So enough years have passed to go on the record. Yeah, it was a struggle to make SOUR DEATH BALLS. The project generated a lot of buzz from the get-go. I was in talks with Warner Brothers for months, but they balked at my insistence on casting unknowns. It would be perfect for Jodie, they'd say. I knew what that meant. Attach the big name and a few months later, SDB becomes A Film By someone else.
With other studios the battle was over the films projected length. Couldn't I just add, say, another 85 minutes or so? No, I wasn't willing to sacrifice my vision so they could sell more popcorn. Sometimes the sticking point was the sour death ball itself. Was its extreme sourness enough to wow the 18-25 crowd? Couldn't it also burst into flame? And was I aware that shooting in black and white would kill box office? The doubters started to line up and take numbers.
I came closest to making the film with Paramount, but that fell apart as well. The film, they felt, was simply too bleak, the sour death ball too relentless in its attack. As one executive infamously protested: Its just that, in the end, the sour death ball is still so sour. Couldn't it sweeten up a little?
"Look," I said. "Maybe you live in a world where every candy has a soft gooey center, but those aren't the streets where I grew up." And I left. Six months and several maxed-out credit cards later, the film showed at Sundance, and from there well, enough said. You don't polish the trophies when company's over.
Biography:
Jessica Yu is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK OBRIEN, an intimate portrait of the writer who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung. Her black & white short, SOUR DEATH BALLS, won several awards, including Best Live Action Short at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, and was featured at Berlin, Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney and on the national PBS series ALIVE TV. Yu serves as an Artist Trustee on the board of the Sundance Institute, and was on the Board of Directors of the International Documentary Association, where she was an organizing member of the first International Documentary Congress. Yu's current documentary feature project, PROTAGONIST, compares the experiences of four men who have experienced a similar kind of epiphany. It is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2006.