Despite serving as an executive producer of “American Fiction,” filmmaker Rian Johnson still had a host of questions for writer and director Cord Jefferson about how he pulled off the magic trick of making a crowd-pleaser about some of the most divisive subject matter one could tackle.
In an IndieWire exclusive video of the pair’s conversation (check it out above), the first-time filmmaker turned current Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominee told the “Knives Out” helmer that the initial experiment of the film was asking, “What if we can make a movie about these polarizing things that’s really inviting to all different kinds of people?”
Jefferson said, “It’s wild to me now that there’s conservative movies and liberal movies, and we actually talk about them in those terms. ‘Well, this is for right wing audiences,’ and ‘Well, this is for left wing audiences.’” Though adapting Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure” meant making a film that’s about “race and racism and sexuality and identity and all of these things that are really dividing and polarizing people right now,” he said, Jefferson did not want “American Fiction” to feel like it was “just for people in New York and LA” or “just for people in Texas and Alabama.”
Ultimately, the goal was for the experience of watching the TIFF People’s Choice Award winner, starring Oscar nominees Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown, to feel like “this is going to invite you in, and maybe it’s something that you’re scared of, but you’re probably gonna find something in here that resonates with you,” said the director.
And Jefferson believes he has succeeded on that front. “We’ve shown it at the Hamptons Film Festival. We’ve shown it at Morehouse, the Black college in Atlanta. We’ve shown it in California, we’ve shown it in New York. We’ve shown it in Savannah, Georgia; London, England; Paris, France,” he said. “And the nice thing about it has been that every single kind of person, not every person of course, but every single kind of person — old, young, Black, white, American, British people — have come out and said, ‘I found something that really resonated with me in the film.’”
Going on a world tour with the film has also taught the IndieWire Honors Breakthrough Award recipient about why the theatrical experience is so important. “This is the kind of movie that benefits from sitting in a room with a lot of different people and experiencing it together,” said Jefferson. “When I set out to [make ‘American Fiction’], I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is gonna work. Maybe this is going to alienate a certain segment of the population, maybe this is going to piss off this kind of people.’ And yeah, granted, it’s not universally beloved, but it is reaching a lot of different people in a way that has been really satisfying and surprising.”
“It’s universally beloved by me,” added executive producer Johnson in a show of support for the Oscar nominee.
Watch the full video of Rian Johnson in conversation with “American Fiction” filmmaker Cord Jefferson, an IndieWire exclusive, above.
