[This story contains spoilers from American Fiction.]
It’s not often that a filmmaker gets to premiere their project to an audience they’ve set their hyperspecific comedic sights on. But it’s an experience first-time director Cord Jefferson can now claim after his new film, American Fiction, made its east coast debut at the Hamptons International Film Festival this past weekend.
At one point in the film, Jeffrey Wright’s Monk — an author and professor who has become increasingly frustrated with the suffocating, microaggressive treatment of his work and his Blackness amid the rise of a fellow writer’s success — admits that white people in the Hamptons are going to eat up his new book, “My Pafology.”
The kicker is that the book is an entirely made-up, satirical take on Black life. It’s written by Monk under a pseudonym, which is attached to the identity of a (fictional) formerly incarcerated man who intentionally embodies racially stereotypical extremes in his vernacular and experiences. It’s Monk’s way of calling out the white publishing industry and, eventually, movie-making machine, and the Black artists who seemingly buy into it. “Books like this are not real,” he says at one point in the film. “They flatten our lives.”
While tucked into a cramped booth at Easton Hampton’s Carissa’s Bakery, the day after the premiere, the writer declines to take credit for the joke and deciding to deliver it straight to its punchline. Still, the opportunity — or, really, coincidence — wasn’t lost on him.
“I did think about how it was going to play here,” Jefferson says, laughing. “That was an ad lib from Jeffrey. That line was not in the script. Jeffrey was just going through and saying stuff, and it was an ad lib that we kept in because I thought it was funny.
“I wasn’t in the room,” he continues, “but I heard it played well.”
That somewhat meta-moment feels fitting for a film that, within its multiple genres, captures the perpetual feeling of forced consciousness around one’s Blackness; how Black stories — and artists — are frequently defined by and navigating their reception by whiteness.
During the Hamptons International Film Festival, which runs Oct. 6-15, Jefferson sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about how he captured that experience through his film based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure; the story he did and didn’t want to tell with American Fiction; and using his satire to crack “the door open just a little bit more” for other Black artists.
Throughout the film, there was a tension that a certain shoe was going to drop. That shoe is the consequences, or backlash, over Monk making up a fictional persona, making people think it’s real — something that recently happened with a comedian, or even farther back with A Million Little Pieces. But you never address that. Why?
I think I know what comedian you’re referencing, who’s a friend of mine. Hasan [Minhaj] was at a screening of this film in New York. You know, it’s an important and worthy conversation, and one that we’re going to have here very soon it seems, but it was never what I wanted to focus on. There was so much stuff that I had to cut out and all these discussions in the book that I found really intriguing, but I just had to make a movie that was one-to-two hours.
When you hear the term “American fiction,” you start to think about these enduring fictions around American history, personal identity, the publishing machine, Hollywood. So, when you were thinking about choosing a title, how did you land on this, and did you in the process think about changing it?
It’s funny that you ask. When I sent out the script, the working title of the movie was Fuck, and when you’ve seen the film, you understand why. (Laughs.) I was very much like: This needs to be the title of the movie. And was very persistent about it. It was a hill that I was ready to die on. But I’m happy that I changed it. It would have been a disaster for any number of reasons. The number one reason why I’m happy I changed it is because one of the producers finally said, “I can give you a bunch of reasons, but the number one reason is that if you Google ‘Fuck movie’ we aren’t even going to be like the eleventh thing. He was like, you’re just not going to find our film. It’s just going to be porn.” So I was like, “OK,” and then it became a very long process of figuring out if it’s not going to be Fuck, what is it going to be?
I came up with probably 20 to 25 ideas that kept getting shot down and kept getting shot down. Other people are coming up with stuff that I was like, “I don’t like that. I don’t like that.” So finally, no joke, three weeks before we had to picture lock — very close to when we need to decide what this movie is going to be called — I was like, “Tonight’s the night.” I went home, smoked a joint, and went, I’m going to read poetry, and it’s going to come to me. I started reading Langston Hughes and was writing stuff down. There was this poem, “Let America Be America Again.” That’s the one I started with, and I kept reading more and more and went, “OK. America. America what?”
Then I was thinking about publishing and what the themes of the film are. So the two that I came up with that night — one was Schools of Resentment. [American literary critic] Harold Bloom, this guy at Yale, wrote The Western Canon. It was this very influential book that stated these are the most important literary figures of our time. There was obviously a huge outcry, and the author used this term to capture all the backlash. He called it “school of resentment.” These are people who are more focused on politics and identity rather literary merit, was his idea. So it was that or American Fiction. The more that I started thinking about it the next day, Schools of Resentment is interesting, but it’s this reference that you don’t understand what it is if you don’t understand the Western Canon debate.
So finally, we landed on American Fiction. It was the one that most obviously people understand what this is a reference to, but then it has all these layers. Race is this fascinating thing, especially because on the one hand, we all know that the vast majority of scientists will tell you it’s made up. Race is not a real thing. On a molecular level, we’re all the same, in all the important ways and these differences are very, very minor, if meaningful at all. Despite that fact, our societies and institutions treat it as if it’s real — and racism is definitely real. So it’s existing in this weird place of being real and not. I think especially biracial, mixed-race people really understand this. It’s a real conversation that we’ve had with ourselves over and over and over. Race in America is also different than it is in Africa and Europe and Asia.
So, to me, it gets at the fun reference to books and publishing, but it’s more about this specific kind of like American fiction and how we believe in this thing both real and not real. How that leads us to run our institutions. How it leads us to think about what is real and not real about Black life, and how people play with and live with that reality. But basically, I came up with that title under duress. (Laughs.) You have to come up with a title, and I was just scrambling. But sometimes that’s when the best ideas come. Overall, it’s much better title than Fuck — though I would have had fun with that.
Monk straddles two worlds — a microaggressive professional life and an emotionally complicated personal life. You’re offering a vision of a world where Monk’s everything is shaped by whiteness and one where it’s not. Can you talk about creating that dual reality and what you were trying to say underneath Monk’s cynicism?
When I was having friends and family screenings and showing people the film, Black people came up to me and said, “It makes me sad, but it’s such a breath of fresh air.” You see a lot of people just living their lives and being normal among their families, with their friends, in a way that doesn’t somehow center whiteness. That is rare. I think that was one of the reasons I loved Moonlight. I don’t remember if there’s a single white person in that movie. It’s just about Black people. That’s why I think it being so accepted by the mainstream was this wildly revolutionary thing. Because normally “prestige Black films” are Green Book.
That montage in the film — New Jack City, when I was growing up, I loved it. I love 12 Years a Slave. I really like Django Unchained. I want to make clear that I’m not saying these movies should not exist. I think the more interesting question is: Why is it only these? Why is it always these? Why is it these to the omission of every other story that we could be telling you about Black people and Black lives? That to me is the more interesting question. The thing that was very, very, very important to me and the thing that Jeffrey and I talked about in our first meeting was that we didn’t want this film to be like the “talented tenth,” respectability politics, pull up your pants bullshit. We didn’t want this movie to feel like it was scolding people and artists for making the art that they wanted to make.
I don’t want to excoriate other Black artists or people making movies about Black people, especially in this country where people are trying to actively rewrite history; stories of race; of racism in America; the stories of slavery. People who want to completely change how we do history. I think these stories are important. I’m happy they exist. I think the more interesting question is not, why are these individual actors making this kind of work? And not just in this industry and Hollywood in general, but in all industries and all aspects of society. The more interesting question always, to me, isn’t why these individual actors are doing this this way. It’s about remembering that individual actors all exist within a system that exists within institutions.
So why are those people atop those institutions making these decisions, the consequences of which are these individual actors making the decisions they’re making? It’s always more interesting and more important to look at who’s a top these things instead of the people on the ground living their lives. That was the thing I wanted to explore. I never wanted to police Blackness or police art. It’s: Why are these stories the only ones that we’re really allowed to tell?
So it’s not about criticizing the current climate but understanding that things can come out and you don’t have to like them, but it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
And the thing is, if you don’t do that — I’m not saying it’s what the system wants, but I think one of the effects of that is it creates infighting among people who shouldn’t be infighting.
They should be supporting each other and saying: Good for you and I’m happy you made this work. Black artists attacking other Black artists doesn’t move anything forward, necessarily. The goal is that when Monk looks at that guy in the slave garb and they both nod, it’s that Monk’s learned this lesson. Monk looks and sees I fell victim to this as well.
Two lines in the film stood out: “There’s a lot of fakes in Hollywood” and “I haven’t been myself lately.” Through this film, you can see how creative industries would make a person feel outside of themselves. Have there been moments where surviving in a space where everybody wants something, but how you get it can feel questionable, affected you? Have you ever not felt like yourself?
Of course. I think if you live life, especially if you live a creative life, the number one quality is resilience — the ability to withstand rejection, heartache, suffering, and get up and do it again. I think this industry in particular is brutal. It’s brutalizing. I could be dispirited after a while. In the lexicon of the film, I have a Black friend who is a screenwriter, and he told me that the movie was really difficult for him to watch because he said, “I’ve writen those scripts because I knew that’s what people wanted and that’s how I could make my way.”
One of the most gratifying things that anybody said about the film that really meant a lot to me happened when we were your auditioning actors for Agnes. There was this women in her 70s who said before the audition when they asked: Do you have any questions for Cord? She said, “I don’t have a question, but I just want to tell you that I can’t believe they’re letting you make this movie.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, I’ve been working here for half a century and you’re talking about things that we’ve been talking about for just as long, if not longer.” To me it was this really lovely reminder that that woman is why I’m allowed to be here.
Movies like Bamboozled and Hollywood Shuffle — the latter is very much a spiritual predecessor to this film. I saw that movie when I was about 7 or 8, and it just blew my mind. It’s having the same conversations I was having. That movie was written by Robert Townsend and Keenan Ivory Wayans starring and directed by Townsend. I think that movie took them a year and a half or two years to film, because they would film on a Saturday and Sunday, then they’d go work to make more money. That’s how they made that movie — whenever they had money that they could scrape together. It was all on Robert Townsend credit cards. He maxed out 12 or 13 to do it. That movie that I loved so much when I was a kid was such a painstaking process for these guys who really believed in it.
That woman had been working for 50 years, probably getting called all the time to play slave roles or unwed mothers. Moments like that really solidify for me the thing I’m trying to remember in this entire process and that I can’t forget ever: Those people were resilient. They faced the same obstacles that I faced — them a little more because things have gotten a bit better. I’m just trying to be resilient so that hopefully, 40 years from now, somebody else can make a story that they wouldn’t be able to make in the year 2023.
Hopefully, what this film does is crack the door open just a little bit more for somebody who is struggling, who want to make and say what they want to say, and haven’t been able to. We made progress in that I didn’t shoot this film during the weekends over the course of a year and a half because there was finally people who were like: This is a conversation that we want to have, so we’re going to give you the money to make it. I’m here because that woman started 50 years ago was having these conversations and saying to people: “You shouldn’t be doing this. Why are you doing this?” That’s the real reason I’m here, and hopefully what the movie can accomplish.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
