CORD JEFFERSON

“American Fiction”

Jefferson is earning widespread praise and awards consideration for his directorial debut, “American Fiction,” but he didn’t even allow himself to think about being a director until he was in his mid30s. After leaving his journalism career to become a TV writer, Jefferson was working on Season 2 of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series “Master of None” when Ansari asked him if he’d ever considered directing.

“I said, ‘No, I haven’t been to film school, I don’t know anything like cameras or lighting,’” Jefferson says. “And he was like, ‘Well, I didn’t go to film school, and I directed these episodes.’”

That planted the seed, and as Jefferson’s writing career took off with his work on “The Good Place,” “Succession” and his Emmy-winning stint on the 2019 miniseries “Watchmen,” he says he started looking for a project that would give him the courage to jump into the director’s chair.

He found it with Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” about English professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who’s stymied by the publishing world only valuing Black stories about poverty and crime, and protests by writing a satire called “My Pafology.”

“I finally felt like I had found a story that I knew on a molecular level,” he says. “That’s what gave me the confidence to say, ‘Even if I don’t know anything about the lighting or the cameras, I know the story that I’m trying to tell and the characters that I’m trying to manifest.’”

Jefferson maintained that perspective throughout the production of “American Fiction,” telling his cast — including Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown and Erika Alexander — and his crew from the outset that he would be leaning on them for support.

“The people on set who didn’t have experience were me and the PAS,” he says. “I was surrounded by people who not who not only were tolerating my inexperience but were excited to help this person learn to become a better filmmaker.” — Adam B. Vary

Reps: Agency: CAA; Management: 3 Arts; Legal: Ziffren Brittenham Influences: “Hollywood Shuffle,” Mike Schur, Damon Lindelof