“Race isn’t real, but racism is real,” Cord Jefferson told a packed auditorium at Sarajevo film festival this week. “To me, that tension is what American Fiction is about. It’s this idea that we’ve all bought into, this lie. It’s not real.”
Fresh from his Academy Awards triumph and huge critical acclaim for his debut feature. American Fiction, Jefferson was in Sarajevo to host a gala screening and masterclass interview. The wide-ranging public conversation covered his career, from music journalist to Emmy-winning TV writer and Oscar-winning film-maker, as well as his working methods, future projects and nuanced approach to addressing sensitive racial issues on screen.
During the masterclass, Jefferson recalled that when he first read the novel that American Fiction is based on, Percival Everett’s Erasure, he was floored by the autobiographical parallels. “No piece of art had ever spoken to me so deeply,” he said. “The more I read it, the more the Venn diagram of me and Monk, the main character, just started to become a circle. There’s so much of me in the film because, truly, I understood this character on a fundamental level. I’ve even started to look like Jeffrey Wright, which is a really scary thing.”
During his screenwriting career, Jefferson has even shared Monk’s frustration as an African-American author whose work is not deemed authentically “black” enough by his mostly white bosses. Indeed, he once received a note from a TV exec asking him make one of his black characters “blacker”. He responded by proposing a personal meeting so the exec could explain what specific racial changes he had in mind. Needless to say, that follow-up never happened. “No, because they knew there would be a civil rights lawsuit,” Jefferson laughed. “I wish it had happened now. I could have made a lot of money.”
The director also stressed the importance of striking the right balance between comedy and tragedy, irony and sincerity in satirical works like American Fiction. When tackling heavy subject matter such as racism, family conflict, bereavement and even slavery, he argues that films which adopt a purely grim tone are simplistic and insulting.
“When I see a movie that just has slaves in absolute, abject misery, unable to find any happiness, that does a disservice to the people who went through those things,” he said. “It makes them seem feeble, it takes away the reality that they were strong people who found ways to survive and found ways to enjoy life. So that was really important to me in making this movie. Yeah, it’s about race and racism, but I also didn’t want to pretend that that ruins my life. You know, it certainly makes my life harder at some points. But I also found lots of ways to enjoy myself and laugh and celebrate.”
Jefferson also dropped a few clues in Sarajevo about his planned follow-up projects to American Fiction, including a contemporary western. “It’s about two brothers who travel throughout the American Southwest looking for their missing third brother,” he said. “It’s got a lot more action than American Fiction, there are twists and turns, it’s kind of noir-ish. So it’s a very different kind of movie from American Fiction while still having some of the same thematic elements.”
As reference points, Jefferson cited Anthony Mann’s iconic run of westerns with James Stewart, but also the Coens classic No Country for Old Men (2007) and the Taylor Sheridan-penned Hell or High Water (2016). Significantly, all films in which landscape is a huge presence, more like an additional main character in the drama.
“I’m from Arizona,” Jefferson explained. “I’ve always thought that it has such unique beauty. Like, there’s nowhere in the world that looks like that. It has these big, weird saguaro cactuses everywhere. You have this dry desert, but there’s also these big mountains everywhere. And the sunsets are incredible. It’s just this tableau that you don’t really get a lot of places. And I was like, why don’t I set something there?”
If the stars align, Jefferson hopes to shoot his western next year. Meanwhile, he is also working on an erotic thriller screenplay, the kind that dominated Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, a once-proud genre he feels has been unfairly forgotten.
“I’d never seen Fatal Attraction until last year,” Jefferson told the Sarajevo audience, “and it kind of blew me away how good it was. I think Adrian Lyne is a genius. Then I started rewatching Indecent Proposal, and Single White Female, and Basic Instinct, all these erotic thrillers in the canon. And I was like: why don’t we make movies about this any more? This stuff is really great. These really big genres that I grew up loving have just kind of fallen by the wayside.”
Listen to the Cinephile podcast on ‘American Fiction’:
