The filmmaker spoke about adapting the themes of Percival Everett’s ‘Erasure,’ how he landed on the film’s title and getting to deliver a joke about white people from the Hamptons, while screening in the Hamptons.
This story contains spoilers.
Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, an author and professor who’s increasingly frustrated with the suffocating, micro aggressive treatment of his work and his Blackness amid the rise of a fellow writer’s success.
“I did think about how it was going to play here,” Jefferson says. “That was an ad lib from Jeffrey. That line was not in the script. Jeffrey Wright was just saying stuff, and it was an ad lib that we kept in because I thought it was funny.
That meta-moment feels fitting for a film that 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 Fest, Jefferson talked 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 in American Fiction; and using his satire to crack “the door open just a little bit more” for other Black artists.
I know what comedian you’re referencing, who’s a friend of mine. Hasan Minhajwas at a screening of this film in New York. It’s important and worthy conversation, and one that we’re going to have here very soon, 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 two hours.
The term “American fiction”
When I sent out the script, the working title of the movie was Fuck, and when you’ve seen the film, you understand why. 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.
Google ‘Fuck Movie’
The 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?
Then I was thinking about publishing and what the themes of the film are. The two that I came up with, 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 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. 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.
It gets at the fun reference to books and publishing, but it’s more about this specific kind of 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. 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 aggressive professional life and emotionally complicated personal life
Normally “prestige Black films” are like 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’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
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. It’s about remembering that individual actors all exist within a system that exists within institutions.
It’s not about criticizing the current climate?
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
The goal is that when Monk looks at that guy in the slave garb and they both nod, Monk’s learned this lesson. Monk looks and sees I fell victim to this as well.
Two lines stood out: “There’s a lot of fakes in Hollywood” and “I haven’t been myself lately”
I think 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: “I can’t believe they’re letting you make this movie.”
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 a spiritual predecessor to this film. I saw that movie when I was about 7 or 8, and it just blew my mind.
Hollywood Shuffle was written and directed by Robert Townsend
That movie took them a year and a half or two years to film, because they would film on 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 when I was a kid was such a painstaking process for these guys who believed in it.
Hopefully, this film will crack the door open just a little bit more for somebody who is struggling, who want to 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 were 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.
