CORD JEFFERSON’S SATIRICAL DRAMA AMERICAN FICTION TAKES CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK PEOPLE TO TASK. HERE, THE FILMMAKER RECOUNTS THE PERSONAL, PASSIONATE JOURNEY HE TOOK TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

AS TOLD TO IAN FREER

CHAPTER I: DAMAGE

I almost passed out on the first day shooting American Fiction. I had 70 people staring at me asking me what to do. I was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. I thought, “If I screw this up, will I ever be allowed to do this again?” I had to go to the bathroom because I was seeing spots and didn’t want to black out in front of the entire team. That’s one way to lose your cast and crew pretty quickly! I went to the restroom and did some breathing exercises. It really was absolute panic and terror.

It was a long road to this point. I had sold projects that had reached various stages of development throughout the years but they had always died on the vine. In 2020, I had a particularly big professional failure when I was making a show. We were so close to getting it on the air —we were even discussing where our production offices were going to be —and then at the last minute, it was killed. I started to resign myself that I would just be a journeyman TV writer, which is a fine job. I’d had a lot of success in TV, I’d won an Emmy [for Watchmen] and was making good money, but I started to feel I would never get something made of my own.

Before I was a screenwriter, I was a journalist. Almost weekly, editors were asking me, “Do you want to write about Trayvon Martin being killed? Do you want to write about Mike Brown being killed? Do you want to write about this unarmed Black teenager being killed?” It started to feel emotionally damaging. My job not only became a revolving door of misery but, also, I didn’t know what I was adding to this conversation. How many different ways can I phrase this idea that Black people are human beings and frequently we are not treated the same as everybody else?

When I got into film and television, I was thrilled because it finally felt like there were no restrictions. We don’t need to spend our time focusing on the misery of the Black experience in America; we can write about anything. Certainly, at that point in time, slavery, the crack epidemic and gang violence were part of the Black experience. But so was being President Of The United States. Between the poles of slavery and being the POTUS are a million other stories we haven’t told. So, finally, I felt I could start digging into some of those.