When I say your name, there's this kind of like starry eyed thing that they get, which I think is the confluence of having been educated and entertained like your film, and they're just like, oh my god, like you really whoa Like they have a very visceral response to you.
That's a delight to hear the fact that the movie's sticking with people. To me, that's the testament of quality of how frequently I think of something after I've consumed it. So it's nice to hear.
Yeah, And I think it's a marker of something that is actually sustainable. I heard a great story about Bob Dylan remarking to his son as his son had sold I think six million records or something with a lot of records, maybe more than a Dylan record had sold. And Dylan's response was great, now do it for thirty years. Yeah, Hello, I'm mini driver.
I've always loved Prust's questionnaire.
It was originally in nineteenth century parlor game where players would ask each other thirty five questions aimed at revealing the other player's true nature. In asking different people the same set of questions, you can make observations about which truths appear to be universal, And it made me wonder, what if these questions were just a jumping off one, what greater depths would be revealed if I asked these
questions as conversation starters. So I adapted Prus's questionnaire and I wrote my own seven questions that I personally think are pertinent to a person's story. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most?
What would be your last meal?
And can you tell me something in your life that's grown out of a personal disaster? And I've gathered a group of really remarkable people, ones that I am honored and humbled to have had the chance to engage with. You may not hear their answers to all seven of these questions. We've whittled it down to which questions felt closest to their experience or the most surprising, or created the most fertile ground to connect. My guest today is
the Academy Award winning writer and director Cord Jefferson. Cord created the movie American fiction, the cracklingly smart film, which expands and updates Personval ever its two thousand and one novel Erasure. Now, if you listen to this show regularly, you'll know it's not really a setup for any kind of promo. But what it does offer, and what Cord so brilliantly explores in our chat, is the opportunity to investigate the way of the creative heart and to consciously
reveal that, well, it ain't all roses. He introduced me to the idea of the third place problem, which observes that we are missing spaces outside of our home and places of work to interact with and build community. We also talked about a shared love of spectacle cuisine, which is a genre I've just created, And you're allowed me to tell a story about this guy who once used a live crab of a seafood tower to try and
clip the end of his cigar. This is one of the most honest and raw conversations that I've had about life, the space we take up and are inherited, trauma, and the lives of our generationally distant parents. It was an honor and a privilege to talk.
Where and when were you.
Happiest right now, in this very moment. I'm in New York City in a hotel, and I think that I am. I'm the happiest now that I've ever been a happiest. Happiness has been a very elusive thing for me for
a very long time. Yeah, I always assumed that contentment wasn't going to be a thing for me, that I was always going to be sort of like searching and struggling, and that was just that was just my temperament, I thought, And that was just going to be you know, other people could be happy and I was just not going to be one of those people. And I just kind
of grinded it out like that for decades. And in twenty eighteen, I was thirty six, and it was the worst year of my life, truly, you know, shockingly, because on the surface, everything was going well. It was my career was flourishing, and I was making all this money, more money than I ever made before, and I was, you know, working on all these great projects. But you know,
behind the scenes, I was just always miserable. I would cry in the shower and sort of like I have to pull all my car over to the side of the road because I was weeping, and I just generally felt miserable, and I felt like this is unsustainable. It felt like I can't keep living like this and being miserable like this, And you know, I knew that somehow I I was going to destroy my life if I didn't sort of get some help, and so I decided
to go to therapy in twenty eighteen. I've basically been going to weekly therapy, if not more since since then, so it'll be seven years next year. And also when I turned forty on my fortieth birthday, my gift to myself was that I started taking zoloft. I started taking an antidepressant and anti anxiety medication, which has kind of changed my life in a very real way. And so all of a sudden, for the past year or so, I've taken a step back and realize, like, oh, is
this Maybe this is what happiness feels like. I think that maybe I feel happy for the first time in
my adult life. It's a strange feeling, because sometimes, you know, I wake up sort of I have this muscle memory of, well, it's time to wake up and realize why you're miserable today, and sort of that instinct I still have that sometimes, But then I sit there and I realized that, well, there's no reason to be miserable today, Like things are going pretty well, and yeah there's challenges here and there, of course, but it's no longer the kind of gloom
that just kind of was hanging over me constantly. And so I think that at the age of yeah, at the age of forty two, I finally feel like I'm the happiest I've ever been, which is it's exciting to have finally reached this position because especially when I had sort of resigned myself to the idea that it would never happen for me.
Wow, was it a conscious thing?
Like when you were younger, did you really have a kind of executive chat with yourself that was like, look, you and me called we're never going to be happy, and this is just how it is, and I'm going to do all this other stuff, but happiness is not anything I'm going to set my coordinates for. Like, was it that conscious?
Yeah, we always think that we're hiding stuff from our parents, but it's kind of silly and sort of like when you get older to think that you could hide anything from your parents. Really, your parents know you so well, and when I was nineteen, my mother said to me, I think that you have clinical depression. And I said, I get out of bed, I go to school, I hold down a job, I exercise, Like all these things that I had been taught were sort of like hallmarks
of a depressive. I was like, that doesn't bear any resemblance to my life, and so I think that you're you know, you're wrong. But what I did say was like, yeah, I think that I have a gloomy temperament from time to time, and I certainly think that I'm a cynic
in many ways. But you know, to me, that was just I was just a young realist and this the world is hell and the world is pain, and I thought, you know, I really wanted to be in like a French new wave movie and like smoking cigarettes and kind of nihilistic, and I thought that that was kind of cool.
And it was like, that's okay, if this is how it's going to be, because you know, you have an artistic temperament, we'll say, and kind of it's okay, you're kind of grumpy and you know, surly, I would say, but I thought that that was okay. I sort of had this foolish idea that I think a lot of young aspiring artists do, which is that you know, art
comes from your pain and your misery. You know, that's where the good stuff comes from, is from being upset all the time, and that you know, happy art is boring art, and that kind of thing. And I think that it was okay to me because it felt like that was my heroes. My heroes were like Miles Davis, like these surly artists who were sort of like mean to people and self destructive, and it was like, that's
who I want to be like. And so to me, it felt like it was a fair deal with myself that you're going to be unhappy, but you're also going to sort of live a creative life, and a lot of creative people are unhappy, and so that's okay. And so I did, actually, you know, have a conversation with myself and just think like that's okay, because I think that there's also this thing that like it means that
you see something that other people don't. There's James Baldwin quote that I'm going to paraphrase where he says, to be black and halfway conscious in the United States is to be in a near constant state of rage. And I think that that was sort of like another thing that it just felt like, you know, ignorance is bliss, and so it felt like, you know, the stupid happy people were sort of like the ones that I didn't want to be like and that I wanted to separate
myself from. And so I was somebody who was thoughtful and considered the world and paid attention, and so because of that, I was also destined to just be miserable all the time. And yeah, I was just a stupid kid, you know, you realize now and I'm forty two. I used to think that I didn't want to live to turn forty. I was like, you know, after fortyes boring, like you got to get the good stuff when you're young, Like who cares when you're forty five? Like how lame
must life be when you're that age? And I think that now. The thing that I've realized when I finally sort of met this therapist to one of the things that I was dealing with in twenty eighteen was that my mother had died in twenty sixteen and I was still grieving her, and I wasn't really doing what I needed to do to process that grief. And so when I went and met my therapist, he told me, I
think that you have clinical depression. That was the first thing that he said, Well, actually that's not It was very funny that he said that because my first session with him, I came in and I tried to explain why I wanted to meet him, and then I just started crying, and I cried as I spoke for about five to ten minutes, and then he goes, you know what, I think that you might be depressed, And it turned out that it was exactly right. Yeah, And I said
the same thing that I said to my mother. You know, I exercise, I get out of bed. And he said, you know, the same way that there's highly functioning alcoholics, there's highly functioning drug addicts, like there's highly functioning depressives too. So it's not that you don't have this just because you're able to achieve those things. It means that imagine what you could achieve if you didn't have this thing hanging over your head all the time. That's how you
should look at it. And so that was really eye opening for me. And then beyond that, I've realized like learning to sort of like get over my issues and
taking the meds and doing the work in therapy. The work has gotten better because I'm happy, you know, like my creativity I feel like is skyrocketed now that I'm sort of not dealing with that stuff anymore, because you know, it opened up a world of new emotions to me, firstly, and then secondly, it's just made me more pleasant to be around, and it's made me more excited to be around other people, and it's made me more excited to talk to collaborators and to work in an environment in
which I'm having a healthy creative relationship with a lot of different people. Like it's just if anything that's put my creativity I feel like on a high speed rail. And so it was just I'm really really happy that I didn't self destruct before I reached this point because it's been just so eye opening and so thrilling. It feels like I've been reborn in some ways and I have a second opportunity of life. It really does.
Wow, I'm so glad that you're happiest now.
Thanks.
Yeah, so interesting, Like you don't strike me as yeah, yeah, but I love that he lives inside of you.
But that's because I learned. I got really good at suppressing it. You know, I got really good at playing playing the game. I got really good being able to walk into a room and convince people that I was, like, yeah, I'm the happiest guy in the room. That was like a real quality that I had. But that made it even worse, you know, because then nobody really knew how I felt. And that's why I would cry alone, is because I was never actually sharing my honest self with anybody.
I was always hiding it, and so that just augmented the problems that I was already having.
So what is the quality you like least about yourself if you've been kind of excavating them?
How to access the happier bit.
I'm very very self critical. I really am my own harshest critic. I find it difficult to appreciate myself. I find it difficult to accept my faults. I find it difficult to forgive myself for making mistakes. A large part of my therapy is spent going over my relationship with my father, and he looms so large in my life and so large in my psyche, and he was a very demanding figure. It's very hard on us high expectations.
And I was sitting with a friend a couple of years ago, another friend who's going over sort of like dealing with her own issues with her parents. And I was telling her that I'm embarrassed at how much I criticized myself. And I said, you know, I have a problem. I've never been a person that can sort of like wake up and go back to sleep. Like that's rare for me, because when I wake up, there's always a voice in my head going, you better get your ass out of bed. You know, you better get to work,
like you're lazy, You're not working hard enough. What's going on? What's wrong with you? Like everybody out there is going to sort of like beat you. And I told her this, and she said, you should ask yourself, why is that voice speaking to you in the second person. Why wouldn't you say I need to get out of bed. Why are you saying you need to get out of it right? Why is that kind of disembodied that way? And I realized, like, oh, because it's probably my father's voice. It's not me speaking
to myself. It's sort of like me replicating the conversations I had with my father in my own head, and so I have adopted that criticism and sort of started criticizing myself, and it's frustrating, but it's also there's also part of me that's like, maybe it's useful I will distill my relationship with my father into this story that I had, actually I think like suppressed for a long time, but it's come up in the recent years and I
think about it often. I used to play a lot of soccer when I was a kid, and my parents got me private coaching lessons with this guy on the weekends, and so on Saturdays I would go and sometimes there'd be two of us. Sometimes there'd be three or four of us, but at the end of every session you would have a scrimmage, and so if it was four of us, would be two on two. But that day there was just two of us, so we did one on one. And I'm from Arizona, so it's you know,
one hundred and eleven degrees in the summertime. It's Saturday. I've been out here running like so hot, I'm so tired, and I'm playing against this kid. As he's dribbling the ball toward me, I hear this voice out of nowhere scream beat him, beat him, he's tired, beat him. And I look to the side and my father has shown up early and he's rooting for the other boy in the scrimmage, like my own dad has shown up to
like cheer against me at this game. And so I can't even remember what happened, but you know, practice is over. I remember sitting in the car next to him and we're like driving in silence. I'm so mad at him, I'm embarrassed, I'm angry, and we're driving along in silence, and at a certain point he turns to me and he said, nobody in life is going to be harder on you than I am, and that's going to make you strong. That's going to make you resilient, and it's
going to make you strong. And looking back on that, I am incredibly resilient. I know.
But perhaps does he get to take the credit.
I'm not trying to say that this is like a rosy story that I look back on fondly. It's certainly a painful story in some ways. But what I'm saying is I do believe that there was something in there that has helped me. You know, you have to injure your muscles for your muscles to grow, so like you have to go through pain in order to sort of get stronger in some ways. And it is a quality that I think every artist needs to have, especially like
you really need to have just an undefeatable resilience. You just need to wake up every day and say, like, I don't care if all of these people said no to me. I'm going to keep going. And so look, I think that there's probably other healthier ways to learn that lesson, but I developed it in the way that I developed it. And so you know, as much as I look at those moments and I'm like I wish that we would have gone about that differently, I can't look at it and say that it hasn't helped me
in some way. Does that make sense?
It does.
Yeah.
There was a dark night of the soul with my father, who said a lot of stuff as fathers to, but I do remember on one agonizing occasion, well, I again just didn't really want to hear this particular thing was he.
Said, It's all a gift. It's all this agony.
All of this failure, all of this self pity, all of this heartbreak, it is all a gift and all your job is is to calibrate yourself to be able to take that gift and turn into something else. And it's brutal, but it was true. I think there was a kind of way. I think it's often with our parents. It could have been more kindly offered, but it is all a gift.
I agree with that. I think that you have to be able to.
Adapt what relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you.
Have you ever seen a film Cold War? Oh?
Yeah?
Cold War for me is the love story that I think is the one that struck me as being the one that I find like most romantic, despite the fact that it's incredibly dark and sad. In case people haven't seen Cold War, it's a Polish film about the Cold War from the forties to the sixties, and it's this couple. They sort of fall in love and I believe that he's a bandleader and she's a singer, or maybe he's
just a musician and she's a singer. I don't remember, but they fall in love and they decide one day that they're going to run away to West Berlin and I think they're doing a show in East Berlin, and they decide they're going to flee to West Berlin, and that night when he decides to flee, she doesn't show up, and so he tries to go by himself, and I
believe he gets conn I can't remember. But anyway, circumstance and time takes them apart and they come back together, and then time takes them apart again when they find each other another time. You know, they are both in relationships. She's now married, he's got a new woman that he's dating. But then they meet each other my hamp and stance again and it's like he says to her, you are the woman of my life. And despite the fact that they haven't seen each other in like seven or eight years,
he's like, I still love you. And then they're taking a part again. And I just think that that, to me is like the endurance of that part of that is appealing to me, because you know, I think that when you join this industry that we are in, you
kind of almost literally are joining the circus. You know, it's like you're on the road, you're traveling all the time, you're not in one place for a very long and so you really need to sort of know that the people in your life are going to still love you even if you're gone for six months or two years, Like you can come back and feel like, you know, you haven't forgotten about me, and I haven't forgotten about you, and like the love that we had still endures, and
the feelings that I had about you still endure. And I think that that, to me has always felt like the most beautiful love story is that sort of like time and circumstance can come in and take you away from each other, but despite the fact, like there's still a flame there. I just think that that's so beautiful.
I think it's Harboca something like that. I remember going to see his movies as a kid in London and Harville Pavlakowski.
Public Cloud Pavlakowski.
Okay, butchering the Polish. Yeah, I love that. Love is so why I love the vendors as well. The love that exists out of time, the love that exists out of temporal restraint conditions, the idea truly what the meaning for me of love is love it exists outside of everything else or the conditions of the world.
I think that's really beautiful.
Yeah, I agree with that, even though it is it is impractical to not be married to the person that you love.
Yeah, but I think that that's the perfect summation of it is that I think that's love is just impractical. And I think that a lot of you know, the reasons that sort of like people get in relationships or marriages so frequently are practical. It's like, well, this makes sense. You know, this person is in close proximity to me, we live in the same town, we go to the same church.
Like.
I just think that there's a lot of sort of like calculations that people do where they're like, yeah, this makes sense, and this is why I'm going to get married to this person. And I think that for me, sort of real love as I define it, is about impracticality. It's like, yeah, I know that that doesn't make sense that I'm married to this person, but I still love my boyfriend from eight years ago, right, But you know that's because love is confusing and mysterious and impractical.
I agree. I agree.
I fell in love with Addison while completely and utterly heartbroken and shredded and ruined so much that I didn't think that it was love until later, and then I realized that's exactly what it was the most impossible, the most impractical, the most implausible version of actually loving someone.
Yeah.
God, I want to go back and watch that film there.
It's amazing. Highly recommend it. Yeah, it's so beautiful.
What question would you most like answered?
That's a good one. What do people say to this one?
I'll tell you. I'll tell you a couple of things.
Yeah.
A lot of people want to know what happens when you die, and they want to know of the people that they love if they will see them again. That's probably the number one. The second is Aliens m h. And my absolute favorite of all time is Jamila Jamil, who said, does anybody really enjoy reverse Cowgirl?
I've worked with Jamila that sounds like.
Yeah, a good place together. It made me laugh so hard.
Yeah, yeah, I feel the way about having sex in the shower. I don't think anybody actually.
By the way, I said that on a list of things that I love and things that I hate, and I was like, the idea of sex in the shower versus sex in the.
Shower, Yeah, exactly fucking rotten. I got a harsh response. But it's a way to do it's.
Not fun, it's not and you think it's going to be, but it's not.
It sounds fun. Well, you don't have to I know.
I'm going to answer it. I was worried that everybody just must say the same thing, so I would, I think, alter the what happens when we die? And this is going to be unfair because it's going to be two questions. It is is God real? And if so, what does God want from us? I just think that there's just so much tumultuousness these days, and I think that we're in a crisis right now as human beings. I think we're in a crisis of meaning. Do you know the
third place problem? Have you? Have you heard about this?
No?
What is it?
So? The third place problem is the world used to be filled with all these third places, right And I think that England beats America this way because I think you still have like pub culture, you know, which is
sort of like a very real thing still there. But in America the third place was like, well, your first place is home, your second places work, and then the third place used to be like church or your bowling league, Like what are these places that you're going to to actually commune with other people that have nothing to do? With your family life at home or your work life. And there used to be sort of like all of
these things that people participated in. They used to go to church a lot, They used to be part of these social groups.
Yeah, be part of a community exactly.
And so now we're seeing all of these kinds of social groups contract. Church attendance's way down. People don't even really go into the office anymore. So like the first and second place, it's just one. Your home is your office, So you're not even getting out to go hang out in an office with your coworkers anymore. And so we're in this place where I think people have really lost faith and institutions, they've lost hope in the future. Young
people are seeing like the world literally melt. I just think that we've reached this place where people have lost faith in everything and lost meaning. There's no meaning for people and things anymore. And so I think that once we have that, especially in America, people don't even believe in America anymore. It's like what even is that, Like we don't even believe in the country as a sort
of like whole anymore. And we look at people as saying like, well, we've started dividing it into like red states and blue states as opposed to just sort of like an entire continuous nation. And so I think that for me, it's like I just really want something to give people meaning again. I'm hopeful that we can find some sort of semblance of national or sort of like global meaning and global sort of like hope.
Is that why you'd like to know if God Israel? Because God could potentially be that meaning?
Yeah, because I'm just like, what do you want from us? Man or woman? What are you really trying to do here? Even if it's just like, well, it's just an experiment to see if you guys can get along, Like even that is a semblance of a way forward.
It's really interesting is that idea of like, without cultural splicity, you lose meaning that when you literally filay out a version of coming together, whether that's literal or figurative, you do you lose meaning.
The center will not hold absolutely.
And I think that that, to me has become one of our primary difficulties as a species these days, is just I agree, total lack of meaning.
I agree, And you know what my little microcosmic observance, I mean, from where I live, moving into a place that has community. You've been to where I live in California, and that that little enclave, the way in which we check in on each other, and you do your elderly neighbors shopping, and there are kids who are the naughty kids and the people that drive too fast, and everybody connects around these things, good, bad and different, annoying, happy, joyful.
The weddings, the funerals, the memorial the walks, the sadness, the seeing somebody crying in the street, all of that stuff has refashioned me. Just my being in that community for the twenty four years that I've lived there. It radically changed the way that I interacted with the rest of the world. It radically changed the way that I was alone in a hotel room in a foreign city, which has always been sort of overwhelming and other and strange.
And I've long since thought that community building is the way in which we get back that, not dismantling communities because of our differences, but rather the commonality of living next door to someone, even if you don't agree with
their politics. There is something I don't know. I chat with my neighbor who's a Trump supporter, about our kids and swimming and how cold the ocean is and the weather and wather they'll be waves, and we have a really cordial relationship that makes me feel like there is a way of communicating that we've just forgotten about.
Absolutely, and there's purpose in that. You found purpose in building a community and taking care of others and seeing the good and sort of like your neighbor. I think that that, to me, that's all we really need. You know,
it's not like curing cancer. It's like that's all just like just a small semblance of something that's like, you know what, here's what you can do in your life that takes you out of your own head, that forces you to think about others for a second, that forces you to sort of like leave your home and sort of like participate in something that to me is all
it's just small adjustments. But we've all become so addicted to the internet and so closed off from the rest of the world that it becomes difficult to see outside of your own brain sometimes.
And yet it actually is actionable, like so much is not shit that we can change, and that actually it actually is something that you can go, Yeah, maybe I'm going to go and I don't know, knock on my neighbor's door. I think there's kind of incremental ways.
Yeah, out of the isolation.
Absolutely.
Can you tell me what person, place, or experience most altered your life.
My father, hands down. He's still alive, he's still with us, and he has by far had the most profound impact on me, as I've in great ways in ways that I really dislike about myself. And you know, much of what I've been trying to undo in therapy is lessons than my father taught me, not just sort of like the self criticism and stuff and the demanding nature that he had over us, but also the way that I learned to be a man from my father was my dad was very you know, being a man meant being
very stoic, very emotionally distant. You never let anybody see you cry, You never let anybody see that you're having a bad day. Nobody wants to hear you complain, like suffer in silence and move forward. And my dad was a Vietnam veteran, and so you know, he did two tours in Vietnam and came back with pretty bad pe PTSD. But they didn't really have a vocabulary for PTSD. Then nobody even really knew what that was. They called it shell shock, you know, And so he came back and
just white knuckled it for decades. And so growing up I just there was a real emotional distance with my father and I never saw him cry. He never spoke about his emotions. Really, it was always closed off. And so I that sort of led to me growing up that way, and I, as I said earlier, I was just very emotionally shut off, tamped everything down until it would explode sometimes in sort of like bouts of rage.
And that to me has been the sort of like biggest unburdening of my life is when I learned to be open and honest with people and just sort of tell people how I was actually feeling. Like the hardest thing in the world for me, a thing that I could have never said ever, even five years ago, was you hurt my feelings, Like saying to somebody like you hurt saying something as simple as like that hurt my feelings, because I would have been like, a man doesn't say that.
Man says you hurt my feelings, because that's expressing some sense of vulnerability.
Just being able to do it differently, whether it's recognizing that the voice in your head is your father's voice and allowing that to peter out, or being able to say to someone that hurt my feelings. Do you feel triumphants the wrong word? But do you feel that you have carved a different pathway?
Yeah? Oh yeah. And again I'm really happy that I did it when I did, because I think that it could have gone very poorly. It could have gone the other way if I didn't learn that. Like I said, I really do think that I was going to explode my life in some way. Yeah. I feel of every professional accomplishment I've had in the past six years, nothing is more valuable to me than the emotional strides that I've made. It's the biggest growth and most important growth
I've ever had in my life. And yeah, I would say triumphant is the right word. It does feel like because you know, people can't get out of their own way sometimes. And I will say, the thing that I think is one of the most impressive things about my father is that, at the age of eighty one, last year, I finally got him to start going to therapy.
Wow.
And so he now goes to therapy as an eighty two year old man and is trying to work through the stuff that he didn't work through for the previous sixty years of his life. And I think that it's so hard. It is so hard to admit that you are going through some stuff and that you need some help. That is a very very difficult to admit. It's very difficult to admit, especially for men. It's especially difficult for
black men to admit this. And it's especially if difficult for a black man born in the nineteen forties to say, like, I need some emotional help and I'm not doing well. And so I am just so incredibly proud of him, and he's told me that it's helping him, and so it does feel triumphant. I think that it is. It's a triumphant thing for somebody to be able to do that.
I agree.
And at eighty two, like my mom had started a new business a couple of weeks before she died, Like I think the idea of time running out, there's always time. There's always time, absolutely till that very last moment.
Okay, what would be your last meal?
Martini? Two glasses, that should be a Caesar salad, and a seafood tower.
Now do you like the grandiosity of the Seafood Tower as much as the seafood because.
I do, yes. I think that more more is more. I think there should be more spectacle in our food, in our di I like a table side caesar where they make the dressing in front of you with the egg and the thing. I like when they flombay things next to the table and they fire like. I like that.
I like it when they roll trolleys and it clackety can't the restaurant and there's gonna be a show exactly.
That is my favorite thing. And so I like the grandiosity of the Seafood Tower while also just sort of like really loving seafood. There's like a decadence to it. It's both elegant but also you're tearing tails off with your bare hands and stuff, so it gets kind of messy, and like it's just it's a good meal to share. I think that every meal it's really fun to be there with a group of people and be sharing that. That's my go to God.
That's so good.
And I'm going to tell you here in London they're not afraid of a spectacle. Eye witnessed the Seafood Tower the other day, complete with dripping seaweed and like it was. It was immense, and there was a tear that had two live crabs on it and they had rubber bands on that.
It just was awful. It was like the circus at.
The table, and I wanted to free the crabs and I wanted to grab them, get them down the toilet out into the world. And this now felt like I was back in Dekenzie in London with this guy. He got out a cigar and he took the rubber band off the crab claw, and I think he wanted His idea was that the crab was going to cut the cigar for him, but the crab just took the cigar.
And so now you've got a crab with a cigar, and now the guy's trying to light the cigar in the restaurant with all the people and like the weight. Now people are looking, oh no, this is going very bad.
What's going to happen?
And it was so funny because the waiters and the staff who'd been all with the pomp and the s arema and the whole thing, they literally had to come and kind of confiscate everything off this guy, like no cigar get rid of the light up, put the rubber band, no crabs for you, goodbye?
They shut it down.
I love it.
It was for about thirty seconds. It was absolutely mayhem.
That may have been my father. Actually I should check and see if he's dad.
Were you in London?
Oh my god, I could see him doing that.
In your life.
Can you tell me something that has grown out of a personal disaster?
Yes, So in my film. There's a scene in the film in American Fiction where two brothers are speaking and one of them tells his older brother, you know, this brother has just come out of the closet is gay. He's in his mid forties, he's married with children, and he's finally decided to come out as a gay man.
And so he's really exploring his new life. And their father has died about seven years prior, and so he says to his brother, I've been thinking of a lot about how dad died not knowing that I'm gay, and it makes me really sad that he never knew the sort of fullness of me. And his brother says, well, what if he had known and rejected you for it? And he says, well, I wouldn't have cared, because he
would at least know me. And that's what's important and that I put in there, because that is a speech that I wish I would have given myself about my mother. And I'm not gay, but my mother died not knowing the fullness of me. There was stuff that I kept
from her. I have tattoos, and my mother didn't know that I had tattoos until about three or four months before she died, because I was so nervous because I knew that she would disapprove and she didn't love tattoos, and so I was so nervous about showing her that I had tattoos. And I finally showed her, and you know, she didn't care. Of course she didn't care. She's unconditional love. Because my mother was disowned by her family for marrying my father because he's black, and so I never met
my grandparents. My mother didn't speak to her father until he was on his deathbed, and she said to me once, she said, I've tried to think of something that you could do that would make me not want to talk to you anymore. She said, I've thought of you murdering people, and like the idea of like you doing even the
world things in the world. There was still no way that I could ever stop talking to you or stop loving you, she said, even in that, and she said, especially not for marrying somebody with a different skin color than you. But that didn't penetrate. And I still hit a lot of myself from my mom, because I hit a lot of things from everybody. As I said, I was a stoic and I didn't talk about my emotions and I sort of like never actually grappled with my feelings, and so that to me, you know, it took me
a while. She died in twenty sixteen. I started really taking care of my mental health in twenty eighteen, and one of the things that I thought about was the fact that I was encountering all these new emotions and I was learning all this stuff about myself and learning why I did the things that I did, like what made me feel the way that I felt. And it was like wonderful because I was like, oh my God,
like I said, it's like a renaissance. Like I'm like, my mind is open to all these new things about myself that I'd never considered before. My relationship with my father, my relationship with my siblings, like all of this stuff was sort of all of a sudden, It felt like I was firing on all cylinders and learning all this
stuff about myself, and it was exciting. But then I remember being overwhelmed at this moment in time where I realized, like, but my mom's never going to know this version of me. She's only going to know the guy that was like emotionally closed off and withholding, and she's never going to know me at my fullest. And that made me so sad.
It made me so sad that I hadn't done the work early enough to let her see me at my best, to allow her to see me at a time when I feel like I've finally become the person that I've been trying to be my whole life, you know, and it took me forty two years to get here. But she's never going to see it, and it makes me sad.
Yeah, but you know what as a mother, As a mother, I can say, without a shadow of debt, the fact that you did it at all is all that matters. She would not want you burdened with the idea that she had to know that you did that. Yeah, she would just want you to do it.
Yeah, that's the best way to look at it. And I obviously get very emotional about it, but you know what, the thing that you're saying is true because it is like, yeah, as I said, I've never felt happier, I've never felt better. And it makes sense that you know that she was the catalyst for that because it's what she always wanted for me. You know. It's like looking back, like I said, like she told me when I was nineteen, I think you have depression, and eventually I sort of really forced
myself to deal with that and encounter that. So she was the catalyst in many ways, and so it was tragedy but it led to triumph.
Yeah. Yeah, well what a place to wind up.
I love this. This is great.
I can't thank you enough for your your candor and your kindness.
It's such an honor, it's such an honestly.
It's it's so brilliant to hear it, like I always feel that, like to feel the shared space with someone that you're speaking to, like the overlaps. Like Addison loves these ven diagrams. He's always making ven diagrams of our relationship.
What is him and what is me?
And what is our overlap, but it's so amazing when talking to people like you who trigger thoughts that I know I'll be thinking about this for a while. I know I'll revisit it and ponder things that you've said, and it's so amazing.
So thank you, so so much.
It's a true one. It's been a real delight to speak with you. You're one of my favorite people that I've met in recent years. You're very thoughtful and honest, and I could just talk to you all day.
So thank you, Thank you. Courd.
Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, Executive produced by Me and Aaron Kaufman, with production support from Jennifer Bassett, Zoe Denkler and Ali Perry. The theme music is also by Me and additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Special banks to Jim Nikolay Addison, O'Day, Henry Driver, Lisa Castello, Annik Oppenheim, a, Nique Muller and Annette Wolfe, A W K p R. Will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Morgan Levoy and Mangesh her Ticke Adore