American Fiction follows a struggling author, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), as he yearns to get his work out there and read. As he grows agitated by the consumption of “Black” books that focus on offensive stereotypes, he decides to give play them for the fools he thinks they are. He writes a novel that fits what they flock to under a pen name. Much to his surprise, he has a hit book on his heads. Our Artisans Editor, Jillian Chilingerian, sat down with Film Editor, Hilda Rasula, to discuss working with Cord Jefferson on his first film and working with the narrative structure of American Fiction.

Jillian Chilingerian: Very excited to talk to you today. I loved this film. I saw it back at AFI. I want to start with how it is a story about duality. From your perspective of coming in with this source material how much of your own story helped you guide to crafting the story?
Hilda Rasula: This film does have all these really interesting identity politics in it that are kind of thorny sometimes. It’s the thorniness that I can relate to in a sense. Monk is a character who holds all these different desires inside of him in tricky ways. He has these conflicts within him of his urges as an artist, as a writer, and then what the commercial world wants from him, and what society’s expectations are from him. Then the inner life that he feels is within him, all of that, are those dualities that. were baked into the character in the script something that I related to. I’m mixed race, and I’m Chinese and Finnish. I have this sort of odd mix of cultures of me and a lot of other things. I’m, I’m bi-lingual and bisexual and have a dual citizen, I’m Canadian, and American. I can understand very deeply and could relate to what it is to have a character who has a lot of different elements of their identities that may not be seen from the outside by people that they’re working with that they’re just interacting with. The theme in general is a really powerful one in the movie, the idea that we all contain multitudes. We have desires to be seen as whole people.

Jillian Chilingerian: We’re able to see him in his professional and private sphere because it just informs so much about the character. Constructing those two timelines that merge over with each other, but like they perfectly complement each other, how was that for you?
Hilda Rasula: It was exciting and one of the generally difficult creative challenges that the film presented, I think, was to just take what in a sense is these two distinct storylines, which is one is this satirical thing about, the book world in publishing and his professional life, and then take his personal life, the storyline that’s kind of almost a straight family drama in a lot of ways, and meld them because one is operating on this much more kind of like, high satirical level, and the other is working in this lower, very grounded, dramatic register. But the key I think, was to make sure that each each of those two storylines basically could have found ways to have a jolt of the other tone, infusing them. So like, we wanted to make sure that like the comedic satirical storyline, never got so out of whack and absurd. I mean, it’s okay for it to be absurd it is an absurd sort of situation that he finds himself in. But we wanted to make sure it never became like such a farce, that it became unbelievable that this would even be possible to happen in the real world. With the dramatic scenes, we also just wanted to make sure that we found lightness or humor, or some of that kind of amazing tone of chords, writing where something gets weird and funny, unexpectedly, like a character says something crazy. And we’re so we just wanted to make sure to look for the lightness and the humanity in those moments as well. So yeah, it was a kind of tricky balance, that sometimes felt like a high-wire act, but it was very rewarding because of that as well. Yeah,

Jillian Chilingerian: I think they complement each other. As the viewer, you’re so engaged up until those final moments. It is a family drama, and some of my favorite moments are those scenes between Monk and his siblings, especially at the end, with Jeffrey and Sterling at the wedding when they have this heart-to-heart. There are very comedic moments, and then we get this room to almost like breathe and flesh out their relationship.
Hilda Rasula: I think that’s a real credit to Cord’s writing. He has such a great ear and a great voice as a writer for the ways that people talk to each other. They’re saying one thing, and what they’re meaning is another. In their sibling relationships, we had the gift of a great cast as well, so I think you feel these undercurrents of these intensely relatable emotions happening between them. Within one couplet of writing you get the implications of years of resentment and humor We had people who were gifted at finding that balance, these actors could slip into that groove, of living in the world where comedy and drama are happening simultaneously almost in their performances, which is a special place for those actors to get to, and it was the place that was the tone of this movie that they needed to fall into as well.

Jillian Chilingerian: With editors when you have such a great cast and you’re going through takes, how do you decide if we need to follow this moment?
Hilda Rasula: We did have great performers and great performances. But I think so much of film editing is you have a problem performance, and you’re like constructing your performance. But in this case, I think so much of film editing is really about sifting through the choices at a kind of really obsessive level, modulating every single moment and beat. What you’re looking for sometimes it’s not clear, right at the start what is the best performance, there are different versions and shades of different line readings that actors give you, which is wonderful, but it’s not clear until you’re really cutting the movie. How prickly does a character need to be? How angry do they need to be have soft do they need to be and once you put it all together, you’re modulating one scene and moment against another that comes later. So that’s kind of the trick of it like these actors were amazing. But it’s a matter of finding the truth of what each scene really needs from that character.

Jillian Chilingerian: One of my favorite scenes is definitely when we’re with Monk and he’s writing and we see what he’s writing, like, play out in front of him. Normally when we see that it cuts away.
Hilda Rasula: I love that scene. That’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Yeah, it was always written in the script, that these characters were going to materialize before us, which was so cool. You’re right, it’s, it’s unusual we often maybe would just cut away and see the scene that he’s writing and the fact that we don’t, and then it achieves this, like a weird mixture of reality. Reality in that moment is really special, because it gives you this weird jolt where like nothing in the movie so far has departed from reality in that sense. suddenly, there’s a slightly magical realism that’s happening And it’s great because it opens the door for the audience to a stylistic break, that’s fun and unexpected. It is planting a seed for the audience of like, thinking about the artifice of storytelling, which ends up becoming a theme that lands much later in the film with the ending and becomes something bigger for them to start to feel and think about, which is great. The actors were amazing in that scene, we really wanted to play with this idea of a little bit of sound design that comes in that, puts you in a little bit of the world of these characters, but without doing it as fully as we would do if you had cutaway, so we were really playing in this weird little uncanny valley of like, Is this happening? Is this not happening? We deliberately break that fourth wall at certain moments with the characters who kind of are they don’t turn the camera but they’re almost doing that, in a sense, we’re doing that we’re playing with it. So yeah, it was a very playful scene and fun. We had a lot of weird discussions about how great the actors were and what were the implications for the actors being so good. Was the audience gonna get confused about whether this was actually a good book that he was writing? It was a joy to cut because everyone was wonderful and it was just such a weird, cool scene.

Jillian Chilingerian: From Cord, you could tell this is from a writer with those little details. It almost foreshadows that tone and style for the end.
Hilda Rasula: Multiple endings are such a crazy, wild thing for the movie to do in a sense, but I love it because they’re really playing with that idea, again, of storytelling and what it means to write stories with its protagonist as a writer. Some of the book itself actually ends with the character going up on stage with Monk goes up on stage to the podium, and he doesn’t say anything like the book cuts off before he gives his speech, which is kind of crazy Cord nods to and replicates by doing that cut tip like a smash to black moment. He knew movie audiences would probably feel really unsatisfied so giving us these kinds of different meta-endings allows us a chance to kind of reflect on the idea of storytelling itself. I think that’s an interesting kind of ambiguous question that is raised and not definitively answered by the end of the movie. It allows the audience to walk out of the theater thinking about the concept of endings and the concept of what it means, to be in the middle of your life actually, to be kind of midlife, where the end is not clear yet. That applies to the Monk storyline as a writer and the more satirical storyline he finds himself in with Adam Brody, but it also applies to the family storyline as well. There’s this idea that we see his brother again, and it gives us a chance to reflect on the idea of what are the relationships in our lives. Are they are they cooked and done? Can you repair things halfway through your life? Can you become closer to a sibling? Can you change your perspective on what artistic compromise means? Has he sold out or has he found a way to become more human and join the ranks of humanity because he’s so disdainful and distant? So there are just these weird, interesting questions that are raised, and not definitively answered.

Jillian Chilingerian: I have siblings, and relationships change over time when you get older, you look back and resentments and all this stuff. I really admired how you relate back to yourself and kind of dive into your own relationships.
Hilda Rasula: I’m glad. Yeah, people are finding things like that to reflect on.

Jillian Chilingerian: When you got the script and had conversations with Cord were there moments where he wanted to enhance a moment? When you read the script how do you feel when you read it versus seeing it?
Hilda Rasula: I mean, I loved the experience of reading it, the experience of reading, it was a very clear, yes, for me. I mean, it just was really such a solid script, that I knew I wanted to do it right away. And we actually didn’t have major, like, huge discussions about tone or sort of breaking down the script or whatever, beforehand. I think we, I mean, we talked a bit about characters, of course, and we and he knew that that kind of like, I mean, a character at one point calls Monk sad and funny and we knew that that was the overarching tone. Cord had an enormous amount of faith in me, which was great too. He was also in Boston shooting it, so he was slammed during dailies. It really was mostly up to me to just react, put together my first assembly mostly on my own, and know that he would come back to LA and we would start working from there. There is always a difference between reading a script and then when you watch the footage, good and bad surprises. There’s nothing I’ve ever worked on, where there haven’t been moments where a scene comes in, and you do feel like disappointed because you’re like, “Okay, that was not the experience of reading it.” There are moments that are beautiful gifts, where actors do things you weren’t expecting, and it deepens it in some way that is much funnier, or much more heartbreaking than you were expecting. I had both of those in this movie.

Jillian Chilingerian: With this character of Monk, did you find him guiding that idea?
Hilda Rasula: That character reads on the page. Very similar to how he comes out on the screen. Part of that is because Jeffrey Wright is such a tremendous actor, that he had the character pretty locked in from the start. He inhabits that he is Monk, or at least he was right from day one. We had to make sure that we were portraying the rougher edges because I think the character needs all that to make sure that he’s not turning into some kind of, you don’t want that character to be that. I mean, we really want him to be very three-dimensional and have all these flaws. But then still have those and make sure that there are other elements of him that feel very relatable and have enough relatable humor that you can always be behind the character, even if you don’t like every choice he’s making.

Jillian Chilingerian: You can feel the energy of Monk through the sound and pacing and the rhythm and you get a good idea of how the movie works around them. For pacing purposes, when you go through drafts of the film before you get that lock.
Hilda Rasula: We did work an enormous amount on pace both within scenes and of the film as a whole. We omitted 11 scenes overall. Some of the scenes got quite truncated or some of them had more certain surgical kind of pacing but throughout there was a lot and even in some cases structuring we did a big restructure in Act One to that end, as well just to kind of set up the character arc more effectively. This is the kind of movie where you read fast on the page when all assembled definitely a little too slow. We actually did a lot of rhythm and pacing work to discover what is the audience ready for at this moment. You need to balance that out with the idea that we also deliberately wanted to let the film slow down in some parts and let it breathe so that we could have this sense of really getting to know some of the family characters, and really developing them as, as three-dimensional humans that could be really relatable. This is a movie that is designed to be enjoyed, it’s not supposed to be some kind of social lesson or painful experience. It’s not that at all, it is designed to entertain, I know that Cord talks about this movie as a big tent that everybody can kind of be welcomed into to have this fun, interesting, and hopefully thoughtful conversation about these social issues. So chasing that universality sometimes means chasing pace, engagement, and interest. We did quite a lot of work on the film to find that ultimately.

Jillian Chilingerian: It is one of those films that spark thoughts after you watch it, but you also feel like you can enjoy it and have an have, like my screening, everyone was laughing a lot. And it was such a communal experience that was so fun. So yes, thank you so much for answering all my questions, as we talked about, there are so many tones themes, and rhythms. How do we put that together?
Hilda Rasula: It is definitely a movie where it was a fine balance. The whole trick of the editing, I think was just to find that balance, not to fall off the tightrope at any moment. We just sort of kept working it and working it and working it until we stayed upright.
Jillian Chilingerian: Well, thank you so much. And it was so nice to chat and it’s so nice to meet you.

American Fiction is currently in theaters.