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 Former
Yale fencer Jessica Yu was faced with a crucial decision
following graduation in 1987 -- law school or no law
school? At a time when many of her friends were going to law
school, Yu wasn’t sure that was the right career path
for her. An English major, she had a creative flair fueled
by the unyielding support of her parents.
Unlike other high-pressure parents, Yu’s folks indulged
her creative ways...and dissuaded her from attending law
school.
“A bunch of my friends were going to law school,”
she says from her Inscrutable Films office in Los Angeles.
“And when I asked my dad if I should go too, he said,
‘Don’t go to law school.’”
An excellent fencer and member of two NCAA national
championship teams (1984 and 1985), Yu is now a world renown
film director with an Academy Award under her belt. Shunning
law school never looked so good.
As a student at Yale, Yu studied English and spent much of
her free time on the fencing circuit.
“Fencing took up most of my weekends,” she says.
“I was on the team, but I was also on the national
circuit, so I was doing the college tournaments and national
tournaments at the same time. So, in some ways, I feel like
I spent more time fencing than I did in other college
experiences. But that certainly wasn’t a bad
thing.”
A two-time All-American and three-time All-Ivy fencer, Yu
was equally as successful as a student as she was an
athlete. She had her choice of universities that she could
have attended, but she says she chose Yale because of
fencing coach Henry Harutunian.
“I took fencing really seriously when I was in high
school,” she says. “And I met the coach Henry
Harutunian; he’s just an amazing person; and so, I knew that fencing was going to be a big
part of my life when I was in college. So that kind of
tipped the scales for my applying to Yale.”
She went on to have a great fencing career (see
aforementioned national championships and All-American
selections), but also had an equally spectacular academic
career. Yu was a first-team GTE Academic All-American her
senior year and an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship Award
winner. She calls the 1985 NCAA championship season her
fondest memory of her Yale fencing career.
“Fencing is such an individual sport, and I always
thought the ‘team’ label was kind of pushing it a
little bit,” she says with a chuckle. “I
didn’t necessarily feel that you had that much of a
connection with your teammates, but that year, we really
did. I remember that our fourth-string person had an
incredible bout where she beat someone that I think most
people didn’t think she’d have a chance to beat.
And she ended up winning the championship for us. That was a
great experience, and we ended up really pulling for each
other that year. It really felt like a team experience at it
was just incredibly fun.”
After a stint fencing around the world upon graduation, Yu
started doing some production assistant work in San
Francisco in 1989, working mostly on commercials. Shortly
thereafter, she began working at a bigger production company
in Los Angeles and began to make short feature films.
Her first short feature was titled “Sour Death
Balls” (which won several awards, including Best Live
Action Short at the Santa Barbara Film Festival) and was
followed by “Home Base: A Chinatown Called
Heinlenville.” Other shorts of hers include “Iron
Silk” and “Men of Reenaction.” In addition,
Yu was the associate producer on the Oscar-nominated
“Rose Kennedy: A Life to Remember” and the 1995
Academy Award winner, “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear
Vision.”
However, Yu is most famous for her Oscar Award-winning
documentary about Mark O’Brien, called “Breathing
Lessons.” The film captures the life of Berkeley,
Calif., poet and journalist O’Brien, who has been
confined to a 900-pound iron lung since contracting polio at
the age of six. Using his teeth and a rubberized pencil tip,
O’Brien writes essays about the world as seen through
the eyes of a severely disabled person. The documentary,
which had viewers and critics weeping throughout the film,
debuted at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival and won several
honors before the Academy Award, including the International
Documentary Association Achievement Award for Best
Documentary.
She is perhaps best known for her quip at the 1997 Academy
Awards as she accepted the Oscar for Best Documentary Short
Film: “You know you’ve entered new territory when
your outfit costs more than your film.” Admittedly, Yu
wasn’t sure what to do with the Oscar Award after she
received it. It now sits in her house.
“They give you a velvet bag for it and I always keep it
covered,” she says. “I’m not being
disrespectful &endash; I just can’t brandish it. I just
make sure the cats don’t knock it over.”
She comments that she struggled to get her legs under her
after hearing her name called for the award. As the pinnacle
of a filmmaking experience, Yu still recalls the night as a
dream.
“It was all sort of unreal to me,” she says with a
slight chuckle. “At the time, I was just doing
documentaries, so it’s sort of the last thing you
expect when you’re working on a low-budget documentary
to be standing there in a borrowed dress.”
Although Yu doesn’t fence anymore, she can still
quickly draw parallels between her experiences as an
All-American fencer and an Academy Award winning
filmmaker.
“In fencing you feel like &endash; even if it’s a
tournament &endash; you feel like if you do well, if you
win, or whatever, you feel like you earned it,” she
says. “But with a film, you have to feel that sense of
accomplishment once you finish the film, not necessarily
winning the award. It’s a wonderful thing to have other
people say that they like your film, but that can’t be
your reason for doing it. The award was icing on the
cake.”
These days, Yu is working on another documentary and is also
working for John Wells’ production company. She
recently directed an episode of “The West Wing”
for NBC and will direct an episode of “ER” in the
coming months. When asked if her athletic accomplishments,
filmmaking accomplishments, or television accomplishments
are the most special, she doesn’t hesitate to offer her
choice.
“Well, all of that pales in comparison to the fact that
I have a baby this year,” she says. “I know
it’s such a cliché, but it’s so true. All
that stuff was incredibly fun and good, but when you have a
kid it just changes your prospective.”
So is there a future Yale fencer in the house?
“I don’t know,” she says with a laugh.
“But I think it’s really important to be involved
with something that has to do with sports or athletics. So
you never know.”
As Yu looks toward the future with her husband — award winning writer Mark Salzman — and her new baby, she still keeps in touch with people of
her past. One of her good friends is Andrea
Metkus, a former teammate
at Yale (now a surgeon in San Francisco), and Henry
Harutunian, her coach at Yale (“He still looks the
same,” she says brightly.).
Nearly 15 years ago Yu was faced with the decision of
whether to attend law school or not. She obviously made the
right decision. Now, when posed with a question of where she
wants to be in 10 years, there is no decision to be
made.
“I want to do what I’m doing now,” she says.
“I just don’t want to be driving the same
car.”
--by Nathan Fry
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