Protagonist is the latest documentary by the very talented Jessica Yu. Her short film Breathing Lessons was the winner of the 1997 Oscar and was followed by the wonderfully creative In the Realms Of The Unreal about the mysterious artist Henry Darger. She is a master of exploring the odd and extreme in the everyday world around us. Her latest film is no exception as she opens our eyes to the good intentions of a terrorist and the secret homosexuality of a televangelist.
Protagonist inter-cuts pieces of ancient Greek Tragedy with the stories of four redeemed men. Each man tells an incredible story of dysfunction and obsession while the Greek text (performed by wooden puppets) creates a dramatic undercurrent for the true stories. It seems to ask the question: Can real life be as dramatic as classic tales of accidental incest and self inflicted eye-gouging? Yu came to the idea of mixing classic and modern stories when Greg Carr and Noble Smith of the Carr Foundation asked her to make a documentary about the Greek playwright Euripides. Yu says, “I had no idea how to do it, and so of course I wanted to try.” From there she looked for living people who had experienced tragedy and lived to tell the story.
Yu edits her own work and is meticulous in her preparation. While it is difficult at first to hold 5 stories in your head (the four men plus the Euripides play) it quickly becomes clear that you are in capable hands. The chaos of diversity starts to meld into repetitive themes of masculinity, revenge and obsession. The charisma of the subjects holds you captive as they describe a terrible past, for you know there must be a resolution if they are sitting there telling their story.
Jessica Yu
Laura Newman: I studied a bit of Greek mythology in college, so what's the definition of ‘protagonist’ you used in this film?
Jessica Yu: The word 'protagonist'? When I called it “Protagonist” I didn’t have any particular reason, it just sounded right. You know that saying that each person feels justified in his or her own actions? I was struck by that idea. How do we gain perspective? How does anyone learn anything? When you see a movie or read a drama and see someone else’s story there is always that thing where you know a little more than the person in the story. We have real people telling their stories and they are the protagonist of their own stories. I guess the idea is can we watch this film and think of ourselves as protagonists as well.
LN: I’m curious why so many of the protagonists you interviewed had these ‘bad boy’ pasts. That seems to be a theme.
JY: Yeah. These guys when they were growing up had circumstances and conflict that they didn’t know how to control. They were victimized or made vulnerable in some way and that sent them on a path where they wanted to gain control and master their circumstances. So, each one of them started out on his journey for some sort of logical or in some cases moral reasons. I thought that was important, that was the genesis. What someone does with that afterwards is not necessarily going to be logical or moral.
LN: There seems to be redemption in all these cases. Can you illuminate the classic elements of a protagonist’s story that you displayed as chapter headings in the film? Are those Greek literary terms? How did you create those?
JY: Some of the chapter headings I just made up. Those were the shared beats in the story between the four men. But it wasn’t taken from some classical text. There is one chapter called “Threshold” which was this moment when each of the men were poised on the Threshold of a irreversible action and so I have no idea if that is something from ancient Greek tragedy but I needed it in there, kind of as a signpost. But I also wanted people watching the film to know that there is this journey happening, that they are all kind of on the same journey. I wanted them to know that especially in the beginning of the film when the men’s stories are very distinct and you’re not sure what the connections will be. I just wanted to assure people that, “Okay, don’t worry, we know where we’re going.”
LN: At what point did the idea come about to intertwine puppetry and the Greek myths within the interviews?
JY: I knew I needed some visual connective tissue between not only the four stories but between them and this backdrop of the ancient Greek drama. I was thinking animation but the problem with animation, besides being very expensive (I love animation), but you can make it very specific. I wanted something that could be the same look for each story. It was after doing all the interviews and having a basic rough cut that I decided to do it. I was doing some research on how the Greek plays were originally staged and I knew that the actors wore these large fixed masks so the nose bleed section could see them and I thought that was a really interesting way of telling the back stories of the four men. I think what’s kind of cool about it, for instance, is you have Mark Salzman watching TV as a kid in his living room, but there it is and it looks kind of like a scene from an ancient Greek drama!
LN: Why did you choose only men to interview?
JY: This is so weird because when we were searching for the people who would be in the film, the idea was to have men and woman. We had the concept first and then we went out looking for people. It’s funny because it was me and my two producers Elise Pearlstein and Susan West and then some interns we had, we were all woman pretty much, we had like one guy. We’d meet at this wine bar every couple of weeks and everyone would bring in the people that they had, candidates that they researched, and out of like a couple hundred people there were literally only 5 or 6 woman who fit the criteria. I think it took us so long to find our final four because we kept looking for woman.
And then finally we realized that women were not having this experience in the same way men were. Obviously this is totally unscientific, but it seemed like women would become as obsessed as men in something, but when things started falling apart or not going well they would sort of see that things were falling apart. They would see that things were crumbling and they would say, “You know the signs were there and I knew it was almost over,” like they had this knowledge of that. And the men would be more likely to go full speed, head long into the wall and then they’d stop and say, “Oh my God! Where am I?” For the purposes of this story and for the dramatic purposes of that moment, what we were looking for was the crash and not the crumbling. And that’s why it turned out to be all men. At so many screenings all the guys in the audience will be nodding saying, “Yeah, that’s the way we are.” I’ve been thinking is there a companion piece you could do about women? It would be a different story I think.
LN: Do you have any idea what you think the classic female story would be?
JY: No. I haven’t really thought about it enough. I think I’m thinking about it too much in terms of this story. It’s odd because Euripides was famous for his depiction of female characters.
LN: What do you do with your subjects when you interview them? Particularly the first time you meet them to make them feel comfortable.
JY: Mostly just talk. I tell them about the film, what the process will be how long realistically it will take, there is no sense in really lying to people and saying it’s going to take an hour and a half when it’s going to take 3. I try not to talk to them too much about what we’re going to be talking about. Sometimes you get subjects who say, “Okay, what questions are you going to ask?” or, “I want to be prepared.” I just try to relax them and say, “Don’t worry about being prepared. We’re going to have a conversation.” I like to keep the heavy lifting for the interview. If people know too much about what you’re going to ask, they feel more nervous because they’re thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to say something profound.”
LN: When really you just want to capture them as they are.
JY: Exactly. And just for them to know that it’s not all on them to be brilliant and eloquent. If they are stumbling on some answer, you know, we’ll come back later and let them know that anything they want to add at the end, we’ll give them a chance to say that. So much of it is really picking the right people to make a film about.
LN: What was one of the most surprising moments during the interviews?
JY: There were surprising themes that came up that now, don’t seem surprising at all. Like the theme of masculinity and what it means to be a man. That was something that emerged in each of the stories. With Mark Pierpont, the gay ex-evangelist, there were some archival materials he had, some personal videos that I had no idea that he had, some from the days when he was on these religious shows. I was so amazed that he had them and that he was willing to share them with us. The other thing that was really impressive to me was how all four of the men were at a place where they could articulate what they’d been through without making excuses for themselves. It wasn’t like a confessional because it wasn’t’ something they had been hiding, it wasn’t a self-flagellation, it was more of a self-reckoning. This is who I was, this is what I did and I know why I did it. The film wouldn’t have worked if one of them had said, “That wasn’t really me.” They all really owned what they did.
LN: You must have 10 ideas swimming around in your head. What made you choose this one?
JY: There were a couple things. One was that I was approached about this idea. I get approached a lot which is that’s not a bad thing at all, but usually people have an idea and if you don’t want to do just that, or there is no funding attached and a lot of things go nowhere. With this I was so intrigued because it seemed like such an impossible idea to make a film about Euripides the person, but then I was really excited by the fact that Greg Carr and Noble Smith were open to any idea. They wanted it to be really creative and really different. There was also something about this process. We had a whole summer of pure brainstorming and a real feeling of ‘anything goes’. I didn’t have to write eight proposals outlining exactly what I was going to do and I could change the creative terms of the film while I working on it. You just don’t get that. I feel like the whole experience was so great and I’m completely spoiled for whatever happens next.
LN: Why do you think documentaries have been gaining such popularity over the last few years?
JY: Certainly there have been some wonderful films that have had an impact theatrically. I think on just the business side there have been films that have not cost a lot that have made a lot of money. Not a lot of films but enough that people notice. And then there is the access to good less expensive technology, that’s a big deal. Also there are a lot of topical documentaries that are coming out and there is a sense that it is part of the ‘do it yourself’ culture. Documentaries have by and large been very ‘do it yourself’ from the beginning. I think people see that as an accessible way to try to explore something going on that they care about. At the same time it makes it hard because there are a lot of films out there. I think that if documentaries don’t prove themselves as a commercial product, for lack of a gentler term, it does make it harder for more people to continue doing it for a living. I still don’t think it’s a very easy way to survive.
LN: Some people say that they think documentaries are becoming more popular among the American public, not only because of the reality-genre TV becoming more familiar to them, but also because people are really frustrated with the news.
JY: That is such a good point. I think that is really true. I think people feel like there is no depth in any conventional coverage of issues. There is good stuff on NPR and some good stuff on PBS but in terms of your day-to-day television experience it is really, really bad. So in order for people to know what’s really going on with any depth, they’ve got to look somewhere else. And documentaries are one place they are looking.
IFC Films releases Protagonist in theaters Friday November 30.