[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," writer, director Cord Jefferson shares his experience making Academy Award-winning film, "American Fiction," the witty satire and heartfelt family drama.

Jefferson delves into the process of adapting source material and successfully marrying drama and comedy in one film.

- I dunno if you've ever had this experience, but it felt like somebody had written a book specifically for me.

Like somebody sat down to write Cord Jefferson a present, and it was like all of these professional themes about sort of like what it means to be an artist of color and what people will allow you to write and won't allow you to write.

No piece of art had ever resonated with me so, so deeply.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] - Wow, so many of you.

[audience cheering] Cord Jefferson, everybody.

- Hello.

[audience cheering] Thank you so much.

- I would love to just kind of jump into the beginning of your process of this film, is based on a novel from about 20 years ago, "Erasure" by Percival Everett.

- Yeah.

- What was it about the book that you were originally attracted to and how did you come across the book and like, kind of what was that journey for starting the adaptation process?

- I had had a miserable 2020.

I think we all had a miserable 2020, but mine, I had also had a big professional failure that year and so I sort of was down in the dumps in December of 2020 and I was reading this book review for this novel called "Interior Chinatown."

And in the review, it said that the novel had a satire reminiscent of Percival Everett's "Erasure," which I had never heard of.

And so I went out and bought "Erasure" and it was one of these, you know, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but it felt like somebody had written a book specifically for me.

Like somebody sat down to write Cord Jefferson a present.

And it was like all of these sort of like professional themes about sort of like what it means to be an artist of color and what sort of like people will allow you to write and won't allow you to write, resonated with me.

But also, you know, there was a bunch of weird overlaps with my personal life.

I have two siblings.

We sort of like have a push and pull relationship over the years.

We have an overbearing father figure that looms large in our life.

My mother died of cancer eight years ago and her sort of like the responsibility for her care fell to one of my older siblings who was living in our hometown while my other brother and I were sort of like off gallivanting around the world.

And then I moved home for about a month when my mother was in hospice care to take care of my mother.

It was just, there was just like sign after sign that it felt like this is for you, this is for you, this is for you.

It just felt so, no piece of art had ever resonated with me so, so deeply.

And so like 20 pages into it, I was like, maybe I should try to adapt this into a script, and 50 pages into it, I thought maybe I wanna direct it.

And then I started reading the character of Monk in Jeffrey Wright's voice.

Like that's how early I started thinking of Jeffrey as I started reading the book, imagining him, - Hello?

- I be standing outside in the night, a police chopper go by and shine some lights in some backyards and I think shine that light on me.

[beep] Shine me some [beep] light so I can see where the [beep] I be at.

Are you serious?

- You'll notice I didn't put my name on it.

- Yes, Stagg R. Leigh, I did notice that.

Well done, but I still can't send this out.

- You said you wanted Black stuff.

What's Blacker than that?

It's got deadbeat dads, rappers, crack, and he gets killed by a cop in the end.

I mean that's Black, right?

- I see what you're doing.

- Good, because it's not subtle.

I mean, how's that book so different than some of the other garbage they put out?

- That's not the point.

- Well, it's my point.

Look at what they publish.

Look at what they expect us to write.

I'm sick of it.

- And so I just, I called my manager as soon as I was done, and I said, you know, "I think that I've found like something that I wanna try to direct."

And then I just went and wrote it in about four months and we sold it in May, and then we're here now.

- And that's something that I think is really special about the film is that it all, it doesn't just provide this critique of the literary world.

You also toss in this critique of blockbusters and major motion pictures and especially with Adam Brody's character.

And so you really do pack a lot in here throwing in all these ideas and voices about how we approach storytelling and how we approach art and also the consuming of art and what does that mean for the people behind it that we often don't see.

- Stag, I presume?

- That's me.

- Hey, I'm Wiley.

Nice to meet you brother.

[soft music] Sorry about the bougie restaurant.

My assistant picked it.

We can go somewhere else if you're uncomfortable.

- This is fine.

- Okay.

What are you drinking?

- I'll have a Chenin blanc.

[Waitress] All right.

- You're driest.

- [laughing] - What's funny?

- It's just a strange order for a guy like you.

- Why is that?

- Well, you don't see many convicts drinking white wine.

- You know many convicts?

- You'd be surprised.

I spent a month in the joint myself.

With some interstate commerce [beep].

It was a short stay, but I'll tell you what, that experience grounded me.

The people I met in there allowed me to see a whole world of underrepresented stories from underrepresented storytellers.

- I'd love to hear how you went about adapting those specific moments and workshopping them into the script.

- There's a ton of me in this and one of the parts of me that's in this is, is, you know, my sort of like career problems and sort of like what I've faced in this industry and in journalism before, like, you know.

I worked in journalism for about eight or nine years before I started working in film and TV.

And one of the things that I started to dislike about it toward the end of my career is that essentially people were coming up to me and going like, do you wanna write about Trayvon Martin getting killed?

Or do you wanna write about Mike Brown getting killed?

Do you wanna write about Breonna Taylor getting killed?

Do you wanna write about this racist thing that somebody said about Barack Obama?

And it started to feel like it was just like, my job was just this revolving door of misery and sort of like, you are, the thing we're most interested in is sort of like what you can say about the traumatic experiences that Black people go through.

And so it started to feel gross and I was like, you know, I don't really like to do this anymore.

I wrote an article called the Racism Beat about it back in 2014.

And so when I started working in film and TV, I was thrilled because it was like finally, you know, no restrictions.

The rules are gone.

Like we can just do whatever we want.

We can write about any fictional universe, any fictional person, like we can, we can create everything that we want to create.

And so I was in it and then people started coming up to me and they were like, do you wanna write about this slave?

Do you wanna write about this gang member?

Do you wanna write about this crack dealer?

And it was like, oh, even in the world of fantasy, even in the world where there are no restrictions as to what we can say and do and like experience, people still had this like intensely limited perspective on what Black life could look like and sort of like what it meant to be a Black person.

Like I remember having notes meetings from, you know, executives where I would get a note that a character needed to be blacker.

And it's like, what does that mean to be Black?

Like what does it mean for a character to be blacker?

Like explain that to me.

And then of course nobody would ever explain it to me because they knew they would sound like an [bleep] if they tried to explain it to me.

It's frustrating from a, from a creative standpoint, obviously.

It's like you hate that there's just limits on what people think you can and can't do.

And it's frustrating from a viewing standpoint, but more than that, it's like, that is pain.

It's a painful experience because just as a human being on a personal level, because what the tacit, sort of the tacit thing that's being said there is like, why would we let you write a rom-com?

You know, like what do you know about romance?

What do you know about love?

You know, like isn't isn't your experience of love so vastly different from mine?

Like why would we let you do that?

You know, it's this inability to see Black people as like fully realized, nuanced, complex, layered human beings whose lives have as much breadth and depth as anybody.

And it's this idea almost that we are defined by the bad things that happen to us, you know?

And like we are not defined by the bad things that happened to us.

In fact, like, like I've had bad experiences with police officers in the past.

Absolutely.

But it doesn't happen every day.

Doesn't even happen every year.

And like even when it does happen, that's the least interesting thing that happens to me that day.

And so this idea that like, these are the only stories we have to tell, it's just so limiting and reductive.

[typewriter ding] - You have all these different relationships in here that stand in contrast to everything that, kinda Monk's doing where he's caught up in his own world.

How did you kind of walk that tightrope?

- Life is neither comedy nor drama.

Life is frequently those same things, like within hours of each other.

And so, you know, it was interesting when we were doing friends and family screenings when we were still in post and showing it to people, sort of the, some people would come in and say that they thought they saw comedy, other people came in and thought that they saw drama.

Like it it wasn't sort of like immediately defined.

And I liked that.

I sort of liked that.

That to me sort of meant that what we were trying to do was working.

I think that, you know, it never felt like a tightrope to me actually.

It just sort of like felt really natural because in the worst moments of my life, I've always, you know, I think that one of the things that I think is beautiful about the Black community that I think we share with Jewish people and Latino people and Queer people and all people actually, it's just is that even in our worst moments and sort of like, despite the fact that like we've, we've been through so much and so much trauma and violence and brutality that like, we've still found ways to like make music and fall in love and have children and make art and celebrate and like find joy and tell jokes, like that is beautiful.

That's what's beautiful about human beings is our resilience.

[Stagg] If you are reading this, it's because, I, Lisa Magical Ellison, have died.

[soft music] Obviously this is not ideal, but I guess it had to happen at some point.

Hopefully I, [waves crashing] hopefully I expired under the heaving thrusts of a sweaty Idris Elba or perhaps in a less dignified manner, under the heaving thrusts of a sweaty Russell Crowe.

Irrespective of how I went, I ask that those closest to me not mourn all that much.

I lived a life that made me proud.

I-I was loved and I loved in return.

- I know that racism is a serious subject and identity and class and sexuality.

Like I understand that these are serious and so serious that sometimes they have fatal consequences, but I don't think that, I don't think that we need to be self serious about these things all the time.

And that in fact, I think that like, it does a disservice to the people who came before us and sort of were resilient and did sort of like deal with all the trauma that they dealt with and still carried on because, and persevered because they felt that there was a reason to persevere.

I think that sort of like, to not acknowledge that those people were celebrating and falling in love and laughing despite the hardship.

Like that to me is, that to me is sort of an actual sort of like, that's when you actually lose the plot.

So for me, I don't, I could never envision making this movie and being super self serious about it or super slapstick like, you know, on the other hand, I didn't wanna, I always said that I wanted to sort of like dabble in satire, but not farce.

And I think that one of the things that, you know, just from a technical level that that the family story helps to helps with is it grounds the, it grounds the sort of like satirical moments, so that it doesn't collapse under the weight of the comedy.

'Cause I also didn't want it to become like silly.

[typewriter ding] - One of my favorite moments is when after Monk gets his mother's diagnosis, you know, he's processing that and he has that breakthrough moment when he first starts typing from "My Pathology" and then he starts to see, he starts to visualize hearing Keith David there.

[police sirens wailing] - Hey young [beep] - Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't shoot me partner.

Come on, huh?

Van Go.

That you?

- Yeah, it's me [bleep], [bleep] but you drunk mother [bleep].

- Where are you running to?

Just leave me alone, man.

- Hey, how your mama?

- What'd you say?

- I said, how your mama?

- And I think it's such a real unique way to really get into his head and visualize what he's processing.

How did you land on that moment and decide to present it that way?

- In the novel, "Erasure," the entirety of my pathology is in the middle of that book.

So like, there's like 11 chapters of that book dedicated to that fake novel.

So you get like the beginning, middle, and end of that entire journey, you get the entire story.

And so it's sort of like that has a real gravity and weight when you're reading the book and it, you know, but the problem is, is like, that's not cinematic.

I knew that I didn't want a scene of like, that's classic scene of like some writer typing furiously and like reaching for the coffee and like they're typing more and you show the words appearing on screen.

It just felt like that doesn't really have the weight that you wanted for what this, you really wanted to like explain what it was that Monk was working on.

So we started discussing sort of like ways to make it more cinematic and it felt like, you know, bringing, their names are Van Go and Willie the Wonker.

So bringing Van Go and Willy the Wonker, that's like an actual scene in the book My Pathology in "Erasure," bringing those characters sort of like into the room sort of felt just far more stimulating and cinematic and you know, meta and funny than, than no way, than just showing somebody typing.

I initially thought that it might be, we were like, maybe we should put it in an alleyway 'cause that, because that scene's supposed to take place in an alley and it was like maybe we cut and then Monk's in an alley and watching this all play out, but we did not have enough money to do that and so we just kept it in his office.

But I think that it's great.

I loved it in his office and I think that it's actually more effective that way.

Another sort of like technical reason for that is that, you know, we knew that we wanted to have the ending that we have and we didn't sort of like seeding in some of that seriality and that meta textual thing early in the film helped it so it didn't like, so the ending doesn't feel like such a yank where it would be like the entire movie's grounded, grounded, grounded, grounded.

And then you get to the end and all of a sudden, it's like meta and weird and like people would be like, wait a minute, that's not the vocabulary of the movie.

So it also sort of like helped with that is just seeding that in a little bit early so that when you get to the end, it feels like you've been at least a little bit primed for the ending.

[typewriter dings] One of the main problems with this industry and you know, as I said earlier, it is so risk averse, because it's so risk averse.

It's just constantly looking to replicate what's worked before.

And so what's worked before is slave movies and civil rights movies and gang movies and drug addict movies and inner city violence movies and sort of police killing Black people movies, like that that has a proven track record.

You know, movies like this don't necessarily have a proven track record.

And so, you know, I don't, I don't anticipate it's going to go away because I don't think that, you know, I think that those movies are always going to be successful.

And something that I want to make clear is that like, I love "12 Years a Slave."

I think "12 Years a Slave" is a very good movie.

I love, there's that scene of Chris Rock smoking crack in "New Jack City," like I love, "New Jack City," was like one of my favorite movies growing up.

I love that movie.

I love "Boyz N the Hood."

Like, I'm not saying that these movies shouldn't exist, particularly in a country in which sort of, you have people actively trying to ban books from schools and say that we need to like teach that slavery had like benefits and they could learn skills.

My only question is why do these exist to the omission of every single other story about Black people when it comes to quote unquote like prestige cinema?

You know, why is that the only story that we can tell?

So not like we shouldn't tell those.

It's just like, man, life is big and they're sort of like, and nowadays in the United States of America, the Black experience includes slavery, of course, but it also includes being the [bleep] president of the United States.

You know what I mean?

And like everything in between that and so, and so I just, so to me it's just like make those movies.

[typewriter dings] When I was reading the book "Erasure," I was very, very excited for that scene when Monk is gonna meet Centara.

I was so excited for that and then it never came.

That scene is not in the book.

So I knew that when I adapted it, I knew that that was like one of the first things that I wanted to put in.

- Black people rapping, Black people as slaves, Black people murdered by the police, whole soaring narratives about Black folks in dire circumstances who still manage to maintain their dignity before they die.

I mean, I'm not saying these things aren't real, but we're also more than this.

And it's like so many writers like you can't envision us without some white boot on our necks.

- Do you get angry at Brett Easton Ellis or Charles Bukowski for writing about the downtrodden?

Or is your ire strictly reserved for Black women?

- Yeah, nobody reads Bukowski thinking his is the definitive white experience, but people, white people read your book and confine us to it.

They think that we're all like that.

- Then it sounds like your issue is with white people, Monk, not me.

- Well, maybe, but I also think that I see the unrealized potential of Black people in this country.

- Potential is what people see when they think what's in front of them isn't good enough.

- Something that Jeffrey and I both talked about early on in the process of working on the film was that neither of us wanted to feel like this was a movie about like respectability politics in the Black community.

I wanted to give voice to Centara.

So I wrote that scene and I don't even really know who I agree with.

I really, that to me is the fun thing about it is like, it changes with the day.

But the thing that's sort of like, I feel like that scene highlights for me and sort of like is, and I think that sort of like, you know, it's fun to see Monk stopped in his tracks, right?

Sort of like, this is a guy who argues with everybody and it's difficult for him to sort of like for you to render him speechless.

And I think that what renders Monk speechless and the thing that I'm sort of more interested in and especially on a creative level is that, and something that I feel like I learned from writing that scene is that, you know, this idea that sort of like you need to be critical of other artists and sort of like other people's work is, it's like small fries down here, like small potatoes, right?

Like the bigger more important question is like, is to understand that like, all of us at the ground level here are working within systems and institutions that were established like centuries before we were around, right?

And so the thing to keep in mind, I think, is that for me it was important to highlight and understand that like Centara is working within like a system.

Monk's working within a system.

Like these are people who are, they have different ideologies, but they're working within the same system and the confines of the same system.

And the way that Centara tries to navigate that system is different from the way Monk tries to navigate that system.

But it doesn't make it wrong and it doesn't make it bad.

It just makes it sort of like her way.

And so I never wanted this movie to feel like it was like scolding anybody or finger wagging anybody and saying your art's bad art and this art is good art.

[typewriter dings] - Yeah, let's give him a hand.

It's quite the journey.

- My journey has been long.

Like I'm 41, you know.

I feel, I finally feel like I found the thing that I want to do for the rest of my life.

And I'm 41.

I would say the first thing to keep in mind is just like, take your time.

You know, there is, we're not athletes where sort of like, our bodies are gonna be done by the time we're 32.

You know, like you have your whole life ahead of you and in fact, like you'll probably get smarter and better at what you do and you'll have more experiences and become wiser.

And so, you know, the good thing about being a writer is that you just need a pencil and a paper in your brain.

You know what I mean?

And that's, and you can write something.

And so I think that there was, there was part of me that was like, I also think that we have a tendency as creative people to like judge ourselves against like our contemporaries.

And it's difficult, you know, to see people who are like 21 and doing the thing that you want to be doing, you know, that can be frustrating and painful.

But that can also sort of like inspire that divisiveness that I was talking about, about where you're like, well, their art's bad art.

How come they're allowed to make their bad art?

Like, believe me, I know that, that like, like when he says like, this will allow you to literally judge your other writers for once instead of just figuratively.

Like, that came from like a true place in my heart.

And so I think that, you know, the best thing that I can offer is like just keep making stuff.

Like, just keep making stuff over and over and over and over again.

And the good, especially sort of like if you're in this industry, if you're trying to write for entertainment, you know, you're going to get told no over and over and over and over again.

Like I said, like, you know, like 2020 was, I truly had, like I was like, they were talk, I was so close to making a TV show that they were talking about where we were gonna open our production office in New York.

They were like, yeah, we've got it.

Like it's gonna be here.

And then it just went away.

And I was devastated, as I said.

And you know, despite my devastation, I was like, you know what, let me just try to write this script because I feel creatively inspired by this book that I read and that decision changed my entire life.

You know, that decision led to this.

And so I think that like you have to be aware that like, people are gonna tell you no all the time, all the time.

Constantly, constantly sort of like rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection.

And you just have to keep, you have to find whatever motivates you to keep going.

That may be like your partner, that may be... religion and you just need to find inspiration to create stuff.

[typewriter dings] - You've been watching On Making American fiction on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about "On Story" and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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