Taika Waititi to direct adaptation of the award-winning novel James, author says

Writer Percival Everett says Kiwi film-maker Taika Waititi is the right person to direct the film version of James, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Photo / NZ Screen Awards

By RNZ

In his 2024 novel James, Percival Everett reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved black man who joins young Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River.

With his talent for balancing difficult material with humour, film-maker Taika Waititi is the right person to direct a film based on the novel, Everett said.

“It would be very easy for James [the movie] to become really quite earnest, and I don’t want that to happen to it. I think that Taika and I can figure out a way to strike the right tone,” Everett told RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

Everett, who is also a professor of English at the University of Southern California, said James wasn’t written out of some “burning desire” to explore the Huckleberry Finn character; the idea came to him while playing tennis.

“I hit the ball out of the court, and as I watched my shot sail into the fence I thought to myself, ‘Has anyone ever told the story of Huck Finn from the point of view of Jim?’”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is “flawed”, as most really interesting novels are, and still important, Everett said.

Even though Huck Finn’s relationship with Jim is the only positive one that the boy has with an adult male in Twain’s 1885 novel, his depiction of the fugitive slave reflects “the stereotypic representation of black people that’s been perpetuated through the last 400 years”, he said.

For Everett, the most difficult part of retelling the 19th-century classic from a new perspective, though, was “getting some distance” from his deep admiration for Mark Twain’s prose.

To “blur” the 19th-century writer’s style so he could rewrite the story, Everett said he read Huckleberry Finn 15 times in a row until he was “thoroughly sick of it”.

In James, Everett reveals how enslaved black people, in order to survive, had to pull off feats of “improvisational genius” in communication with whites.

While his novel shows the harsh realities of being black in America, the writer said that because of his tendency to be “pathologically ironic” it also delivers some laughs.

In creative work and interpersonal interactions, humour is a “wonderful tool”, Everett said.

“If I meet you on the street and you’re nervous and we’re awkward and I can make you laugh, then you relax somewhat.

“It’s the same with art. It’s the same with fiction. If I can break down a wall, then I’m free to do some other things which make you think.”

– RNZ