WILLIAMSBURG — William & Mary President Katherine A. Rowe held a Presidential Conversation with Oscar winner Cord Jefferson Saturday at the Sadler Center’s Commonwealth Auditorium.
Jefferson, a 2004 William & Mary graduate, served as this year’s Homecoming & Reunion Weekend grand marshal, leading the Homecoming Parade on Friday, Oct. 18. He also hosted a screening of his film, “American Fiction,” with a Q&A while on campus and was honored on the field at halftime during the Homecoming game on Saturday afternoon.
“I think one of the things that William and Mary does is it really builds strong relationships, builds strong friendships … it’s a very tight-knit community,” Jefferson said. “There’s people that I haven’t seen in 20 years that it’s just like riding a bicycle, we just see each other and immediately get back into the patterns we have. It’s a wonderful, extraordinary thing. I’ve made friendships here that are going to sustain the rest of my life.”
The award-winning writer and director has written for TV shows such as “Master of None,” “The Good Place,” “Station Eleven” and “Watchmen,” for which he won an Emmy Award along with show creator Damon Lindelof in 2020. In 2023, Jefferson made his directorial debut with the film “American Fiction,” which won him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Jefferson discussed his journey from William & Mary to becoming a successful writer and director and emphasized the importance of passion and resilience in the arts. He also touched on the impact of AI on the industry and the value of human experiences in storytelling. While reflecting on his time at William & Mary, he talked about the importance of diverse perspectives and the significance of empathy in his work.
Rowe asked him to share his insights on the creative process.
“I think that if the idea’s sticky. I’ve got a lot of ideas in my head all the time. But the ones that I always gravitate toward are the ones that I can’t stop thinking about,” he explained. “I don’t want to do anything that I don’t feel passionately about. You know, a lot of movies take 7, 10, 15, 20, years to actually come to fruition. If you aren’t really passionate about that, then you’re going to be miserable when you’re making of it.”
“You have to spend years and years and years of your life working on this thing,” he continued. “So, I make sure that the only things that I get into nowadays are things that I feel really eager and excited about.”
Contrary to the popular image of a lone writer, Rowe noted how television writing is more like a team sport. Jefferson gave the audience insight into what it is like working on a show in the writers room, adding he felt working on a comedy was harder than a drama.
“I always think the comedy is harder to write. You need more people because a good comedy has to have everything that a good drama has to have. It has to have characters. It has to have an interesting story arc, but it also has to be funny,” he explained. “Drama is a little easier because it’s easy to make people feel sad. It’s easy to build tension … but to illicit laughter, I think it’s a harder job, and I think that it does require more people.”
While discussing his adaptation of the 2001 novel “Erasure“ by Percival Everett into the film “American Fiction,” Jefferson spoke of his frustration as a black writer to be asked to contribute “the black experience.” With “American Fiction,” he wanted to show diversity in people’s priorities and backgrounds.
“There shouldn’t be villains in stories, right? There should just be human beings, and some human beings make poor decisions,” he explained. “I think that it’s important to remember that there’s diversity within diversity.”
“I would never have a room full of black people and invite a white writer in and say, like, ‘what’s the white experience?’ Because they’d be like, ‘what are you talking about? That’s crazy. There is no white experience. We’re individuals, so diverse, and we live all in different regions and come from different backgrounds,'” he added. “And I think that we need to start thinking that way about the black experience. There is no black experience, right? We are individuals.”
He credited growing up in a household where he saw people — his father is a Republican, his mother was a liberal — speak to each other civilly about their different opinions.
“I think that one of the things that I love about art, and I think film specifically, is it allows you to see people who you might not otherwise engage with, and see the depth to that, and see the layers of their humanity,” he said. “I think that that’s the kind of work that I really love, and that’s the work that really speaks to me, and that’s the kind of stuff that I want. And I think that it comes from a place of that I just really love human beings. I love our differences, and I love that were so complex and difficult and trying to do the right thing most of the time, and failing and falling short of that.”
Jefferson said he chose William & Mary in part because his father was a W&M Law School graduate, but also because it was far away from Arizona, where he grew up. He added he was “adrift” when he came to Williamsburg, and the liberal arts education allowed him to experience a lot of things. He hit upon sociology because he really enjoyed it.
“What sociology did for me, honestly, that not only is incorporated into all of my work, but in my entire life and education I got here was that I was from Tucson, and there’s a lot of Latinos in Tucson. But outside of that, there’s not much diversity,” he said. “So, when I came here … I was confronted with all these ideas that helped me see how I wanted to look at the world. It really gave me my worldview more than anything.”
When asked for advice about breaking into the industry, he says to envision what success looks like.
“What is the pinnacle of success for you when you are setting out to do this? Maybe it’s winning a certain award, maybe it’s earning a certain amount of money. Maybe it’s sort of like getting a certain actor to start whatever you’re working on, whatever success looks like for you, just really consider that and focus on it,” he said. “And then the next thing is to imagine that that never happens. Imagine that you will never achieve that. Imagine you never you never get this movie made. Imagine that you never win that award. Imagine you never make this kind of money. Do you still want to do the thing? And if you don’t, then you shouldn’t do it in the first place.”
Noting how few artists gain fame or riches in their lifetimes, he suggests, “You need to find value in the creation of the thing, not the sort of like success that the creation of the thing will bring.”
He added a lot of success is luck.
“I’ve worked very, very hard for a very long time, but I’m also incredibly lucky. ‘Watchmen’ — for which I won my Emmy — The way that I got that job was because a friend invited me to a dinner party one night to talk about politics,” he said. “So, I went to his house, and the person that I sat next to was Damon Lindelof, who had created ‘Lost.’ We just started chatting, and we hit it off. We found we could make each other laugh. And about a month later, he emailed me and said, ‘Hey, I’m starting this show called ‘Watchmen.’ Do you think you’d be interested in coming and talking about it?'”
The audience was given the opportunity for a Q&A, and Jefferson was asked questions ranging from what gives him hope to working with Jeffery Wright. When the audience brought up artificial intelligence, he had much to say.
“My question for the people who are doing AI development. My question is, why aren’t all the AI programs solving cancer and climate change? Why do you want them to write screenplays? Truly? Why? Why are we? Why are we spending any time getting AI for screenplays?” he said. “It’s a job that a lot of human beings want to do. It’s a job that a lot of human beings are good at, but they’re doing it because they want to chisel away at people’s jobs.”
“AI really is just a plagiarism machine. That’s how it’s learning to write, by reading and taking in work that other human beings have created. And so we’re teaching it with plagiarism. And so it’s just plagiarizing the work of a bunch of artists who aren’t getting paid, right?” he continued. “How sick is that? To use these people’s own work to make sure that they can’t afford to put food on their tables. I think that AI has a place in society. It’s not going anywhere, but please, cure cancer. I don’t need AI to write a Christopher Nolan movie.”