David Remnick: When a director's first feature film is nominated for the big award at the Oscars, best picture, that's always something to take note of. That is certainly the case with the movie American Fiction, which is written and directed by Cord Jefferson. It was nominated for four other Oscars as well. Before making the film, Cord Jefferson had a real career as a TV writer, early on with Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show on Comedy Central. Then working on The Good Place and Succession and many more. He began though, as a journalist. He contributed to The Root, The New York Times magazine, and particularly Gawker, and that's how he got to know The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb.

Jelani Cobb: Cord Jefferson and I met almost 15 years ago when we were both part of a listserv for Black writers. We've kept in touch over the years encouraging each other's work and keeping tabs on what we were up to. In 2019, he was a writer for Watchmen, which was one of my all-time favorite television shows. Even though I've known him for many years, I've kept a much closer watch on what he's doing professionally and artistically since then. This year, his directorial debut American Fiction was released, and the film was garnered a great deal of attention and praise.

David Remnick: American Fiction is based on a novel called Erasure, which is about a writer whose none too successful, and his name is Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. He's beyond frustrated with the publishing world, so he turns out a really trashy novel under a pseudonym, a deliberately offensive book full of the stereotypes that are euphemistically described as urban. That book becomes a literary sensation.

Female Speaker 1: Yes. Well, first of all, let me just say that all of us here at Thomson Watt are thrilled with my pathology. It is about as perfect a book as I have seen in a long, long while. Mr. Elli, is this based on your actual life?

Jeffrey Wright: Yes. You think some bitch ass college boy can come up with that shit?

Female Speaker 1: No, no. No, I don't.

David Remnick: Jeffrey Wright plays the writer Monk Ellison, and here is Jelani Cobb talking with the director, Cord Jefferson.

Jelani Cobb: The interesting thing I thought about the Ellison family is that they are affluent, educated, well educated, and distinguished and at the same time dysfunctional, troubled, not an ideal family. They have problems, but none of which require a social worker.

Cord Jefferson: Yes. Exactly.

Jelani Cobb: They have a different strand of difficulty. I thought that was really well represented in the line where Monk says that his life is to paraphrase, messed up, just not in the ways that people think. You mentioned this being something that Black creatives deal with. Monk is a character who very much feels that he's been constrained and has really been told who he is or at least who he is supposed to be based on these presumptions of what and who Black people are. Is that something you've related to in your own creative journey?

Cord Jefferson: Absolutely, absolutely. It started when I was a journalist. One of the last pieces of journalism that I wrote was called The Racism Beat. It was how I had reached this point in my journalistic career when it was every week I was being asked to write about the latest unarmed Black person murdered by the police, or a trigger-happy nervous neighbor, or just some other white person. Or I was asked to write about somebody saying something racist about President Obama.

Well, it felt spiritually degrading just to be writing about this misery and pain over and over. More than that, it felt like what to write about Mike Brown that you didn't already write about Trayvon Martin, or what to write about Breonna Taylor that you didn't already write about Mike Brown. You feel like you're just writing stuff that is A, emotionally tough, but also you're writing stuff that seems like it's falling on deaf ears sometimes. You're just like, "Is anybody even paying attention to what I'm saying?"

When I got into film and television it was incredibly exciting because it felt like finally, we are not beholden to any realities of the world. We can write about Black people doing anything. We can write about Black people living in fantastical other realms, or you can write about Black people in space or in an underworld. Whatever you want to write about you can write about because we are not tasked with representing the realities of the world.

I was surprised to find, lo and behold, that it wasn't long before people were coming to me and saying, "Do you want to write a movie about an unarmed Black person being killed by the police? Do you want to write a movie about drug dealers? Do you want to write a movie about slaves?" It felt like, oh, even here, even in this world of fiction and fantasy, there's still a rigid perspective as to what Black life looks like and to what Black stories are.

Jelani Cobb: The primacy of suffering, I think, what I'm saying.

Cord Jefferson: Exactly, exactly. It's specific kind of suffering, to your point when you talked about the problems that the Ellisons have. The Ellisons are suffering. There is tragedy in their lives, but it's just not the same rote suffering that people expect. It's just like, well, wait a minute, where's the conversation about food stamps, or where's the dangerous interaction with the police officer? It's like all of these things that we've come to expect are not there, but it doesn't mean that they're not suffering. It just means that it's a different kind of suffering and that there's a diversity in their suffering, just as there's a diversity in the humanity of Blackness.

I think that to me it was something that I really could not-- I guess I wasn't surprised by, but it was something that I felt pained by. Three months before I found Erasure, I got a note back on a script from an executive through an emissary, not from the executive. I got a note back from an executive that said, "We want you to make this character Blacker." I said to the emissary, I said, "I will indulge that note if whoever gave it to you will sit in front of me and tell me what it means to be Blacker. Tell me how to make the character Blacker, and I will have that conversation." Of course, that note went away because the person was terrified to have that conversation.

Jelani Cobb: Invariably, I guess the idea of that was going to be more of particular types of suffering or defamation.

Cord Jefferson: Exactly.

Jelani Cobb: I think, for me, and I've written a whole lot of those stories myself, it's never been simply telling that story, I think is the idea of telling that story to the exclusion of telling other stories which becomes the biggest-

Cord Jefferson: Exactly. That, to me, especially nowadays, I think that those stories are more important than ever. I think that in a country that's actively trying to erase slavery as it was from children's textbooks, I think that it's very important to remind people over and over again that this happened in the reality of what it looked like. Black history in America now includes slavery, and it includes being the president of the United States. Between those two polls, there are many, many other stories that have yet to be told.

Jelani Cobb: The 40 million variations on the theme. Let me ask you, what drew you to this novel. Of all the kind of projects that you could have taken on, what were the themes in Erasure that felt familiar to you?

Cord Jefferson: Well, Erasure is this very interesting juxtaposition of two stories, which is it is Monk the protagonist. It's his professional life and his professional ambition, which is simply to just to write the kind of novels that he's interested in writing many of which are contemporary adaptations of classical Greek literature and classical Greek theater. You have him focused on trying to write the work that he wants to write and being told that it's not Black enough, essentially. Then that story is juxtaposed with what's going on in his personal life, but it's juxtaposed with this more complex view of Black life.

It's like his life and his family are what he wants to see in the world. It's this two-handed story of like here's the problem and here's a solution to the problem, and here's what we want to in the same novel. To me, I was incredibly attracted to the professional themes and the satirical themes, and about the limitations that the world puts on Black creatives and Black art. The expectations that the world puts on Black art. Also on top of that, I was really drawn to the family stuff. My mother didn't have Alzheimer's, but my mother died of cancer eight years ago.

Like Monk in the book, I moved home to help take care of my mother as she suffered. I have two siblings, like Monk has two siblings in the novel. We have a push-and-pull relationship the way that the siblings in the novel did, where sometimes we're closer, sometimes we're farther apart. Like the father in the book, we have a very overbearing father figure who we lived underneath his very, very high expectations, and sometimes I would say impossibly high expectations. The more that I read, it started to feel like the Venn diagram of Monk's life and my life. All these overlaps to the point that it started to feel a little eerie as I read.

Jelani Cobb: Why did you choose to call the film American Fiction as opposed to Erasure?

Cord Jefferson: A, because we were worried about what the people would confuse it with Erasure, that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the '90s. In the world of all the reboots and remakes, we were like, well, we don't want anybody thinking like, "Oh, yes, I remember that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't want to see that." That was one of the reasons. The second reason was that Erasure is a great title, but I think that you need something that feels a little bit splashier and catchier for films.

Unfortunately, I just think that more self-explanatory than I guess Erasure was. The two final titles when it really came down to choose the two that I was most excited about were the Western Canon and American Fiction. Everybody thought the Western Cannon was a little too literary. It was too cutesy by half, and so American Fiction was the one idea that I came in and everybody rallied around that one pretty quickly.

Jelani Cobb: You have an astounding cast for this film and it's kind of an embarrassment of riches. You have in this cast, Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, and the great Leslie Uggams, just to name a few of the people. Can you tell me about how that cast came together? I know that Jeffrey Wright was your first choice for Monk.

Cord Jefferson: Yes. I started reading the novel with Jeffrey's voice in my head. That's how early I started thinking of him for the character. I thought that our luck was over. Once we got Jeffrey, I thought, well, we got our first choice, so everything else is going to be our sixth, seventh choice. Then we started getting word like, actually Issa Rae said, "Yes," Sterling K. Brown said, "Yes," Erika Alexander said, "Yes." Everybody was very excited to work with Jeffrey. Jeffrey legitimized the movie in a very real way. It was no longer just a good script and director who had never directed anything before, it was Jeffrey Wright's involved, and that was like caused people's ears to perk up a little bit.

Speaker 1: Here you go.

Jeffrey Wright: Wait a minute, why are these books here?

Ryan Richard Doyle: I'm not sure. I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is Black.

Jeffrey Wright: That's me-- Ellison. He is me and he and I are Black.

Ryan Richard Doyle: Oh, bingo.

Jeffrey Wright: No bingo, Ned. These books have nothing to do with African American studies. They're just literature. The blackest thing about this one is the ink.

Ryan Richard Doyle: I don't decide what sections the books go in and no one here does. That's how chain stores work.

Ryan Richard Doyle: Right, Ned, you don't make the rules.

Cord Jefferson: Then what they told me, a lot of them was that it was the script and it was the characters. John Ortiz, who's wonderful-

Jelani Cobb: Who was amazing in the film, right?

Cord Jefferson: Yes. He's wonderful as Arthur who plays Monk's Agent. He told me that he'd read the script, and then he called his agent and he said, "Wait a minute, what part do they want me to play?" His agent said, "They want you to play Arthur, the book agent." He was like, "They want me to be the book agent?" He said it was the first time that somebody had just come to me and said like, "We just want you to be a guy, we don't want you to talk anything about, it's nothing about being Puerto Rican. It's nothing about being raised in the projects in Brooklyn or whatever or your tragic childhood."

It's just like, "Yes, you're Puerto Rican, but you're just a guy that's not coming up."

We talk about it all the time, Black actors are just not utilized in the ways that they could be, and not Black actors of color are not utilized in the ways that they should be. We talk about it every year, they're underrepresented, they're underutilized, they're asked to play the same parts over and over and over again. I say to everybody look at what happens when you give these characters real roles. Look at the kind of actors you can get for these parts.

David Remnick: The writer and director Cord Jefferson who made the film, American Fiction. He's talking with Jelani Cobb and their conversation continues in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll return now to a conversation with Cord Jefferson. He's the writer and director of American Fiction, which was just nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Jefferson is speaking today with Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Jelani Cobb: You know You mentioned Erika Alexander who is an amazing actress. There's a particular scene in the film where Monk realizes that she is reading a novel that he has anonymously written. He has this really incredible reaction. I wondered what you were thinking about as you directed that scene, how that came together because it really is a striking confrontation on multiple levels between Monk and Coraline, who is Erika Alexander's character.

Cord Jefferson: Monk is a very pugnacious guy. From the very beginning of the movie he's arguing with his students, his colleagues, his family. This is a guy who steamrolls everybody in his life. He's arrogant, he's frustrated, and he is angry because he is so frustrated and wounded. Because up until that part in the film, Monk very frequently just gets away with yelling at people and being arrogant and rude. I knew in that scene I wanted somebody who could really stand up to him and be formidable in the way that he's formidable. Erika Alexander was one of the reasons why I wanted her for the role was because she is a formidable woman.

A, she's age-appropriate, I didn't want to do the Hollywood thing where we're getting women in their '20s and '30s for a guy in his '50s. She's somebody who has lived experience, who's smart, who's intelligent, and who can serve as the other side of this argument too, which is that I didn't want it to be like respectability politics, pull up your pants movie. That sort of this is good Black art and this is bad Black art. I think that showing somebody in that scene also who is smart, who's accomplished, who's a lawyer, a professional person.

The way that Monk is a professional person who we understand has a good rapport with Monk. Who likes this book, this book that Monk hates, who sees value in this book that Monk hates, who sees it as being art when Monk sees it as being garbage? I think that to give voice to that was incredibly important for the movie to not feel like it was scolding certain kinds of blackness or scolding certain kinds of Black stories. Another scene that I think is incredibly important to the film and to that end is the scene where him and Sintara butt heads and discuss there.

Jelani Cobb: Sure. Certainly.

Cord Jefferson: They're like different ideological opinions.

Jelani Cobb: Yes, Sintara is the author of the novel that sends him on this spiral in the first place.

Cord Jefferson: Exactly. It also allows us to see what happens when Monk is not honest with the people in his life. Then how that facade and that dishonesty are leading him on this dangerous path toward a life that his father led, which is one of constant lying and constant hiding and ultimately a very, very tragic end.

Jelani Cobb: You mentioned tragic end. It's important to note in the course of this conversation that this film is a comedy, it's a satire. It is a tremendously [laughs] funny one.

Cord Jefferson: Thank you.

Jelani Cobb: One where I laughed throughout the movie. People in the audience at the screening where I saw laughed at it a lot. I had a really interesting conversation with a person who works in publishing who they laughed at it despite the fact that they thought they might've been the butt of the jokes themselves. [laughter] I'm curious about what goes into grappling with the weighty themes that we've been talking about for the past, however long and also presenting that in a way that makes people laugh.

Cord Jefferson: Despite the tanner of things in the year 2023 and 2024, I think that race is actually really, really a fertile target for laughter. On the one hand, race is not real. We've read enough and there's enough scientists who've told us enough to understand that race is a social construct that there is no basis for it in biology, and that we are kidding ourselves if we think that it's real at all.

That being said, race is also incredibly real in that we've constructed our institutions and our societies believing that it is real. On the one hand, race is not real and insignificant, and very real and incredibly important. Sometimes life or death depends on race. To me, that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy. I grew up in a household in which my dad played a lot of Richard Pryor vinyl, and I watched-

Jelani Cobb: Ditto. [chuckles]

Cord Jefferson: -Hollywood Shuffle over and over, and in which we watched Eddie Murphy and a lot of these great Paul Mooney.

Paul Mooney: [unintelligible 00:21:31] have you noticed you've been fighting back with earthquakes and the rest of the stuff it's fighting back. It don't eat. Don't worry about that, worry about people, each other. You can't worry about the animals and anything else, something with four legs and got teeth, it'll be fine. I blame it all on White people. I blame it on White people, I do, because you guys started out messing this stuff up, chopping down trees to build boats to go get Black folks. Now that the picnic is over, you want us to help you recycle. I'm not recycling a damn thing.

Cord Jefferson: These things in which people approach these subjects with a comedic lens was just part of my upbringing. I think that I saw that as being a way to diminish the power that it had over all of us and to mock it and mock the idea of it while also finding ways to laugh to keep from crying. You're just going to have to underline that and point it out to people and have them laugh at it. It also invites a lot of people into the party.

Jelani Cobb: You mentioned o, and elsewhere you've referred to that film as a spiritual predecessor to American Fiction. It's a cult classic by Robert Townsend, and it deals with the subject matter of stereotyping and how Black actors have to grapple with that.

Bobby Taylor: Really?

Jesse Wilson: Only an Uncle Tom would do this shit. They just lookin' for somebody to sell out.

Bobby Taylor: Sell out?

Jesse Wilson: The only role they gonna let us do is a slave, a butler, or some street hood or something. Don't sell out, brother. Don't be a butler or a slave.

Receptionist: Jesse Wilson? Jesse Wilson, you're next.

Jesse Wilson: That's me. Good luck, brotha.

Jelani Cobb: Were there particular themes or even scenes in American Fiction that were inspired by what you took from Hollywood Shuffle?

Cord Jefferson: I would say, I don't think necessarily scenes, but I think that one of the things that Hollywood Shuffle does so well is it never sacrifices commitment to character for comedy. What I mean by that is that it is a very, very funny movie. It's almost like sketch comedy at certain points, that's how much it becomes a comedy film. It gives you a real perspective into his family and to this emotional selfish choice that he's making between professional success and personal dignity. There's all these commitments and efforts to make you understand that this is a real person that I really felt was important when I wanted to make my movie.

For me, there is three pillars that were maintaining the spirit of Erasure. One was it needed to be funny because the book is incredibly funny. The second is that it needed to be metatextual in some ways like the book. I knew that that was important to the novel, so I wanted the movie to feel a little meta. Then the third was that it couldn't be didactic. The book takes great pains to never say, this is right or this is wrong. I needed to make a movie that didn't spoon-feed morality.

Jelani Cobb: Of course, he was writing that book, Erasure, in response to a lot of what he saw going on in the fiction world and [unintelligible 00:24:59] ideas. [laughs]

Cord Jefferson: Absolutely.

Jelani Cobb: It really is a meta situation.

Cord Jefferson: I'll tell you how meta it is, is that last week Percival got stopped in a coffee shop by somebody who thought he was Jeffrey Wright. [laughter]

Jelani Cobb: That was amazing.

Cord Jefferson: Yes.

Jelani Cobb: That's pretty amazing.

David Remnick: Cord Jefferson, the director of American Fiction which is based on a novel by Percival Everett. The film was nominated for five Oscars. Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the Dean of Columbia Journalism School.

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