Interview: Cord Jefferson on Adapting an Unadaptable Novel, Balancing Satire and Sincerity, and Audience’s Reactions to ‘American Fiction’

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There was a lot of buzz coming from this year’s Toronto International Film about American Fiction, an entertaining satire that follows a novelist whose fed up with the literary establishment tell him what the “Black” experience should be to make a book that will sell. In his frustrations, Monk (Jeffrey Wright) uses a pen name to write a book to make fun of the kind of books they want him to make, only for it to turn around on him and propel him into the core of hypocrisy that he can’t get out of, no matter how hard he tries. At the same time as this outlandish story is going on, we follow Monk as he tries to reconnect with his estranged family and build a new relationship with the woman who lives across the street. Behind all the acclaim for the film, and the idea to get this story made, is one of the best, fresh voices of 2023, writer-director Cord Jefferson.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, Jefferson started his career in journalism, where he was an editor at Gawker, and wrote for various other outlets like USA Today, The Huffington Post, and the New York Times. Around 2014, Jefferson got his start in the television world, as he became a writer or story consultant for shows like The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Master of None, The Good Place and Watchmen, where he received an Emmy for his work alongside show-runner Damon Lindelof for their episode titled, ‘This Extraordinary Being.’ With this, he was able to move into his directorial debut American Fiction, based on Percival Everett’s groundbreaking novel Erasure, and crafting a film that “speaks the honest truth that most debuts don’t dare touch, making American Fiction both hysterical and poignant.”

In my conversation with the writer-director at this year’s Middleburg Film Festival, we spoke about adapting the film’s difficult text into a film, his relationship with the source material, his work with his stacked cast of phenomenal actors, what he hopes the audience takes away from the film, and how we don’t want those awkward ‘Monk moments’ to define us. During the conversation, Jefferson brought up Steely Dan, which is ironic because when he spoke with our Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson at the Mill Valley Film Festival, they had an extensive conversation about Madonna that night. As I remind Jefferson of that moment, he laughed and his eye lite up as he said “Every time I talk to you guys, it’s about music. You are going to know my whole Spotify playlist by the end of the year.” As the festival went on, he talked to everyone over the course of the weekend about music, movies, life. By the end of our last interaction at the Saturday night party at Middleburg, one thing was clear, Cord Jefferson is having the time of his life celebrating a debut feature film he should be proud of.

Ryan McQuade: Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today.

Cord Jefferson: No, thank you for having me.

RM: I was at the premiere at Toronto.

CJ: Oh wow. Beautiful.

RM: It’s such an interesting film to talk about…

CJ: Thank you, man.

RM: Erasure, the book American Fiction is based off, it’s been out a long time. It’s a book that has been a part of a lot conversations. This is not an easy adaptation. For you, how do you step into this 20-year work and start adapting it, which is a very abstract novel too, to make it a feature link film that we saw?

CJ: The thing that immediately attracted me to the novel wasn’t just the satirical professional themes of it, about what it means to be a Black writer and a Black creative and what people expect of Black art. That’s stuff that had been swirling in my head for decades. But on a more personal level, when I was reading this novel, I was just kind of overcome with how many overlaps the character had to my own life.

So, he’s a Black writer. He has two siblings, I have two siblings. He moves home at a certain point to take care of his ailing mother. My mother didn’t have dementia, but my mother died of cancer eight years ago. And a certain point I moved home to take care of her. And so there was all these… It had a reference to my college, which I went to William and Mary here in Virginia. And nobody talks about William and Mary. It is like I’ve never seen it really in pop culture before.

There’s one Steely Dan song that references William and Mary. I’m a huge Steely Dan fan, but outside of that, you don’t really hear about that in pop culture. And the book is actually set in DC, I moved it to Boston, but I used to live in DC. So, there was all these overlaps with my own life that felt that when I was reading it just started to feel like, oh, this has such a relevance to my life in a way that very, very few pieces of art have had before.

And so as soon as I was done with it, I knew I wanted to adapt it because I really felt the material in my bones. I really felt like close to the characters and sort of the storyline. Percival Everett’s a genius. I think people toss that word around too much, but I believe he’s an actual genius. And his work is it’s meta textual and experimental in many ways. The problem that I faced was how to streamline this for screen and while not losing the spirit of the original text, that was the hard part. And so, I unfortunately had to cut out some of the more experimental stuff. If I tried to make the novel a carbon copy into a film, it probably would’ve cost $80 million and it would’ve been five hours long. You know?

RM: I would’ve seen it. (laughs)

CJ:  Thank you. Thank you. Maybe that’ll be like the third movie. (laughs)

RM: I can’t wait for the director’s cut in a couple of years and they just let you go.

CJ: Exactly. And so, I had to cut out some significant things and change some stuff and add a few scenes here and there. More than a few scenes, I added a lot of scenes, but it was about keeping the spirit of the book. And I was able to keep some of the meta textual stuff. I was able to keep some of that kind of experimental stuff, which I was happy about.

And the biggest, one of the greatest compliments I’ve had about the film is Percival Everett, who wrote Erasure, came to my home to see the movie in an early cut with his wife, who’s also a fantastic novelist named Danzy Senna. But they came to watch the film and Percival said to me after it was done, I was drenched in sweat cause I was so terrified of what he was going to say. And he said, “The thing that I really like about the movie is that you made it your own. You took my book as an inspiration and came up with a piece of art that stands on its own.” And that, to me, it was one of the biggest compliments I’ve received about the film.

RM: I feel that as I was watching it, I felt what Monk was going through. We’ve all, people of color, myself as a Latino, have had ‘Monk moments.’

CJ: Oh, absolutely.

RM: We all have moments where we’re sitting there and this out of body experience is happening where a group of people are celebrating, in case of this book or piece of material or something, and we’re like, “Is nobody else seeing that this is an issue?”

CJ: Absolutely.

RM: For you, is there a significant ‘Monk moment’ early on in your career or something more recent you thought back to when you were making the film that made you contemplate, “My God, this is why I have to tell this story. It’s continuously happening.”

CJ: Yeah, absolutely. Firstly, I’m from Tucson, Arizona and I have a lot of Latino friends, and this movie’s about a Black writer, right? But I think that, as you said, the ideas and themes in it are applicable to a lot of people. I have a lot of Mexican friends who say, “Why does every story coming out of Mexico have to be about a cartel or about somebody fleeing their miserable small Mexican town for the promised land of the United States? And why does it have to have that weird orangy brown wash on it every time that you’re shooting a scene in Mexico?”

RM: Very Traffic.

CJ: Exactly. Exactly. And so most recently, I’ll say that I have encountered numerous instances, but most recently, I’ll say that… I was working on a TV show a few years ago, and I will not name the executive, but had some notes come down the ladder that said, “We want you to make this character Blacker.” And to me, you know, my response was, “Well, what, explain to me what would make this character Blacker.”

RM: I assume that this executive was not black. This was a white executive.

CJ: Yes. And my question was, “What makes this character Blacker to you? What do you think, what does it mean to be Blacker to you? Like on the spectrum of Blackness, what does it mean to be more or less Black?”

And of course, they never gave me that note ever again. They can’t answer that because they realize that if they try to answer that, they’re going to get themselves in a lot of trouble and put their foot in their mouth. And so, again, this is, I’m not talking about 15 years ago, I’m talking about three years ago, four years ago. These are the conversations that people are having in this industry. The satirical moments in the film, yes, they’re slightly exaggerated, but only slightly, not as much as you might think watching the film. These are conversations that still go on pretty regularly in this industry.

RM: Well, that kind of leads me to my next question is that, in writing this, you have to find that easy balance between satirical comedy and honest commentary. How conscious are you of the comedy and the commentary and trying to balance all that to then reach the message you want to make with the film? Because sometimes it’s a very delicate thing to be able to capture that. And I think you do that pretty effortlessly here.

CJ: Thank you. Yeah. I think for me, when I sat down to write the script and make the film, it was, I wanted it to reflect life, which is neither comedy nor tragedy. In my lowest of moments, I’ve still found ways to laugh and celebrate and sort of make jokes. And even in my highest of highs, I’ve still found moments of tragedy and sort of sadness.

And when I set out to make the film, it’s like life doesn’t have a tone or a genre. Life is life. And so what I wanted to do is reflect that, was that, reflect that… And so the thing that people that I really love when people are done watching the movie is when they say, “It’s like I was laughing and crying and sometimes within the same scene.”

And I think that to me is what I set out to do. And because that’s what life is like. And I think that for me, I wanted this movie, obviously it’s satire, there’s elements of satire, but I wanted to make sure that the satire never tipped over into farce.

And I think that sort of sometimes satirical movies, it’s a directorial decision. People decide that they want to make farcical movies, and that’s fine. But I never wanted to do that. And I wanted to always try to make sure that the comedic elements didn’t, that sort of like the rest of the film didn’t collapse under the weight of the comedy.

And so to me, one of the ways that we accomplished that is to make sure that we had moments of real poignancy and pathos with Monk and his emotional relationships with his family and his romantic partners. That to me was, I always wanted to keep the film grounded. And I think that hopefully we, and thank you for saying it, hopefully we sort of kept it from toppling over under the weight of the satire because I didn’t want to make something like slap sticky. And I think that sometimes when you’re trying to make a satirical thing, you are in danger of sort of bumping up too closely to just farce and slap sticky.

RM: I think that everyone is going to talk about humor of the film. Monk’ book and the storyline with Issa Rae especially. But I don’t think people are picking up on the story within the story, this family drama that also feels like a movie that doesn’t get made in enough in Hollywood. I was talking with some other critics and we all agreed this film feels like a movie that only gets made because of this other, humorous angle that is attached to it. While other directors, non directors of color, they get that movie about the family drama made easily. Is that an indictment on where we’re still at in terms of creatives being able to, especially creatives of color, being able to tell stories?

CJ: Yeah, I don’t think it’s an intentional indictment, but I think that it’s certainly there in that I didn’t set out to make this movie to sort of prove that point. But I do think that you’re right. I don’t know that this movie gets made if we don’t have that sort of other element. And I think that to me, what it speaks to, and again, it’s not just Black people, it’s Latino people, I think it’s queer people. I think that the thing that, obviously just as viewers, we want to see other stuff. But also, I think that to me, what it speaks to and why it’s painful for people like you and me and other people who are looking for these other stories is because it suggests that our lives are not as complex and layered and nuanced and as other people’s lives.

It suggests that the most interesting thing about us is our ability to withstand trauma and our ability to withstand violence and our ability to withstand racism and prejudice. And to me, that’s the least interesting thing about me. It’s one of the least interesting. It’s like, “Yeah, yeah, man, I’ve had some weird interactions with police officers in my life.” Absolutely. But it doesn’t happen all the time. And when it does happen, that is one of the least interesting things that’s ever happened to me, because when you encounter those kinds of things it has nothing to do with you.

RM: Exactly.

CJ: That says nothing about me. It says everything about the person I’m interacting with. And so, you’re actually learning nothing about me because somebody’s a jerk to me. And also, that doesn’t define me. There’s much more interesting things that do define my life, and it’s not that.

I just think that for me, the frustrating part about it is that, and the thing that makes you angry is that… I have a therapist once who said that anger isn’t a real emotion, that it’s always pain or fear underneath anger. And so, I think the painful thing about it is that it suggests that people don’t see us as fully nuanced human beings. It suggests to us that, to your point, why would we watch? Why would we make a family drama about Black people? Because it suggests that there’s a belief that our lives are so vastly different from other people’s lives that like, “Why would we watch a family drama from you? It would be so… What would we have in common with that? How could I relate to that? How could I relate to a Black family? Their issues must be so different from the issues that my family has, so why would I watch that or why would I want to green light that or put money into that?”

And so yeah, that is something that unfortunately, I think is probably true. But the hope is that, as with all art, I think is that maybe this movie will crack the door open a little bit for other people behind me because there’s been a long legacy of… I think a spiritual predecessor to this film is Hollywood Shuffle, this film Hollywood Shuffle, which I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but highly recommended it if you haven’t.

And Robert Townsend made that movie on credit cards over the course of a year and a half because he shot, he would shoot Saturdays and Sundays and then go work for another couple weeks to be able to rent the camera equipment again, and then shoot another couple days. And it took him a year and a half and he maxed out 12 credit cards.

And so I think that, but what that did, was that allowed me some 40 years later to come into a room and say like, “Hey, would you guys give me some money to make this?” And all of a sudden, I’m not maxing out my credit cards. I’m sort of working with people who say like, “Okay, we’re willing to take a risk on this.” So, for me, I’m sort of standing on the shoulders of those people, and if this film has any success at all, to me, it would be a dream to crack the door open a little bit more the way that Robert Townsend and Keenen Ivory Wayans cracked the door open for me 40 years ago. That maybe somebody gets an opportunity in 2063 to make a movie that they hadn’t anticipated they’d be able to make. You know?

RMYour cast is extraordinary in here. I’ve loved Jeffrey Wright for his entire career. I think he’s one of our great actors.

CJ: Absolutely.

RM: And Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, they’re both incredible in this film. What was it like getting to collaborate and work with them on making American Fiction?

RM: It was amazing because I had… This was the first thing that I’d ever directed. Working with actors was something that was probably the most frightening for me just because I’d worked on, I’d written TV for a while, but I hadn’t really been on set a ton. I’d been on set several times and worked with actors here and there, but for the most part, the actors that I was working with on those things were already established. They were sort of other people’s creations that I was helping the actors with dialogue here and there and jokes, but I wasn’t sort of building the characters with them.

And so, to build these characters with these actors was a dream come true. And the thing that I was, obviously, they’re excellent actors, so they’re already coming in with a whole tremendous skillset. But beyond that, all of them were so, so, so, so collaborative. From Jeffrey on down, every single person was so excited and enthusiastic about building this storyline with me and building these characters with me and building this film with me. I just felt incredibly well taken care of by the cast, and hopefully they felt the same about me, that I was trying to do my best to take care of them despite my inexperience.

RM: Lastly, I feel like audiences are going to take this film in various different ways, but as a filmmaker, you try to make a movie for every audience, even though you are satirizing many throughout the film. What do you hope they take away from American Fiction overall?

CJ: I mean, to be honest, the only thing that I hope people take away is a smile that is honestly it. I think that this movie, my favorite art, doesn’t spoon-feed morality or give people lessons or suggest this is how you should think. It’s not didactic. It’s not an op-ed column. I think that my favorite art puts forth a series of characters and situations and scenes and then lets you make your own conclusions about it. I think that the thing that’s important to remember is that, and I think that a thing that people have difficulty with sometimes is that, these are thorny issues, issues of class, issues of race, issues of gender, issues of identity, issues of sexuality. These are very thorny subjects and difficult, and sometimes they have an easy answer. Sometimes it’s like, “Yes, slavery, there’s an easy answer to slavery”, right? It’s like slavery is bad. That’s a binary.

But for a lot of these things, what is Black art? What makes good Black art? What makes bad Black art? What makes good art and what makes bad art regardless of race? There is no answer to those questions. It’s just sort of like how you want to believe and what values you have and how you think about the world. And so this movie tackles some of those subjects, but when I was making it, I wanted to avoid telling people, this is how you should think about this issue. It’s far more interesting to me for people to just come in and enjoy themselves and leave laughing and sort of immediately turn to their friend and say, “Do you want to go get a drink and talk about what we just saw?”

That to me is my favorite kind of art. And so I’m happy that you said… To me, I really did want to make this a big tent film. I want people who watch Fox News to come see it. I want people who watch MSNBC to come see it. I want White people to come see it, Black people to come see it, Latinos, Asians. I want everybody to come see this. And I want people to feel like they are being invited in because I think that we are…

Man, this is, I would say probably the most polarized the world has ever been in my lifetime. I think that we are so divided, and I think that everybody is so afraid to say the wrong thing and sort of think the wrong thing and believe the wrong thing. And to me, we’re never going to move forward if everybody operates from this perspective of just like, “Well, I can’t say anything and I don’t want to talk to those people because they believe differently from me.” And it’s like, man, nothing’s going to get accomplished if we’re all just of in our bubbles. And the Fox News viewers are watching Fox News and the MSNBC people are watching MSNBC and never the Twain shall meet. That’s sort of all that does is increases the polarization.

So, if this is a movie that feels inviting to all kinds of people, that’s the dream to me is that it’s just an audience full of strangers and people who are different from you coming together to sort of think about these things and maybe talk about them afterward. That’s what I’d like to people to take away from this, is just to go have a conversation about it and enjoy yourselves and laugh for a little bit. I want this to be a movie that people can come in and laugh and enjoy themselves.

And I think that it is, that night at TIFF when it premiered was, that’s the largest room I’ve ever seen it in, and it was just such a reminder of what a great theatrical experience movies can be. And this is a movie that I think is made to be seen with a lot of people because I think that there’s something fun and energetic and dynamic about the audience response and how sort of hearing people laugh and gasp and talk at the screen. That to me is…

I was just so excited to see that because it feels like you’re watching live music in that way. It feels like people are responding to different parts of the song that sort of are meaningful to them. And I think that that kind of divergent opinions and divergent reactions like that to me is the best stuff about being in a movie theater and the best stuff about seeing art that makes you think a little bit. So that, to me, that’s a long-winded way of saying, I just hope people go and have fun and then talk about it afterwards cause to me, the metric… I always consider the metric of great art or art that is meaningful to me is if I’m thinking about it after I’ve consumed it. And so, if I’m thinking about this book months after I’ve read it, or I’m thinking about this movie years after I’ve seen it, that to me is always a mark of quality. If people are talking about it afterwards and engaging with the ideas afterwards, that to me is what I’d like.

RM: Brilliant. I think you did a great job. Thank you so much, Cord.

CJ: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to chat with you, Ryan.

American Fiction will have a limited release on December 15 from Amazon MGM and then go wide on December 22.