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Features
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Oscar Watch: Jessica Yu
Before going through the John Wells TV mentorship program, Jessica Yu won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject. This year, she’s in the running for another non-fiction statuette.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
By Pam Grady
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
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Filmmaker Jessica Yu
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As Jessica Yu's documentary In the Realms of the Unreal makes its way into theaters this winter, it does so with a certain hint of irony.
The film's subject, Henry Darger, now considered one the United States' foremost outsider artists, lived his life in obscurity in Chicago, his vocation hidden from the world until his landlords discovered his secret when they went to clean out his room after illness forced him to move in the final months of his life. Although Darger was a true underground phenomenon, Yu's film is anything but: not only is it coming out at a time when docs are enjoying a higher profile, but the film has joined such sterling titles as Super Size Me and Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants on the short list of 12 films being considered for a Best Documentary Oscar nod.
Yu is no stranger to that kind of acclaim. In addition to being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival for In the Realms of the Unreal, Yu won the Academy Award in 1996 for Best Documentary Short for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien. She also won an International Documentary Association award for her 1994 effort, 89 mm od Europy.
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Diorama Films
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Artist Henry Darger
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"I couldn't have chosen a more difficult subject, but I just found him so compelling," says Yu of Henry Darger during a recent interview with FilmStew. "The other thing is that there is such a mountain of evidence to grab onto. It was very freeing at times, but it couldn't be a conventional film in that way. It forced me to be more creative in the storytelling and that turned out to be really an adventure."
Darger died in 1973 at age 81, leaving behind no family and only neighbors whose recollections weren't always clear. Only three photographs are known to exist of the man. But while the biographical data is scant, the work he left behind is massive: the 15,000-page novel that lends Yu's film its name, about seven sisters involved in a bloody war against an evil army; sketches; songs; collages; and hundreds of paintings illustrating the little girls in the novel, in battle and play, some even drawn nude with penises.
Yu says her fascination with Darger began over 15 years ago when she saw some of his work exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum or Art (LACMA). Years later, when she visited Chicago, journalist, Ted Shen introduced her to Darger's final landlord, Kiyoko Lerner, who in turn brought Yu to see Darger's then perfectly preserved room (it was dismantled in 2000, shortly after Yu finished filming there).
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Kiyoko Lerner
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Darger's 'Storm Brewing'
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"It's not a tiny room, but it's a small room to live in for most of your life," recalls the 38-year-old filmmaker who, despite her 1996 Oscar, was only able to make inroads into Hollywood after being picked for John Wells’ TV mentorship program. "It was almost like a nest that was feathered with all of these pictures and toys and little religious figures and, of course, paint materials.”
“The presence of this person was so strong in the room, even after 27 years,” she continues. “It was one of the few places I'd been in that felt so particular. I started to get a sense of who this person was behind these bizarre and fantastic paintings."
Through her research, Yu became immersed in Darger's world, a process she likens to the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin, with its story of a girl confronted with an entire room of straw that she must turn into gold. For a time, she dedicated herself to trying to read all 15,000 pages of the novel on microfilm, but quickly realized that the dense, single-spaced pages were not meant to be a reading experience.
"This was a writing experience,” she recalls. “He wrote it for the joy of coming home after a crappy day at work and having some adventure happen, having some drama."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Early mentor John Wells
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“There are certain conflicts that are played out, but they are played out again and again and again,” Yu adds. “So what I tried to do, besides reading the first 1,000 pages, was to skip around and read 100 pages here, 100 pages there, 15 pages here, and so on, until I got a sense of what the rhythms and themes of it were.”
Yu, married to writer Mark Salzman and the mother of two young daughters both born after the Darger project started, found herself becoming almost as hermit-like as Darger himself during her research. “It was pretty funny,” she admits. “After a while, my office looked like a mini-Darger room, just because I had volumes of things and stuff and clippings.”
“In that way, it was actually a great place to live for a while,” she maintains. “I was so entranced by the whole thing, it was like being in a state of wonder for a while. [But] I had the luxury of stepping back into my own world of people and everything. He didn't have that; that was it was for him."
In the end, Yu made two crucial decisions to determine the style of the film. One was to have a little girl narrate it as a way to get away from the traditional documentary narrator. The other was to animate some of Darger’s work.
"When I would read the novel, I would hear little girls' voices," explains Yu, who chose The Cat in the Hat’s Dakota Fanning to voice the narration. “I wanted the sense of this not being a traditional documentary. It was not a definitive analysis of his work, but more of an imaginative experience of this story."
Meanwhile, animating some of Darger’s prodigious output was a much more time-consuming process. Yu decreed that her team of seven animators that could only animate what was already in the paintings. All told, the process of editing and adding animation to the documentary spanned a full two years.
“There was the story he wrote; there were the paintings; there were sketches of the different characters; and the lists and the maps and the lyrics he would write to the music,” she says. “It was like he was creating elements of a film, so I felt like if I could bring them together, it would be a natural way to tell the story."
Although Yu’s first documentary win brought her to the attention of various TV producers, no one wanted to hire her for lack of direct episodic helming experience. It wasn’t until producer John Wells (ER, The West Wing) stepped up to the plate and made Yu became the first director in his Diversity Program for Directors that things started to fall into place.
| Yu remains a busy TV director and is currently developing her first feature, an indie collaboration with actor-writer Jayce Bartok called The Cake Eaters. Although she's excited to be exploring the narrative realm, the real payoff for Yu was to be able to work on her latest documentary without having to worry about how to pay the rent.
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“Sometimes, when you work on a documentary and you feel like, God, you've got to make some money, then you feel guilty for that or if you're just doing commercial stuff, you feel, oh, you know, like you’ve lost that side of yourself,” she says. “This way, I kind of have the luxury of having both worlds. I'm lucky in that way."
“[But] there's still a feeling that documentaries should be sort of more issue-oriented films,” she adds. “With this particular project, people might be interested in the idea of an artist, an outsider artist. But when you say, 'Little girls with penises', you know, the discussion could end.'”
On the other hand, if In The Realms of the Unreal is among those lucky enough to be singled out by the Academy on the morning of January 25th, 2005, no one in Hollywood will have any problems tackling the topic of transgender art.
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