Cord Jefferson Channels Erykah Badu to Explain Awards Season Insecurity: ‘I’m an Artist, So I’m Sensitive About My S***’

Cord Jefferson would love to stay and chat with his icons, but he’s in the midst of a long awards season and has to “talk to some strangers” about his debut feature “American Fiction.”

So upon accepting the Breakthrough Award at the IndieWire Honors ceremony on December 6 at NeueHouse Hollywood, he said he’s ducking out early not because he’s a “snob,” but because he cares deeply about his work and he wants to make sure he can keep meeting people he admires.

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“I’m an artist, so I’m sensitive about my shit. That is 100 percent true. I am deeply insecure,” Jefferson said, quoting the singer Erykah Badu. “I’ve never directed anything before I made this movie, I’ve never written a movie before I made this movie. Putting it into the world is a vulnerable experience. It is something that I was terrified people were going to hate and that someone would say, ‘Don’t ever do that again, and we’ll never give you money to do that ever again. The fact that it has been embraced in the way it has been embraced, it means the world to me.”

Jefferson prior to receiving his Breakthrough Award told us he “cried” once he learned “American Fiction” had been greenlit, having just learned that a series he had planned for Apple TV+ was scuttled at the last minute.

Since then though, Jefferson’s “American Fiction” won the People’s Choice Award at this year’s TIFF, a big precursor to Oscars glory, and he’s recounted his own frustrating experiences of trying to tell meaningful stories as an independent writer and director despite a long career of working on “Succession,” “Master of None,” “Watchmen,” “Station Eleven,” and more.

“It’s this revolving door of misery and tragedy,” Jefferson said in the Q&A following “American Fiction’s” TIFF premiere. “I got into film and television, and I was excited because I was like, ‘Great, these are fictional worlds I could write about’ — aliens and unicorns and anything fantastic I want to — and then people would come to me and say, ‘Hey, do you want to write about this slave? Do you want to write about this crack addict? What do you think about these gang members?”

Much of the humor and discussion surrounding “American Fiction,” which follows an African American author who finds enormous success writing about a stereotypical “Black” story, has been in its satirical twists on poverty porn or the farcical looks inside the world of high-brow literature. But Jefferson’s bread and butter is in making those moments secondary to the real family drama surrounding Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) as he grapples with his fractured relationships with his siblings, the ailing memory of his mother, and his own prickly persona that threatens to derail his romance and his career.

For Jefferson, it’s not the accolades but the surrounding things around awards season that are meaningful, and he told the crowd on Wednesday night he wishes he could do more of that.

“This to me has been the best part, is meeting these icons of mine who make such great work. I’m so honored to be in the same space as you guys right now, and I’m really sorry that I have to leave,” he said. “I would love to be sitting on the comfortable couch back there, drinking bourbon, and talking to people until I have to go home.”

Though “American Fiction” has already sparked a wave of discussion and buzz, Jefferson is still eagerly awaiting how public audiences respond to the film. Amazon’s MGM and Orion Pictures is opening “American Fiction” on December 22. He previously told IndieWire how terrifying an experience it was to screen his debut feature for an audience for the first time, recalling the peculiar sensation he felt watching a white audience laughing during a screening of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”

“My metric for great art is: Am I thinking about it days after I’ve seen it? Months after I’ve seen it? How frequently does this come to my mind after I’ve consumed this thing,” he previously told IndieWire. “And so it would break my heart if people came and saw the film and then left the theater going like, ‘Ok, that was fine. Where should we go to dinner? Let’s debate about that.”

“American Fiction” stars Wright alongside Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, John Ortiz, Leslie Uggams, and Myra Lucretia Taylor.

Jefferson spoke at Neuehouse Hollywood alongside fellow nominees Greta Gerwig, Lee Sung Jin, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, Lily Gladstone, Todd Haynes, Chad Stahelski, Jharrel Jerome, and Melina Matsoukas.

Veronica Flores conducted all interviews for IndieWire Honors social media videos.

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