How ‘Watchmen’ Helped Bring ‘American Fiction’ to Life

TV News

By Diego Peralta

Updated Dec 31, 2023

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Summary

American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, follows an author who challenges the publishing industry's portrayal of Black culture.
Using a pen name, he exposes hypocrisy and fights against offensive stereotypes, with a supporting cast including Tracee Ellis Ross and Issa Rae.
The HBO limited series Watchmen taught Jefferson that a good adaptation shouldn't force moral lessons or simple categorizations of good and bad onto the audience.

Turning a comic book or novel into a film or television series always comes with several challenges, as Cord Jefferson, one of the writers behind the Watchmen limited series and the director of American Fiction, knows all too well. Since the two mediums are very different from one another, there are always a couple of elements that need to change in order to bring the story from the page to the screen. During a recent interview with Collider's Perri Nemiroff, Jefferson talked about how adapting Watchmen helped him turn Percival Everett's book, "Erasure," into American Fiction:

"But the thing that I took from the adaptation of Watchmen, that Damon [Lindelof] always talked about, was that the key to a great adaptation isn't necessarily maintaining fealty to the text of the novel and the full characters and stuff that come from that story. The key to a good adaptation, and one that doesn't feel bloodless, is keeping the spirit and the essence and the feeling of the original text alive. So to me, although there's some big departures from the novel that we take in the movie, what I try to do is keep the spirit of the novel alive and keep Percival's original ideas alive."

Jefferson continued to explain the differences between the Watchmen comic book and the HBO limited series, which starred Regina King, Don Johnson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jeremy Irons:

"I couldn't make a movie that felt like, “Here's the moral lesson that you take from this, and here's the good guys and here's the bad guys.” It felt like my responsibility was to make a movie that gave you some scenarios and gave you some interesting characters and then allowed you to walk away and sort of feel about it how you want to feel about it. So that to me was one of the main lessons that I took from Watchmen."

What Is 'American Fiction' About?

Coraline and Monk Ellison smiling while walking in tall grass in American Fiction. — Image via Amazon MGM Studios

In American Fiction, Jeffrey Wright portrays Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, an author frustrated with how Black culture is portrayed in the publishing industry. Directed by Jefferson himself, the film follows the writer as he tricks the publishing industry into sharing his stories with the world, even if they're determined to print content that turns out to be stereotypical and offensive. Monk won't be alone for the ride, with Tracee Ellis Ross and Issa Rae as part of the movie's supporting cast. Ellison knows the boundaries of what he can create, and he won't let anyone stand in his way.

American Fiction is in theaters now. Watch the full interview with Jefferson in the player above.