Cord Jefferson, “American Fiction”
Jefferson was a journalist and then began writing for TV, comedies like Master of None and The Good Place and dramas like Succession and Watchmen.
What led you to adapt American Fiction?
CORD JEFFERSON I had a horrible 2020. Besides the COVID thing, I had a big professional failing: I came very close to getting a TV show on the air, and at the last minute it was killed. I was adrift, trying to figure out what my next project would be, and just by chance read a review for a novel called Interior Chinatown that said it was a satire reminiscent of Percival Everett’s Erasure.
So I went and read a synopsis of Erasure; it sounded interesting, so I bought it. Reading it, I had the feeling that it was written specifically for me. Twenty pages into it, I was like, “I might want to adapt this.” Fifty pages into it, I thought, “Maybe I want to direct this.” Then I started reading the novel in Jeffrey Wright’s voice. The themes — what it means to be a writer of color, and the restrictions people put on your life and the stories you can tell because of your identity — that was stuff I’d thought about since I was a journalist. It just resonated with me deeper than any piece of art before or since.
Succession
JEFFERSON I worked on Succession. I don’t know any white billionaires. But I think the reason that Succession works, and the reason why people love it so much, is that while most people don’t know anything about being white billionaires, they know what it’s like to have a sibling rivalry; to want to impress your father, who’s never given you his entire heart and soul; to have sexual hang-ups; to have drug addiction problems — all the stuff that makes human beings human.
Good Ending:
JEFFERSON A satisfying ending can make up for a lot of mistakes that come before it. When I was adapting Erasure, I knew I was going to have to make some pretty big changes in order to make it cinematic and a little less cynical than the book, but I always wanted to maintain the essence and spirit of what Percival wrote. I frequently write with no idea what the ending’s going to be. This was one of those instances, and I wrote an ending that I was not happy with, that I knew was going to have to change at some point. About a month out from preproduction, I was on a long drive and I had to talk about the ending with one of the producers. He called and said, “Try to write an ending that feels like a big swing, that feels as audacious as the rest of the film.” So I slept on it and then woke up and wrote the ending pretty quickly, in about 15 minutes. It’s a big departure from the ending of the book.
JEFFERSON Bed.
On what do you write?
JEFFERSON I literally sit in bed and type in Final Draft, a bit like Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka.
Favorite part of the writing process?
If you could have written one other script that became a film
JEFFERSON Network.
