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, filmmaker Taika Waititi is just the right person to direct a film based on the novel, he says.
“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 tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.
