BlackBook Magazine

The Oscar-winning, Emmy-nominated director of In the Realms of the Unreal returns with Protagonist, a Euripidean tale of "eternal hell," gay sex, and the Sweet Transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania. (And that's just the first vignette.)

By Nick Haramis

In 1997, when accepting her Academy Award for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, director Jessica Yu chuckled, “You know you’ve entered new territory when your outfit cost more than your film.” Now, ten years later, the Yale Graduate and onetime competitive fencer is laughing again, all the way to the awards podium, with her latest feature documentary Protagonist. The film centers on four men, each of whom recount in uncomfortable detail their struggle with obsessions past. Hans-Joachim Klein was born into a working-class German family, and devoted his youth to leftist activism, until crossing the line into unmitigated terrorism. Mark Pierpont, hoping to escape “eternal hell,” ignored his homosexuality to spread the evangelical word of Jesus. After killing his abusive father, Joe Loya goes on to rob over thirty banks. Mark Salzman, Yu’s husband, rehashes his adolescent experience with bullies, friendship, and the world’s most sadistic kung fu coach. Perched on the edge of a couch in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel, the Oscar-winning, Emmy-nominated director opens up about patricide, pathos, and why President Bush needs to see this film.

Director Jessica Yu, above, with puppeteers Rob Saunders and Eli Presser.

BLACKBOOK: What sort of movie did you set out to make?

JESSICA YU: I was asked to investigate Euripides, but to explore and think very outside of the box. This is probably so far beyond that box.

BB: Are you a Greek scholar?

JY: No, and with this film, people don’t have to brush up on Euripides. It’s really a way of structuring the story of these four men. I think people will get college exam anxiety flashbacks if they think that it’s demanding of them.

BB: The juxtaposition of puppets and talking heads is quite novel. How did you come up with this combination?

JY: I knew that there had to be some visual element connecting these stories, something to show that they were living similar lives. The second function was, as you said, to supplement the idea of talking heads in another storytelling possibility. With the exception of [Hans-Joachim] Klein, these men aren’t media figures. There’s not a lot of footage of them. Also, creepy puppets are just so cool. I remember I was like, “Oh my God, puppets! This is going to be so great!”

BB: What overarching struggle connects these men?

JY: This is a film about obsession. The same qualities that drive someone to tragedy are those that, in another context, might drive them to heroism and accomplishment. The nature of obsession is that you lose track of yourself in service of another goal. Protagonist, in some ways, is a cautionary tale about losing sight of oneself in that kind of quest.

BB: Given today’s political climate, these stories of extremism can’t help but seem somewhat charged.

JY: Certainly, that was on everybody’s minds, but I dropped politics as a conscious idea. I think it would have shown in the storytelling if I were trying to say, “George Bush needs to watch this film.” Although, it’s so funny, because in Q&A’s, people say that all the time. So I guess it’s in there somewhere.

BB: How else have audiences reacted to the film?

JY: A lot of people come up to me after screenings, telling their own stories. A long time ago, I saw Joe Loya give a talk about his experiences. There were some people in the audience who just could not get past the fact that he had been a bank robber: “What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he self-flagellating?” In this film, I think the comparison of the four stories makes it a little harder to say, “Okay, this man is bad, and this one is good.”

BB: I’m interested in the selection process. What were you looking for?

JY: By the end of my online search, I was typing in things like, “And then I asked myself, how did I get there? In one single moment, one violent action, everything changed forever.” I had these crazy quotes, but oddly enough, that is what led us to Klein. And I can’t remember what the search was, exactly, but all of a sudden I came across a badly translated German site. One of the Google translations was, “I, terrorist, not no more.” And I was like, “Whoa, perfect!”

BB: How did you know that these were the four subjects you were looking for?

JY: There’s a certain arc to the story. They had to fit that trajectory. There’s some logical or moral reason that they started on this path. They get caught up in something, they get obsessed, and then, boom! We were looking for people who didn’t then turn to another obsessive quest. They couldn’t just become fanatics for another side. What’s interesting is that later, as the film goes on, I realized that I didn’t have to revisit every character for every chapter, because I was able to checkerboard between their similar experiences. We would ask them the same question, and they’d say almost exactly the same thing, and I’d get these little chills down my spine.

BB: You cast your husband, whose narrative is much different than, say, killing one’s father or becoming a terrorist.

JY: That was a very conscious thing. We needed somebody whose trajectory was on a smaller scale. Also, we needed some humor, so the personalities needed to be very different. My guess is that most people aren’t going to be able to identify with a German ex-terrorist, but a suburban coming-of-age story is a little more accessible.

BB: As a filmmaker, what types of stories do you gravitate towards?

JY: Everyone likes to think that they’ve got their own unique approach, but I do tend to get drawn to people who are obsessives. I think my reasons for being drawn to various projects are on a subconscious level, because if they were conscious, I might not have that tickling curiosity to keep looking. When I look at somebody who is very obsessive, I think, “Oh, I’m not that bad.” [Laughs.]

BB: So, in a way, it helps to make you feel better about yourself?

JY: Oh, wow. [Laughs.] I feel like I should be lying down on the couch now.

BB: Why are all your subjects men?

JY: We consciously tried to find a woman, or two women. Women can become just as obsessed as men, and time after time, we’d be reading something and think, “This is really fitting.” But then, as things started to go awry, each woman seemed to sense that things were going badly. She’d realize she shouldn’t be doing this, and then her story would grind to a halt. We were looking for that person who runs full speed and hits a wall. And, more often than not, the woman would be walking, and she’d be like, “I think there’s a wall over there, so I’m just going to head this way.”

BB: How is this different from your work directing episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy?”

JY: “Grey’s” is a really great job and it keeps everything fresh. That said, I don’t think I could direct six episodes a year or anything.

BB: What did the Academy Award win mean to you?

JY: It didn’t mean, unfortunately, that I was given a giant bag of money on the front step. You know, they didn’t go, “Here’s the big foam check!”

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