‘American Fiction’ Writer-Director Cord Jefferson Reveals the Key to a Good Adaptation

The only way is up for writer-turned-director Cord Jefferson; the Watchmen writer made the feature directorial debut of a lifetime with American Fiction, the Jeffrey Wright-led dramedy that’s been making quite the case for Oscars glory since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film hit TIFF in September and has already scooped up Best Picture nomination honors from the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, it stars Wright as disgruntled novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose frustration with the stereotype-laden state of Black-centric entertainment leads him to pen an outrageously offensive novel under a pen name as a joke—a plan that quickly backfires when the novel receives overwhelming critical praise and thrusts Monk into the spotlight.

Making a film adaptation of anything usually means playing with a bit of fire, and American Fiction is no exception. Luckily, this isn’t Jefferson’s first rodeo, and in a recent interview with Collider, the filmmaker divulged the secret to making a great adaptation—namely, the faithfulness towards the inherent subtext, rather than the more tangible elements:

“The key to a good adaptation, and one that doesn’t feel bloodless, is keeping the spirit and the essence and the feeling of the original text alive. So to me, although there’s some big departures from the novel that we take in the movie, what I try to do is keep the spirit of the novel alive and keep Percival’s original ideas alive.”

He would later pass on a key mindset he held onto while dreaming up American Fiction, one that he not only owes to his work on Watchmen, but one that arguably separates a good movie from a magnificent one:

“I couldn’t make a movie that felt like, ‘Here’s the moral lesson that you take from this, and here’s the good guys and here’s the bad guys.’ It felt like my responsibility was to make a movie that gave you some scenarios and gave you some interesting characters and then allowed you to walk away and sort of feel about it how you want to feel about it. So that to me was one of the main lessons that I took from Watchmen.”

And a magnificent movie is certainly one of the better ways to describe American Fiction. It remains to be seen whether Jefferson’s debut will go the full distance and collect that final statuette, but the budding filmmaker already has more than enough to be proud of as is, and if he keeps honoring the creative values that made American Fiction what it is, a remarkably fruitful film career is on the horizon.

American Fiction is now playing in theaters.

(featured image: Amazon MGM Studios)