‘American Fiction’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“My name is Cord Jefferson and I am the writer and director of the movie ‘American Fiction.’ The scene is that our main character, Monk, played by Jeffrey Wright, is kind of frustrated with the lack of imagination that people have when it comes to the stories that people are allowed to tell about Black life. And because of this anger when one of her books doesn’t sell and she sees the ways in which the culture is attached to these kinds of reductive views of Blackness, she decides to write her own version of the hyper-stereotypical that Black story. The scene also features Keith David as Willy the Wonker and Okieriete Onaodowan as Van Go in the scene that unfolds before Monk’s eyes as he writes it in a Word document. “Don’t shoot me partner. Let’s go.” “So this movie is based on the novel ‘Erasure’ by Percival Everett which was published in 2001. So this scene is not in the novel. If you’ve read ‘Erasure’, you’ll know that the entirety of ‘My Pafology,’ this kind of prank book written by Monk was published within the novel ‘Erasure.’ I know that’s not very cinematic. I didn’t want to show the Monk character just sitting there banging on his keyboard furiously and I think we’ve all seen enough. And I don’t think it takes away from the gravity of what the character is writing especially this time, when you really have to understand what he’s put on those pages. “Look at my face. Look at my midnight Black comple — no, that’s not right.” “What do you want to say? You can say it better than that. Right, come on. What do you want? Think about it, Van Go. look at my face Look at my cold Black skin and then look at yourself. Look into my Black eyes and look into your own. Look at my big Black lips and see for yourself. I’m your daddy whether you like it or not?” “Shut up!” “So I really meant for this scene to be funny and I think that the characters play it that way. The thing that was interesting while we were shooting the scene was that Ok and Keith David are such good actors that you have this tendency to take them seriously because they’re such good performers. So I guess I wanted it to be comedic but I never wanted to make that comedy obvious. “I think there’s going to be some kind of dumb melodramatic sob story where you highlight your broken interior. It’s like, I don’t know — I hate this man. I hate my mom and I hate myself.” “Yeah, the intention was to be funny but without saying like oh, this needs to be played super broad. In the end, I wanted it to be a little restrained and I think, in fact, that’s what makes the scene better.” “And I see eyes that don’t care about tomorrow.”