Director Jefferson adapts life-changing novel
‘American Fiction,’ based on Everett’s ‘Erasure,’ viewed as Oscar contender
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Writer-director Cord Jefferson had never heard of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure” until the 2020 day he picked it up. He started to read and quickly sensed his life was about to change.
“I went out and bought it just to read over the holidays — just a new book to check out,” says Jefferson, who at the time was a writer-producer on TV series such as “The Good Place,” “Succession,” and “Watchmen.”
“Within 50 pages, I was obsessed with it,” he says on a recent video call. “I told my manager, ‘I think I found the thing that I want to turn into a movie and direct for my first directorial effort.’ ”
Jefferson read on.
“It wasn’t long after that that I started reading the novel in Jeffrey Wright’s voice,” he says of the actor, who in Jefferson’s imagination embodied the role of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the protagonist of Everett’s 2001 novel.
“It just started to get in my brain as to what it was gonna look like.”
Almost as soon as he read the last pages, Jefferson says he reached out to Everett. “I called and begged him for the rights,” Jefferson says. “I said I feel just deeply passionate about this — would you let me take a crack at it?
“He gave me the rights for free,” he says. “He said, ‘You can have the rights for free for six months. Go write a script. And if you end up selling it, then you can pay me.’
“I will be forever indebted to him for that.”
“American Fiction,” the film that Jefferson adapted and directed from Everett’s “Erasure,” is now
Actor Jeffrey Wright, from left, author Percival Everett and director Cord Jefferson attend a screening of “American Fiction” on Dec. 5 in California. Jefferson adapted the film from Everett’s novel “Erasure.”
playing in theaters and is widely viewed as an Oscar contender. Jeffrey Wright did play Monk in the movie, surrounded by a strong cast that includes Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, and Erika Alexander.
In it, Wright plays a novelist and professor whose books are critically acclaimed but have miserable sales figures. When another Black writer scores a national bestseller with a novel titled “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto,” which Monk sees as exploiting stereotypical tropes of Black lives, he knocks out a bitterly satirical response. He titles his book, “My Pafology,” and orders his agent to submit it to publishers.
When it sells for a huge advance and buzz about its pseudonymous writer
Stagg R. Leigh takes off, Monk becomes even more despondent.
For Jefferson, the story of Monk resonated strongly, because in some ways he’d always lived its lessons.
“I worked as a journalist for about eight or nine years before I started working in film and television,” he says. “And towards the end of my journalism career, I felt like people were coming to me and asking me to write this revolving door of Black trauma stories.
“It was like write about Trayvon Martin being killed and write about Breonna Taylor being killed and write about Michael Brown being killed,” Jefferson says. “And it just felt like: a) this is a gruesome job; but b), it’s
also like, ‘What can I write that’s new about these things?’
“You know, once you’ve written about a Black teenager being murdered by the police, what else can you say about this subject that feels different from the last time?”
Moving from journalism to TV and film writing seemed like the answer.
“I was excited because it felt like, finally, I’m working in fiction, I can do anything,” Jefferson says. “And yet, lo and behold, people came to me and said, ‘Do you want to write this fictional story about a Black teenager being murdered by the police? You want to write this fictional story about slavery? You want to write this fictional story about inner city violence and poverty?’
“It felt like even in the world of fiction, there’s this limited perspective of what a Black person’s life looks like. What our humanity contains. And sort of, like, the depth and complexity of our lives versus other people’s lives.”
“Erasure” understood that bind, too, and as Jefferson read, he saw other points of connection to his own life in it, including experiences he shared with the fictional Monk with complicated sibling dynamics and the struggle to help an aging mother.
“I was able to really nail down some things that felt deeply personal to me in a way that gave me the courage to make this thing that I wanted to direct.”
“American Fiction” is smart, funny and bitingly satirical when it takes aim at topics such as literary success, publishing and Hollywood. But it never loses sight of the human heart that beats at its center, as Monk navigates his unlikely and unwanted success as Stagg R. Leigh, as well as his family troubles and the speed bumps his ego and pride place in the way of a burgeoning love affair.
All of that’s part of life as Jefferson sought to portray it on screen: happy, sad, complicated, messy, real.
“I wanted to make something that, to me, felt real to life,” he says. “And, you know, my life is neither comedy nor tragedy. I don’t think anybody’s life is really comedy or tragedy. It’s frequently both of those things on the same day.
“Even in my darkest of moments, I’ve found the ability to laugh,” Jefferson says. “And even at my highest highs, there’s been some awful things that happen. And so I wanted to show that. And I also wanted to make a movie that felt like it was inviting in a lot of people.”
The point, he says, is that you can make your points in ways that entertain and inform, educate and empathize.
“Some of the themes in this movie are about race, or about identity, or about sexuality,” Jefferson says. “I think that sometimes people stiffen, and they go, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to go sit in a college lecture for two hours and feel like I’m being scolded, feel like I’m having to sit through somebody telling me why I need to feel bad.’
“I wanted to make sure that, yeah, we’re going to talk about some things that are serious issues, but there are ways to talk about these things that are not serious, that are not self-serious,” he says. “There’s a way to talk about serious things and find joy and laughter, and find silliness and absurdity in them. And allow yourself to laugh while acknowledging that these are serious subjects.”