Cord Jefferson is interested in putting life on screen.
That’s what he hoped to accomplish with his film “American Fiction,” which is now playing in theaters. This is Jefferson’s feature directorial debut, having mostly worked in television up until this point. Alongside Damon Lindelof, he won an Emmy Award in 2020 for his work on the series “Watchmen” for Outstanding Writing For A Limited Series for the episode “This Extraordinary Being.”
“American Fiction” is written and directed by Jefferson, adapted from Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure.” Part satire, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor and writer who is fed up with a white publishing industry that dines out on stereotypical Black entertainment, exemplified by the critical adoration of a book by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) called “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.”
Monk hits a breaking point when his newest novel is deemed “not Black enough” and decides to write his own version of the hackneyed stories that he hates. But when the novel (“My Pafology”) becomes a surprise hit, Monk has to reckon with his own blindspots and prejudices, culminating in a conversation between he and Sintara that dives into the danger that comes with putting an entire group’s experiences onto the shoulders of one person.
But that’s really only part of the story. The satire is very funny, if a little broad. But where “American Fiction” really shines is its familial focus. Monk’s bitterness at his profession bleeds into a family life that’s riddled with hardship – his mother is suffering from dementia, and the bonds between he and his siblings are growing weary with the weight of their family history.
It makes sense that Jefferson would be well suited for that type of old school dramedy. Some of his favorite writers and directors include the likes of Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcenter and their focus on naturalistic, grounded stories.
“That stuff always really spoke to me, and I think that they do an excellent job of just getting at the realities of life,” he said. “It’s a little bit more elevated and sort of stylized, obviously, but I think that Wes Anderson is also a huge influence on me. I think Wes Anderson movies, you know – you’ll go from a scene in which you’re laughing your ass off, and then next thing you know, Gene Hackman is dead … That’s the reality of the world, and that’s sort of what I was trying to capture.”
Prior to the wide release of “American Fiction,” Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Jefferson about his career and the adaptation process. There are some spoilers for “American Fiction” and “Erasure” in this conversation, which have been noted. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
“American Fiction” is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” You recently read that book, if I’m mistaken, only a few years ago. What drew you to it?
Cord Jefferson: I read it in December of 2020, which was, as you may know, a terrible year. [Laughs] It was not a great year. I had, besides just the same stuff that had happened for everybody, I had some major professional failures that year that were sort of bugging me, and I always kind of get gloomy around the holidays too anyway. So I was kind of going into Christmas a little dejected. I was reading this review for a different novel called “Interior Chinatown,” and the review for that novel said that there’s a satire reminiscent of Percival Everett’s “Erasure.” I had never heard of “Erasure.” I went and bought it, and then just almost as soon as I cracked it open, I was just like – oh, this is amazing. It was one of those books where every time I put it down, I sort of wanted to come back to it immediately. I just kept finding myself back in my room reading it – and I’m a very slow reader, so that doesn’t really happen to me a lot.
Within 20 pages, I knew I wanted to write the screenplay. Halfway through, I was like – I maybe want to direct this. I started reading it in Jeffrey Wright’s voice, like that’s how early I’d already cast Jeffrey in my mind, when I was reading the material. It was not just the sort of satirical, professional themes about what it means to be a Black artist and what people want from creatives of color and what stories people choose to tell – that stuff had all been swirling in my mind for a long time – but also, the thing that was even sort of stranger was there was this sibling dynamic between three siblings, and I have two older siblings. There was this ailing mother, and I had an ailing mother. My mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s, my mother died of cancer years ago. One of my siblings was living in our hometown and taking care of her, taking her to chemo appointments and going to buy her groceries, and sort of shouldered that responsibility while me and my other brother were sort of away, gallivanting around the world, doing our jobs and stuff. So there was some tension there. The overbearing father figure – you know, I love my father, but he’s an overbearing presence. My brothers and I, all of us have our own issues with him.
So, there was just all of these weird overlaps with my personal life,besides just the professional. Because the professional stuff is you know – that’s one thing. But the weird overlaps in my personal life felt like … I really understood the material deep in my bones. It felt like I can do this as well as any other director on the face of the earth right now, because I just understood the material. I don’t know as much about cameras or whatever, that other directors probably know. But … I understood the intention of the story in a very, very deep way, and I understood the emotions of it in a very, very deep way. So that’s what I think gave me the courage to try to take the project on despite the fact that I had never directed anything.
So within 20 pages, you were thinking about directing this. Had you ever considered directing anything else? How much at the forefront of your mind was that?
Jefferson: I was working on “Master of None” season two, and Aziz Ansari had asked me if – you know just casually, he wasn’t asking me to do it on the show – but he asked me if I had ever thought about directing. I said, no. I’ve never been to film school. I don’t know anything about cameras or lighting. And he said, I went to NYU for business school, and I got nominated for a Golden Globe for directing. You don’t have to have gone to film school. All you have to do is – it’s obviously more than this, he was being reductive, but he was like, all you have to do is have a vision and then go to set and be able to articulate that vision to people. Just tell them, this is what I think the room should look like, and this is what I think the camera should move like, you know? Just be able to tell people that, and then you have people who are really good at their jobs who understand the technical aspects of that stuff, and they can execute on that.
He put the seed in my mind in like 2016, but then I said, you know, I’m not going to do this until I feel really passionate about the material. I didn’t want to just become – you know, there are some directors who are journeyman TV directors, and they’ll just go shoot different episodes of stuff. Totally fine, it’s a great living. I’m sure that they enjoy it. But I always felt like I wouldn’t want to do that as my first directing project, just because I felt like I didn’t know if I’d be as passionate about the material. I think that I wouldn’t be as good at it because of that. I really wanted to wait until I found something that I was hyper, hyper, hyper obsessed with, and really wanted to throw my entire self into. And this was that.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Thinking about the adaptation process, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read somewhere that the conversation that Monk has with Sintara Golden, Issa Rae’s character, is not actually in the book. That’s really interesting to me, because that tête-à-tête feels like the linchpin of everything in a lot of ways.
Jefferson: So Percivals’ novel is – you’ve seen the film now, so I can spoil this for you – Percival’s novel is great, because you know, the thing that’s great about novels is they can be discursive and weird and expansive in a way that movies can’t necessarily be. Particularly movies that need to be made on a limited budget. So his novel is just very big and much bigger in scope. So for instance, in the novel – this is a spoiler, I’m spoiling stuff for you – but in the novel, for instance, his sister was murdered. Lisa is murdered by an anti-abortion activist who comes into the clinic and kills her and some other abortion doctors.
The movie becomes very different if that’s the way that his sister dies, right? And in the book, they find out that his dad hasn’t just had affairs, but has a secret family in a different city. So Monk actually travels to meet this half sister that he never knew he had, and he has an interaction with her. So there’s just all these things that really get super big in ways that I couldn’t do in a movie, or the movie would have to be like, four hours long, or it costs like $50 million.
There’s a lot of flashbacks in the book too, to childhood, and I initially put those flashbacks in the script., because I was like, oh – this is how the siblings got to be the way they are, and this is how the father treated them when they were children, you know? That was giving some perspective into that. So there were about four or five flashbacks. I sent the script to people who I trusted and who were giving me good notes. Not all of them, but a lot of them came back and were like, you don’t need these flashbacks. Not only do you not need them for the narrative, it’s also they’re going to be expensive. Because for flashbacks, you have to have period costumes and cars, and you have to hire all new actors. It just becomes super expensive. So you can strip these away and still … make the father feel like a looming presence, you know? You still feel him despite the fact that you never see his character on screen. It’s a lot of streamlining, but in a way that doesn’t strip away the spirit of the novel. The spirit of the novel, to me, is still there. I still kept that stuff, but tried to make things a little more cinematic, and tried to get at what the intention of the story was without taking a million hours.
But when I was reading the novel, I was really excited for that scene [between Monk and Sintara]. I was like, oh man, I can’t wait until Monk meets her and they have this kind of showdown and they talk about their ideological differences and stuff. And it never came. So that to me, I was really excited to write that scene because it felt so important, as you said, to the film. It’s one of the most important scenes in the whole movie, and it remains one of my favorites. It was one of my favorites to write, because I always love – I think the best arguments are sort of ones where you walk away not knowing who’s [right]. I mean, the best arguments in my own life – I want to win every argument [laughs]. But on screen, that to me is the most fun stuff to watch, and most interesting stuff to watch. I wrote that scene, and I still don’t know who I agree with more, you know? Every time that I watch it, it kind of changes depending on the day. I think they both make really interesting points, you know?
[END SPOILERS]
Obviously, there’s a lot of satire in this, but then there’s the family drama aspect, which feels a little more straightforward and honest. Did you find it difficult to meld those two tones together?
Jefferson: I didn’t. I don’t think so. Because I think that the tone that I was after in the movie was life, you know? To me, life is neither comedy nor tragedy. I would say probably the lowest point of my life was when my mother was dying. It was 2015. And it wasn’t just because she was sick, it was also because I just started this new job that I wasn’t really enjoying. I mean, I enjoyed the work, but it was very, very hard. I was working too hard and then staying out too late, and just running around trying to keep my mind off the fact that my mother was sick. I needed therapy and was not getting therapy. It was just a very, very bad year in many ways.
And yet, even in the depths of all that, I still found ways to enjoy myself. I still found ways to laugh. I still found ways to celebrate. I still found ways to, you know, persist and continue. I think that human beings are resilient, and I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about us, is that we persevere, despite all the tragedy that befalls us constantly, right? Life is a series of tragedies, and as you get older, there are more tragedies. People start dying around you, your parents start getting sick. You start having to figure out, oh my god, what am I going to do? I don’t have the money that I thought I needed. I’m getting older. All of these things start to pile up. If we don’t have the ability to persist and persevere, then it just gets miserable.
