By Iain Blair
Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Lead Actor, American Fiction is writer Cord Jefferson’s impressive directorial debut. It’s a dramedy satire that stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, an erudite and frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from stereotypical “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, which, to his disdain, becomes a huge critical and commercial success.
Cord Jefferson
Jefferson himself earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for American Fiction for his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure.” I spoke to him about making the film and navigating post. Editor Hilda Rasula (French Exit) joined the conversation.
You’d never directed a film before this one. How did you prep? Did you talk to a lot of other directors?
Cord Jefferson: I talked to other directors, and I did the Martin Scorsese MasterClass. (Laughs) I felt like it would be worthwhile to spend some time listening to him. I read “Making Movies” by Sidney Lumet. I prepared by reading and studying and talking to friends of mine who were directors. But directing is something that you can’t really understand until you do it. It was sort of like trial by fire. It was just kind of getting in there and doing it. So I prepared myself as much as I could, but really what I focused on was just the script. I was like, even if I didn’t know what I was doing with cameras or with lighting that day, and I felt out of my depth with the technical stuff, I knew the script and the characters at a fundamental level. That allowed me to make all the technical decisions I needed to make based on just my pure understanding of the story we were trying to tell.
Hilda Rasula
How early on did you start working with Hilda?
Jefferson: Hilda was onboard before we started shooting in Boston. She wasn’t on-set, unfortunately. Hilda, how far before principal of photography did we start working together?
Hilda Rasula: We started meeting six weeks before shooting started. Then for the shoot, I was here in LA and getting the dailies. There wasn’t a lab in Boston for us to go to, so they were flown to Atlanta every day for processing and then sent to us.
How did the process work? You must have been in constant contact, right?
Jefferson: Hilda would send emails occasionally at night and say, “I looked at the dailies, and here’s what I think we should be shooting for tomorrow’s scenes” and stuff like that. But outside of that, there wasn’t much time to have conversations, unfortunately. It was very run-and-gun.
Rasula: And with the time difference, it was just tough. Also, my dailies were always running a little more than a day behind because of having to go to Atlanta and then to LA. So essentially, the whole editing didn’t start until post.
Cord, how steep a learning curve was post for you? Were you in shock?
Jefferson: (Laughs) Yes, of course. I had two director friends who said, “When you go and watch the editor’s first cut, you are going to feel like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? This is a nightmare. This is absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever done, and I’m so ashamed.’” And that’s everybody’s feeling when they see the first cut of the film. You just need to work past that. I think that I was so afraid of that that I didn’t watch the first cut.
In fact, I came in and told Hilda that we weren’t going to watch it all the way through. We were just going to watch what she’d edited. Then we could go through it scene by scene so the scenes wouldn’t all play at once and give me a heart attack. I didn’t think that I could do that, to be honest. So we went through and cut everything together — I think the initial director’s cut was 2 hours and 14 minutes — and then we refined from there. All the color grading and mastering was done by FotoKem, and the colorist was Philip Beckner. I actually loved the whole post process.
Hilda, where did you do the editing and the rest of the post?
Rasula: In the offices of our production company, T-Street, which is Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’s company. Our post setup was dead-simple. We used Avid Media Composer 2018, and we shared media between my assistant editor, Charmaine Cavan, and me on a Nexis in a neighboring room.
We also had Jump Desktop to keep a bit of a WFH hybrid option open for ourselves, which was useful during dailies. The one unusual aspect of our post setup at the office was that we had a great screening room on-site at T-Street. They have a small screening room that has its own computer with the ability to hook up with Nexis. That computer ran on Avid 2022, so there were occasional translation issues we had to contend with, but generally it was extremely easy to host screenings for producers and for friends and family screenings with relatively little downtime needed to prep the cut. Mandell Winter was our sound supervisor, and we mixed at Signature Post with mixers Alexandra Fehrman and Richard Weingart. We were really happy with the entire sound team.
What were the main editing challenges? Obviously, it has a lot of tonal changes.
Rasula: You put your finger on it. I would say the biggest challenge was the tonal pivots that the movie takes. Being able to go between comedy and drama in the way that it does required some tricky tonal turns, and doing that was a delicate balance. We also spent a lot of time working on pacing and rhythm — sometimes within the scenes beat by beat, getting the comedy timing to be perfect. Other times it was a matter of playing with that teeter-totter of the balance between comedy and drama for the movie to feel really cohesive… so that it didn’t feel like we were going too far into a broader comedy film or a darker drama. We needed to find the perfect balance. And that was kind of like a high wire act at times.
Jefferson: People have asked, how did you manage the tonal balance? And we found that in post. I tried to find it in the script, and sometimes on-set I’d realize that I hadn’t found it in the script. And then a lot of really great stuff ended up being cut out of the movie – great comedy and also really dramatic scenes that make you cry every time you see it. But we realized that despite the greatness of those scenes, they just weren’t the film that we were making. The thing that I told everybody at the outset — and Hilda and I had to stick to our guns on it — was that we wanted to make a movie that was satirical but never farcical.
Rasula: Often, I think when you’re making a comedy-drama, there is an instinct on everybody’s part to say, keep making it funnier. And I do think this is an incredibly funny movie, but being really disciplined with ourselves about holding that line, and also making sure that the drama didn’t get too sentimental, was what we had to carve out in post.
What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
Rasula: We probably spent the most time talking about and worrying about the multiple endings, trying to figure out what was too confusing for the audience and needing to make adjustments there. Balancing that out was a tricky thing. And ultimately finding the right ending for Monk, what feels right for the character, and what feels satisfying for an audience.
Did you do a lot of test screenings?
Rasula: We did just one official test screening.
Jefferson: But we probably did 15 to 20 friends and family screenings throughout post. That was also incredibly helpful. The biggest problem besides the ending was the very beginning. We kept getting this similar feedback from friends and family: “The movie starts off a little slow. We don’t fully understand that it’s supposed to be funny and that we’re supposed to be laughing at the very outset.” We were beating ourselves over the head with, “How are we going to fix this?” And then one day we all came in and Hilda had spent the night before reorganizing the first 25 to 30 minutes of the film, and a light bulb went off. It was truly like, you found what we needed to do. And correct me if I’m wrong, Hilda, but a lot of the impetus came from friends and family feedback.
Rasula: Absolutely. Feedback from people is so crucial because you’re making a movie for an audience. Basically, everything we do is for the audience, and it’s only through showing it to people that you can really start to get that sense of how it is working and what information is not hitting their brains in the right order at the right time… or their hearts. Those screenings were invaluable since it was very late in the process that we did that restructure, and it’s really only because of things that people were saying that then triggered a lot of discussions.
Did you use a lot of sound temps?
Rasula: This is a very talky movie, so it’s not like an action movie where it required crazy sound design. But we did all of our temp music cutting; we didn’t have the budget to have a music editor or anybody else working on sound through most of the process, so we had to do it ourselves. My assistant editor Charmaine Cavan took care of all the temp sound design while I was doing the temp music editing and much of the temp music supervision in the offline.
Cord, you have few visual effects courtesy of Outpost, Papaya and We Shoot Lasers. Did you take to it quickly?
Jefferson: I took to it pretty quickly because fortunately T Street has a really good relationship with some great VFX people – Rian’s movies tend to be way more VFX-heavy. Our VFX supervisor, Giles Harding, is someone that they work with regularly. Giles was incredibly helpful, and it was easy to get him on the phone and talk about what we needed.
(SORT OF SPOILER ALERT!)
The final scene of Monk getting shot was the most VFX-laden thing that we had, and it was just kind of just trial and error. We saw five to six different versions, and every version was good. It was just kind of refining what was already there. For example, let’s move this bullet hole a little to the left. Let’s move this sort of blood spatter a little to the right, but nothing too major. I felt it was pretty easy overall.
Rasula: In the end, we had a lot of VFX, some of which were invisible visual effects that you would never know existed, but those were easy enough to deal with. Split screens and that sort of thing.
Cord, I assume you want to direct again?
Jefferson: Absolutely. I will keep making movies for as long as they’ll let me make movies. And I’ve told Hilda that I want her to work on everything with me now, so hopefully she’ll be there as well.
Hilda, would you work with him again?
Rasula: (Laughs) Of course. Cord has the most amazing voice and such clarity in his writing. And I think as a storyteller and now as a director, he has a reason to make movies. He has a reason to tell stories. He just doesn’t do it without a sense of purpose. That’s all I ever want from my director.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
