam Sandler's Punch-Drunk Love, Jim Carrey's The Truman Show, Bobby Lee's Death and Ramen.

Who would be your next dream casting, and what kind of role would you like to see them star in? 

I have a crush on so many actors that I think deserve the love. Will Sharpe, from Flowers is such a brilliant performer, director and writer—his brain is just so wonderful. I love his work, and I am hopeful for the future. 

Andrew Scott, I believe is one of the best actors working today, a force to be reckoned with. His work in theatre is amazing, and All of Us Strangers is great—I don't think he's done that much comedy outside of Fleabag. 

I love Peter Dinklage. I think he's amazing and would love to work with him one day.

The Ramen Chef, Timmy, in Death and Ramen knows his ramen recipe by heart. What are your go-to toppings on ramen?

It really depends. Recently, I've been getting into tsukemen, which is a dipping noodle ramen-type. It's very fatty and decadent so you don't need much added. For a more subtle ramen, like a miso or ginger, I've been experimenting with parsley and mint, like with pho. I'm guessing that will be a big no-no amongst traditional ramen chefs, but the match between the heartiness of the pork stock with the herbs freshness tastes really good.

Before realising I was lactose intolerant, I used to make a Cacio e Pepe ramen, originally an invention of Momofuku's, David Chang. He has this viral video online making instant ramen, but the way they do a Cacio e Pepe. There's something really interesting about the combining of cultures and in my opinion, it’s better than Cacio e Pepe.

Mundane sounds and music play an important role in this film. What was the effect you wanted to achieve by combining the two amongst snippets of dialogue?

I’m a very score-driven director—a lot of Koreans do this as well. Namely, Bong Joon Ho with Parasite, and Park Chan-wook with Oldboy. Those two films utilise almost orchestral music, and their movies feel almost like a symphony with montages. I really like that, and I enjoy using music subversively. For example, in Death and Ramen we take this handle piece, Sarban, and we subvert it from a very traditional use right before Timmy topples over, and continue using the theme over again in different tones right until the end. It then becomes an EDM sort of house music, which I've always thought was interesting. It creates a funny, weird sadness that is something I really love. My brilliant composer, Savannah Jolak, is a really great person to work with and someone I must credit. 

There are conflicting ideas of mortality throughout this film. Did you find it a challenge to highlight the grey surrounding life and death? 

I think that there's many different ways to interpret this. For me, when I wrote it the intention was that Timmy realised he needed to say goodbye to his mum, and once he did there was a lot of pain and sadness, but he realised that the face of that, the face of death, is not something that we should fear.  So yeah, in a way there is a grey aspect of holding these two conflicting truths in one hand—that life does end, and life is beautiful. That is something that I've toiled with a lot when it comes to my own questions that I've dealt with, and these two conflicting truths are something that I still wrestle with.

The closing of the film finishes with a dance scene, is this the only way you saw the film ending?

A celebration of life was the only way to end this movie, having this broader set piece with lots of people yet was still intimate. Bobby Lee dancing is just such a beautiful thing, and the way he did it was almost balletic. I was thinking about the final scene in Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round, otherwise known as "Druk" in Danish, where an alcoholic high school teacher decides to celebrate with his graduating students while acknowledging all of his own pain. He realises the song, What A Life is playing, which is a very youthful song, and we see Mads Mikkelsen just dancing his way through the beauty and sorrow. That was what I was thinking when capturing the final scene.

What is the biggest mistake you have ever made, and what advice would you give to young,

aspirational creatives like yourself when it comes to starting out the industry and making a name for yourself?

I've made so many mistakes. Many of my biggest mistakes so far is from lacking patience and trust for the people around me—being a sledgehammer. But I have no regrets because I've found my voice through being the person I am, and I'm very happy with how everything is right now. We'll see if everything comes crumbling down in flames.

I was talking with one of my mentors, Ruben Östlund, and he told me—when you're starting out and typically a shy and introspective filmmaker who's afraid to speak up, do the opposite. Be a sledgehammer. Fight for what you want and fight for yourself because that's the only way you're going to make the best work. If you're like me and you're overly eager with something to prove from the chip on your shoulder, you probably want to take the back seat a little bit and play within a team to see what other people can offer. But defining that balance is important.

I look forward to seeing your next production. Can you provide any insight into your future

projects?

I am so deep into writing two films at once. We will see which one goes first.

One is a small, intimate horror comedy film that I’m developing with Beef breakout star Young Mazino. It’s called Who the F*ck is Kevin Kim, and the basic premise follows a messed up Asian male in the entertainment industry… That’s all I can say for now.

Image courtesy of Roeg Cohen

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