A blistering satire about American attitudes toward race and success as filtered through one Black writer’s experiences in the publishing industry, American Fiction was the breakout film of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and it seems sure to inspire heated debate upon its Dec. 15 release.
Director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut adapts Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure with wit and panache, charting the mess created by author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) when, in response to his frustration over seeing only stereotypical inner-city Black stories receive acclaim, he pens his own pandering novel of broken homes and crime dubbed My Pafology and it becomes a literary sensation. Simultaneously disgusted and enticed by this turn of events, Monk attempts to perpetuate his prank, all as he copes with a family life coming apart at the seams thanks to a recent tragedy and his strained feelings about his late father, his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, his brother (Sterling K. Brown), and his new love interest (Erika Alexander).
The personal, professional, and cultural all absurdly collide in American Fiction, which proves an equal-opportunity lampoon, poking fun at white liberal allyship, Black intellectual arrogance and anger, and the corrosive cycle of exploitation and self-exploitation that limits, rather than expands, ideas about who we are and what we’re capable of achieving. Refusing to posit sermonic answers to its questions about artistic expression and representation, it’s as complicated as its protagonist, embodied by a masterful Wright as an erudite writer whose egotistical indignation is at once justified and tangled up with his chaotic personal travails.
The film is a stew of incendiary issues that, by their very nature, can’t be easily resolved, and its sharpness comes from its ability to navigate its chosen minefield with pointed humor and potent compassion. It’s easy to imagine viewers coming away from American Fiction with various interpretations of Monk and his ruse, and ahead of the film’s premiere, we spoke with Jefferson about wrestling with such inflammatory material, the boundaries between satire and farce, and processing the film’s rising Oscar fortunes.
[This conversation has been edited for length]
There’s mounting awards buzz about American Fiction. Has that reception been exciting? Daunting? Overwhelming?
Overwhelming is the word I was going to use. I made the movie, I was proud of the movie, I liked the movie, but releasing art is a vulnerable thing. You have no idea if this thing you’re proud of, other people are going to be proud of. There are a lot of people who are proud of their movies and it turns out that other people hate them. Especially with a movie like this that deals with some third-rail issues people feel uncomfortable talking about, it was a risk, and I was definitely fearful.
Have you been heartened by the fact that, even among the positive reactions, people are seeing and hearing different things in it?
The novel Erasure has a final coda page, and the coda is a Latin phrase I’d never encountered before. It’s generally used in relation to complex mathematical equations, and the rough translation is, “I offer no hypothesis.” To me, what that was saying was that this was a book Percival Everett wrote to put forth a series of scenes and characters and situations, and then he offered no hypothesis. You take from this what you will.
In keeping with the spirit of the novel, I wanted to make a movie that allowed for interpretation. This wasn’t an op-ed column, this wasn’t a persuasive essay where I was saying this is how you should feel about this. It was a thing where you come, sit down, laugh and think a little bit, and leave with a smile on your face. That was the goal. Then the ultimate goal after that was you turn to the person you came to see the movie with and say, you want to get a drink after dinner and talk about what we just saw? I’m really happy it’s inspiring conversation and discussion and differences of opinions. That was what I set out to do. I think if it was universally loved or universally reviled, either way, I would have been disappointed.
Navigating racial issues can certainly result in heated responses.
The thing about race is that it exists in this weird liminal space where it’s both real and not real. It’s not real because the vast majority of scientists will tell you there’s no basis for racial differences on a biological level; that this is not a real thing. Yet we’ve structured our society and institutions on the basis that it is real. It’s both real and not real, and there’s an inherent absurdity there.
I think people have a hard time with nuance, complexity and uncertainty. The thing about some of the questions in the movie… In the scene in which Monk and Sintara (Issa Rae) have their ideological debate about what it means to be a Black artist and what it means to make Black art, I wrote that scene and I have no idea who I agree with; it changes day to day. The thing people need to understand is that there is no right answer to that conversation. It’s just purely who you agree with more.
Was it tough getting American Fiction made?
This movie was incredibly easy to make in some ways and incredibly difficult to make in other ways. When I pitched the script, there were like 12-14 producers who were immediately interested. Talked with all of them, and all but one said, we love the script and want to package it up; let’s go get Jeffrey Wright and other actors and we’ll take it out and sell it to a distributor. T-Street was the only one who, in the room, greenlit the movie. We went with them, obviously—bird in the hand.
After that we went looking for distribution, and we got Jeffrey on board. Again, we met with like 14 different people, from streamers to studios, and I’ll never forget my manager saying, this is going to be huge, there’s going to be a bidding war, get ready! We took it out, pitched it around, everyone loved it and Jeffrey, and was so complimentary. Then we finished those meetings over the course of two weeks, and there was nothing. At all.
Naturally.
We got the offer from Orion/MGM, who we wound up going with, and then we got a second offer from a company that was offering us less for the distribution rights than the production budget—not just a little, but millions less. Everybody else, the refrain, over and over, was, “I really wish I worked at a place where I could make this movie.”
Doesn’t that speak directly to the movie itself?
Exactly! These were people who work at places that regularly make $100 million movies, multiple times a year. They’re not saying they don’t have the resources to make this; they’re saying they don’t have the will and courage to make it. To make this movie, with me as a director, is a risky bet, and they don’t want to take that risk. Because this isn’t a movie where, if it comes out and flops, somebody’s going to lose their job or the company is going to go bankrupt. If it flops, it’s a drop in the bucket and they’re going to make another $100 million movie.
They were afraid of the material and they were afraid of me, I guess—that I’d screw it up somehow. This movie got made very quickly but only thanks to 3-4 people who saw the script and agreed to take a risk. Without those 3-4 people, there’s a world in which this movie doesn’t get made because there is no will for it.
How did you guard against the film’s satire becoming overly farcical, which—given Monk’s stunt—was certainly a possibility?
Farcical is the exact word I used when I was pitching people. They would ask, what’s the tone you’re going for, and I would say, satire but not farce. I want to be satirical and funny but never fall into farce where it gets silly and slapstick-y. I love the family stuff because it’s an integral part of the story and I love those characters, but one of the things the family stuff does is it grounds the satirical moments. As soon as Monk leaves those moments, he’s in a more grounded scenario with his family and ailing mother and romance and challenging relationship with his brother. All of that stuff helps ground the bigger laugh moments so it doesn’t collapse under the weight of that satire, which is what I wanted to avoid.
Were there movies you looked to for inspiration?
One of the biggest spiritual predecessors for me is Hollywood Shuffle. That movie was a real revelation when I was a young person. I think even before I understood what the word “satire” meant, that was the first movie I saw where… when you’re a kid, every lesson in school and movies about the Civil Rights movement and race in America is treated as very important and very serious. Robert Townsend’s film was the first time I’d ever seen talk about race that was like, let’s laugh about this, let’s find the humor in this. That was a huge revelation. Wait a minute, we don’t need to be super-sad all the time when we talk about this stuff! In fact, it’s probably beneficial that we find ways to laugh in all of this, because laughing through the pain, and laughing to keep from crying, is sometimes a good thing.
That was a huge one. As I got older, The Squid and the Whale was a big movie with the tone. Life is neither comedy nor tragedy; it’s frequently both in the same day, and often in the same hour, and I think Noah Baumbach does a really good job of capturing that in his writing. Nicole Holofcener is another big influence on me; I think she does a great job capturing that slice-of-life comedy-and-tragedy-in-the-same-moment. Wonder Boys, I looked to a lot. I think a stew of all of that, and Spike Lee is generally a huge influence on me. He was the first director that I really understood as an author with an intentional voice.
Do you see American Fiction as the kind of Black art—one that doesn’t conform to familiar stereotypes—that Monk is trying to champion? Do you feel a connection to the character in that way?
Absolutely. I feel like there’s a bit of me in every single character in the film, but especially Monk. I think what I was trying to do with the film was make something that’s a little left-of-center that felt different from the stuff everybody else was making. I think I empathize with Monk’s struggle in a very deep way because, like Monk, I’ve had executives come to me with the note, “Can you make this character Blacker?” That is a reality of my life in this industry, that people come to me and say that this character isn’t Black enough, can you Blacken it up. So I fully understand Monk’s frustration.
One of the reasons I wanted the film to be grounded is because I think this could happen. I don’t think this concept is that ridiculous. I do believe there’s a world in which this happens. So it’s interesting that this is the thing that has become my greatest success in this industry. Because unlike Monk—who’s just like, screw it, I’m going to do a prank to make fun of you guys and it then goes off the rails—I just said, I’m going to put all of my frustration and resentment into a script that isn’t this, that feels like it’s different, and see what happens.
It has been by far my biggest success in this industry, and I think there’s probably a lesson in there for other people who are making stuff, which is—this is the first thing I’ve made without any business agenda in mind. I wasn’t writing this for a studio or as an open-writing assignment. I got the rights for free from Percival; I called him and asked for the rights to the book and he said, OK, you can have them for free for six months and if you write a script and something happens, you can pay me after that. It was purely on a whim and a dream that maybe I’ll write this thing that I feel passionately about, and we’ll see what happens.
Monk isn’t just passionate, though—he’s also angry.
To me, I really empathize with Monk because, for a very, very long time, I was full of anger, and I think this movie is a very angry movie. I had a therapist that said anger is not a real emotion; underneath anger is always either pain or fear. Especially for men, anger is the way we’ve been socialized to show that we’re in pain or fearful. To me, Monk is a guy who’s angry because inside, he’s hurting because he’s adrift over his career not going the way he wanted it to go, he’s alienated himself from his family and his colleagues and romantic partners, and he’s just this isolated person who’s in a lot of pain. That’s the origin of his pugnacious attitude and fighting and arguing all the time.
How did you empathize with that?
I empathize with that because I lived my life like that for a long time. It wasn’t until about 2018-2019 that I started realizing I was self-immolating because I was frustrated with all this other stuff. If I had tried to make this movie even seven years ago, it would have been a disaster. I wouldn’t have understood myself and my motivations enough to make it properly. When I sat down to finally make this, I really did understand Monk’s struggle and frustration and resentment and why he decides to write My Pafology.
Fortunately, I’d reached a point in my life where I realized that he was making bad decisions. Five years ago, I might have thought, Monk’s a hero, and I would have been much more inclined to make a villain out of Sinatra and not had that scene at the end where they discuss their ideological differences. It would have been a movie where I really tried to herald Monk as this righteous crusader, instead of showing that he’s got this impotent rage he doesn’t know what to do with, and he’s kind of pathetic.
Still, do you view the movie as hopeful, in the sense that it got made, and therefore proves that there’s a space for these sorts of stories and characters?
Absolutely. I’m a person who really does believe that, as difficult as things are right now, they’re significantly better than they used to be. A perfect example is Hollywood Shuffle, which required Robert Townsend to max out his credit cards and shoot that movie over the course of two years because they could only shoot on Saturdays and Sundays. It took them forever to make. This one, I walked into an office and got a couple straight white dudes to write me a check for millions of dollars. That is a different environment than forty years ago when Robert was trying to make Hollywood Shuffle. So things are getting better.
Obviously, change is incremental and I wish things could be different faster, but things are different. And the world is so dark right now that I don’t want to add more cynicism. I do think that Monk, as somebody who finds a little hope, is true. It’s how I feel. I think I stand on the shoulders of Robert Townsend, who busted his ass and put his financial future on the line to get that movie made forty years ago; I think he cracked the door a little bit so I can now walk through it. Hopefully a few years down the road, somebody who might not be able to get their film made right now can get it made, because there was some incremental change that I helped push forward. That would be the dream to me. I have cynicism about some things, but I never want that to creep too much into the work, because I think that, in fact, there’s reason to be hopeful for a lot of stuff.
