Jessica Yu's previous documentary feature, In the Realms of the Unreal, did a scarily inventive job of fleshing out the fantasy life of the reclusive "outsider artist" Henry Darger and detailing the lonely existence from which Darger had only his imagination as escape. For her next trick, Yu was offered the job of making a film about one of the great shapers of classical tragedy, Euripides. Yu took them up on it, sort of: her new film Protagonist intercuts between four men as each describes part of the major dramatic arc of his life, according to Euripides' chain-reaction formula of "Provocation" followed by "Opportunity", leading to "Doubt", etc. Yu sifted through hundreds of potential candidates before settling on her four stars. As it happens, the final four included her husband, the writer Mark Salzman, who narrates a hilarious account of his adolescent attempt to transform himself into Caine from Kung Fu. [Also memorably retold in his memoir Lost in Place. — ed.]
The others are Hans-Joachim Klein, a former German terrorist who participated in the 1975 attack on meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna (and who can also be seen in another current documentary, Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate); Mark Pierpont, who spent years proselytizing for Christianity as a "cure" for homosexuality, using himself as Exhibit A, before he snapped out of it; and Joe Loya, whose rough childhood shaped him into a nihilistic serial bank robber. About the worst thing you can say about the finished film is that, with four good stories split up over the course of its running time, it can leave you a little hungry for more, and in this interview with Aaron Hillis, Yu confirms that she had to cut out a lot of good stuff. (Here's hoping the DVD will make room for some choice deleted scenes.)
One surprise is that, having concentrated on getting the subjects who seemed best suited to her game plan, she found herself making a movie about what seems to be a specifically male form of craziness. She was looking for people who thought they "had to go on this quest where they had lost track of the original idea — we called it the 'Fever' stage — and then that fever needed to be broken by one moment, this dark epiphany, where they realized, 'What am I doing?'. . . It's something you see in drama all the time, in narratives, but it hardly ever happens in real life, yet it seems to have happened to them. The five or six women we found, when things went awry, tended to notice things were falling apart. Then it would go to an end and they would stop what they were doing. But the men seemed to be going full speed and then crash into a wall. That, for many reasons, was what we were looking for: the crash, not things crumbling."
— Phil Nugent