His pal and past collaborator Mike Schur puts theAmerican Fictionwriter-directors career in context.
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This article was originally published on January 12, 2024.
At the 2024 Oscars,American Fictionwon the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
It regards you andAmerican Fiction.
Over the course of this interview, Im going to attempt to prove this thesis.
Were you thinking about fiction writing during that time?Yeah.
Its because to them, what it meant to be a writer was a very big thing.
They were the kinds of writers who were like, Yeah, I can do that.
I have a visceral memory of looking at books on my moms shelf of Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer.
They would say other books by Gore Vidal and list books of essays and plays and novels and historiographies.
You become a TV writer post-journalism.
I met you when you were onMaster of None, which I produced but did not create.
AndThe Good Place, where you and I also worked together, a connection comedy/moral philosophy.Meditation on death.
Yeah, slash the afterlife!
Is that a coincidence?
Or are these the projects you have sought out?Its not a coincidence.
What connects those projects is that they were all swinging for the fences.
There was an ambition to do something that feels at least a little different.
Why should I spend my time and energy on it?
Id rather be working on a grand failure than a mediocre success.
Two of those shows,Station ElevenandWatchmen, are adaptations.
The movie you wrote is also an adaptation.
Thats how I felt doingStation ElevenandWatchmen, and I brought that toAmerican Fiction.
I watchedNo Country for Old Menrecently, which I hadnt seen in years, and its perfect.
Its a perfect movie.
And then I thought, You know, I havent readNo Country for Old Mensince probably 2006.
So I reread it, and its just the movie.
The movie is the book is the movie.Really?
Entire scenes are seemingly just Cormac McCarthys words put into Final Draft.
He just shotHamletand then got nominated for an Oscar!
What a heady play!
I want to hear about your experience readingErasurefor the first time.
I did, and had two thoughts.
One was, How did this book exist in the world for so long without anyone else telling me?
I had never heard ofErasureeither, and so I bought it.
Can you remember the last book you read that felt like it was written specifically for you?
Thats how I felt aboutErasure.
I wont say what it is, but I do.Mein Kampf!
Well talk about it after!
Come on, man!
That resonated with me deeply going back to journalism days.
The book is set in D.C., I used to live in D.C.!
Monk lives in L.A. and Im also living in L.A.!
It was more,Small movie, big ideas.
Its like you were on the beach with a metal detector and found a diamond ring.Truly!
Did you end up readingInterior Chinatown?I didnt!
I read this book instead, fell in love with it immediately, and just ran with it.
But the essential piece of satire is about how the business side of art flattens everything.
Monk writes the dumbest thing he can, and it becomes a success.
This movie, and book, are split down the middle.
I dont think Ive seen that before.
Was that part of what made you want to do this?Yeah!
I told everybody who came aboard that I wanted to make something satirical but not farcical.
When satire becomes too heavy, it can collapse under its own weight.
Where I really found the tone was in the edit.
There are a couple scenes that were more broadly comedic.
One of our actresses was Miriam Shor, and shes incredible at improv.
Then in post, Id see,Oh, this is a little too silly.
Tone is the hardest part of making anything.
The first take, theyd do it as boringly as they could.
Like, this is a drama or a documentary involving boring people in a boring place.
Then, they would do the craziest, broadest, silliest, most over-the-top take possible.
And then theyd aim for the middle of those two.
But sometimes theyd watch the super-boring take and say, We like this!
Were gonna use this one!
So you never know.
Tone is the only thing you have to search for in every moment.
Every script, page, line of dialogue: Is this right?
I didnt see that coming.
Thats probably good, right?
I never wanted people to feel like they were being lectured for two hours about race in America.
Youd never written a movie or directed anything beforeAmerican Fiction.
First of all, how dare you!
What was essentially your pitch?The script.
This was both very, very easy to get made and very, very difficult to get made.
I went and talked to Percival, whos an amazing guy.
Ive never met somebody who gives less of a shit about anything.
He doesnt care about awards, doesnt care about money, all he cares about is making art.
Its about Charles Mingus.
And I was like, Okay, man!
Can you describe the painting?Its completely abstract.
Im still trying to understand where Mingus is in it, but I appreciate it!
I go, What?
And he goes, Yeah, I have a ranch in town and we break wild horses.
I was like, What?
Where do you find time to do this?
Hes also a professor at USC of creative writing.
Hes an amazing man.
After talking with him, he gave me the rights for free for six months.
Then we sent the script to Jeffrey and he signed on after a few months.
Theres gonna beso much money.
Were gonna sell this forso much money.
Its gonna be crazy.
What a stupid thing to say!I know!
I was like, Oh, shit!
Lets go!And then you hard cut, and guess what?
The thing is, I believed him!
We were meeting withso manypeople every streamer, every big studio.
And in every meeting it was, Oh my God, we love this script.
Oh my God, we love Jeffrey Wright.
Oh my God, whats your vision?
I started to think,Okay, maybe we are in a bidding-war situation!Then there wasnothing.
Under $10 million.Significantlyunder $10 million.
If they made this movie and it was a flop, nobodys losing a job, nobodys going bankrupt.
Its the ham-and-cheese-sandwich budget onThe Marvels.
I was thinking about this the other day after someone brought up Steve Buscemi.
To me, Buscemi invented the one for me, one for them thing.
I wonder why studios dont function that way.
You read about WeWork and the guy was like, We need a WeWork Costa Rica!
and everybodys like, Why?
No, we dont!
Everybody just wants to surf in Costa Rica!
But hes like, We need a presence there!
Do you feel like thats what happened?
I feel like its the influence of tech on everything.
The influence of tech in Hollywood is a uniquely shitty merging of ideals.
Hollywood famously is nobody knows anything where do ideas come from?
How do people interpret art?
How do we reflect the culture back on itself?
And then tech tries to sacrifice everything for the sake of efficiency.
When you merge those things, you get a Hollywood that doesnt allow for any weird tendrils of creativity.
How many great shows and movies came from one person standing up and saying, I love this.
Were gonna do this.
Is it gonna work?
I dont know, but were gonna try because I believe in it.
The tech approach is to eliminate that line of thinking.
This is the living nightmare were in right now.
This is when GE owned NBC.
It was like, two people at T-Street and then one person at Orion.
Without those three people, this movie doesnt get made.
Whats sad is that youd hope the folks who have the other attitude would have shame.
One of the ones they asked him about was, Would you makeThe Shawshank Redemption?
Like, a universally beloved movie.
And he said, No.
And Im like,Youknowthat thats a successful movie.
Well, I want to talk about the concept of endings.
I know you shot multiple endings, and were not going to talk about which one you chose.
But when you were considering all of them and their different tones, what was most important to you?
That it felt true to the story?
Lets just keep it intellectually satisfying!
Now Im so content with the ending that we chose.
One person I talk to a lot about endings is Damon, becausehes so haunted by what happened withLost.
Im not speaking out of school.
I learned from him that you want to make something feel of a piece with what everybodys just watched.
It was Greg Daniels who basically taught me that its the line fromFight Club.
Hows that working for ya, being clever?Its funny you say that.
He kept telling me that: I know this is cooler, but we shouldnt do that.
Its a bad idea.
Weve made something that feels more big-tent than that.
you’re able to invite more people in.
I wanted to call the movieFuck!
When I sent you the script to read, it was calledFuck!
Its supposed to be radical, man!
Get in peoples faces!
That was my hill to die on because that was cool and making a statement.
And I realized, No, thats not why I made this.
So we changed the title, and Im really happy they convinced me to do it.
Briefly, one last story.
It was a silent film.
And I was like, Why?
And they said, Because you have five years of an audience whos deeply invested in a romance.
You want to deny them one character saying, I love you, will you marry me?
and the other saying, Yes, I love you too!?
Why would you deny them that?
Its already a documentary!
We have all these kinds of layers and membranes between the audience and the people.
Dont do the super-arch thing all the time, do it in the margins.
Anyway I said I had a thesis, remember?Okay, yeah.
Do you think Im right?Yeah, absolutely.
I nailed it!Its crazy that you say that, truly.
I was talking to my girlfriend earlier today and called the movie my lifes work.
It was a joke, but I was kind of not joking.
Literally everything Ive done before this …
So yeah, this is absolutely the culmination of everything that Ive done in my life.
It feels very weird.
Do I win something?Yeah, you got to do this interview!
