How did you first hear about the story of the triplets?
Tim Wardle: I was working as head of development for Raw, a BAFTA-award-winning production company in London. My job at that time was to work up all of the ideas coming through the company and pitch them, mainly for other people to direct, though I also direct. I tend to make a film every two years or so and really pick and choose my projects. One day a very talented young producer called Grace Hughes-Hallett brought in the idea. Instantly when I saw this story, I realized it was one of the most extraordinary documentary ideas I’d ever come across. Grace and I spent two years developing the project and trying to get it to the stage where it would be makeable, and Raw spent a further two years raising funding. By the time we got it financed, I was totally in love with the story and desperate to direct it, despite the fact it was my first feature (my previous documentaries were all for tv broadcast in the UK). I was very lucky that Raw and the funders agreed to give me a chance to make it.
How did Grace hear about it?
TW: Grace had previously worked on a film about adoption and so was interested in that area. She’d done a lot of reading around the subject and came across the story of the triplets.
When you first met Robert and David, two of the three identical strangers, what were your impressions of them?
TW: They are engaging, natural storytellers—they have real charisma—but they were also guarded and not particularly trusting of anyone. When you see what’s happened to them over the course of their lives, it’s not surprising that they don’t trust people easily. One of the advantages of the project taking five years to get off the ground and make was that it enabled us to build a degree of trust with them, which was essential for strong interviews.
What did it take to persuade them to do the film?
TW: A lot of time, really: meeting them in person, meeting their families. Lots of people have tried to tell their story before, and for a variety of reasons it’s never happened. When they first became famous in 1980, there was a lot of hype around them and people saying, “We’re going to make your story into a film or a documentary,” and it never happened. They’d been promised a lot that never materialized, so while they were interested in doing the film, I think they were also quite cynical about it. When I showed them the finished film for the first time, and they loved it, there was the sense that I had delivered on my promise and that was great.
The triplets’ unique backstory threw up all kinds of interesting dilemmas for us. For example, normally with this kind of film where people are delving into really difficult things from the past, you would put them in touch with a psychologist before filming starts to ensure that they are emotionally robust enough to deal with it. But at the same time we were also acutely aware that the brothers don’t have a very high opinion of psychologists because of what happened to them. Ultimately we did make the offer to them and they chose not to take it up, and after careful consideration we decided to press ahead without it. Throughout production, we had to be constantly aware that while it’s an extraordinary narrative from a filmmaker’s perspective, it’s also the reality of the triplets’ lives; they were manipulated and lied to over decades and decades.
Why did the other people who tried to make this film fail? And why did you succeed?
TW: During production, a number of people told us about three previous attempts by major US networks to tell the story, two in the 1980s and one in the 90s. In at least one of these cases, the film was apparently pretty much finished and ready to go when it was pulled at the last minute by senior management – one of the filmmakers involved told us they never got to the bottom of what happened. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about the political and media connections that some of the people and organizations involved in the study may have had. I definitely agree with Lawrence Wright’s suggestion in the film that there are a lot of powerful people who would like to have this story silenced. I think we succeeded for two reasons, firstly because a lot of time has passed since the study started, many of those involved have passed away (though some are still alive and very reticent to talk about it) so there were fewer people actively trying to stop us than there might have been in the past. Secondly, I think we’d learned from the failures of previous filmmakers and planned very carefully in terms of who we approached to talk about the story, and when and how we approached them.
What were your own thoughts and feelings when you first heard about the Twin Study?
TW: I’m very interested in psychology—I studied it at university— particularly what happened in the '50s and '60s when interest in the subject first really boomed, and there were a lot of experiments that were ethically dubious by today’s standards. I don’t believe that the people who conducted the Twin Study were evil. Lawrence Wright has this phrase that he uses: “noble cause corruption,” to explain why good people with the best intentions sometimes do bad things. He believes these scientists were genuinely trying to further human knowledge by answering the nature-nurture question, and in the process lost perspective on the human cost. My personal feeling is that there was probably a significant element of ego and ambition involved as well, but to me that just makes it a more interesting story. I’m not interested in making a film about goodies and baddies, I want to make a film about human beings in all of their rich complexity. We didn’t want to demonize the scientists, but it was important, because we were telling it from the triplets’ perspective and their families’ perspective, to acknowledge that what the study did was hugely damaging on a personal level. You can still see the damage today.
The two psychologists who were connected to the study who appear in your film don’t come off particularly well. How do you feel about that?
TW: It’s important to reiterate (as the film does) that the two psychologists interviewed were quite peripheral figures in the study. Natasha was Neubauer’s research assistant, but was never involved in the study itself, and Lawrence only worked as a research assistant on the study for nine months before he left. So if they seem unapologetic in places it is probably because they don’t feel they have much to apologise for because they weren’t the people who conceived the study or were driving the study. The film also emphasizes the importance of the historical context - as Natasha says, in 1950s and '60s ‘this was not something that seemed to be wrong.’ Lawrence admits that from today’s perspective ‘it was undoubtedly ethically wrong.’ I think it’s something that still bothers him even though he was only involved for a relatively short period of time. In many ways, I think Natasha and Lawrence should be applauded for talking about the experiment. There are many people who were much more involved in the study who we approached to take part in the film and refused to even talk to us on the phone. Some are still practicing psychiatrists in New York today. Without people like Natasha and Lawrence speaking out, we’d know even less about the study than we do. I guess when placed in the context of hearing about the damage that the study did, there’s always the danger that the audience is not sympathetic to the psychologists in the film. And it’s not that I want the audience to be overly sympathetic to them, but I want the audience to understand why the people involved in the study did what they did.
And what about Lawrence Wright? How did you get connected to him?
TW: As far as I’m aware, Lawrence is the first journalist to write about the study and bring it to wider attention. It was known about in very small circles within the twin research community, where it was regarded as highly controversial and something of an embarrassment. In 1995, Lawrence was writing a New Yorker piece about separated twins, and after speaking to a number of leading twin researchers, he was pointed to this obscure paper by one of the people who worked on the study. It’s mentioned briefly in his New Yorker article, and then he did more research and included a chapter on it in his later book, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are.
I was a bit nervous about contacting Lawrence as he’s something of a legendary journalist (he won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower) and incredibly busy, but he was very warm and friendly. When we travelled out to Austin to film with him, our first introduction was at a gig where he was onstage playing keys with his blues band! As the man who ‘uncovered’ the experiment (at least in terms of the wider public conscious), he was a crucial part of the story, and the first journalist to contact the triplets about Neubauer and the study.
The film takes a very unconventional and ultimately very powerful approach to the telling of the story. When did it become clear to you that you would construct the film in the way that you have?
TW: The benefit of spending four years trying to get the film off the ground was that it allowed me to spend a lot of time thinking about the triplets’ story, and when we would reveal certain things. There are elements to their story that play out like a psychological thriller, a Bourne-style film with questions of identity. I thought it was really important to do justice to that story. And to do justice to the triplets story you really have to think, When were they discovering information? You want the audience to be in the same position that they were and to go through it with them. To align audiences with the triplets’ point of view, you have to keep your audience in the dark just as they were.
What’s really interesting for me as a filmmaker is that in this movie you have two completely separate genres of documentary filmmaking going on. You have the past tense, archive and reconstruction story, and then you have present tense vérité or what we call in the UK “actuality.” They’re very different types of filmmaking in terms of tone and pacing and it was a real challenge to make those work together. Past tense stories work are often cut so tightly it’s almost like watching a drama play out, whereas when you’re in vérité mode things tend to be much more loose and free-flowing. To move between those two is very challenging. It’s why I included that section in the film when the triplets stand up and walk out of the formal interview – it’s like a decompression moment in between the two styles of filmmaking.
Let’s talk about the financing. How did that come together?
TW: We had interest fairly early on from Channel 4, one of the main broadcasters in the UK, because the commissioning editor there had - 10 years earlier - tried to make a film about the female twins who are mentioned briefly in our film. But they could only commit around a third of the funding we needed to make the film. We then spent ages trying to raise money in the UK from major film funders and got a long way but ultimately they turned us down. Right when we were starting to give up hope, the Sundance Institute came in with a small amount of development money. So we shot a taster reel of the triplets telling their story, and decided to look at US funding. When we first pitched the project with the reel there was immediately massive interest. In retrospect, we should’ve gone to the US right from the start.
We had a lot of interest from major funders, including CNN Films. Raw had a good existing relationship with CNN, and also one of my previous bosses had worked with Courtney Sexton, the commissioner for CNN Films, when she was at Participant, and had nothing but good things to say about her. As soon as we spoke to CNN Films, I just felt they got the film and it enabled us to keep Channel 4 as part of the package. It’s easy to wax lyrical about your funders after you’ve made the film, but the relationship we had with CNN Films is genuinely one of the best relationships I’ve ever had with a broadcaster or funder. They were amazing. They gave us very concise, very helpful and supportive notes that had a really positive impact on the film. It’s not often that you can say that.
Was there ever any concern, given what had happened with previous films being shut down, that that would happen again?
TW: Yes, if I’m honest. Not in terms of CNN Films or any of the other funders pulling the plug, but every time something would happen or we’d lose access to someone or something, we’d think, “Who’s pulling the strings here?” Myself and the producer Becky Read spent a lot of time convincing each other not to be paranoid because once you start down that road, you can get paralyzed.
Do you think that the film is going to break the Twin Study wide open and that all of the records connected with it will now be released?
TW: I would love it if they were but I suspect it’s unlikely. Instinctively you think that there should be total transparency with the study and that all those who were subjects should be informed, but the organization that has control over the records is saying that there’s an issue of confidentiality and privacy with the people who’ve not yet been identified as subjects in the study. There’s a moral and ethical dilemma about whether they should be informed at the age that they are now (they’re probably in their fifties or sixties) that they were part of a scientific experiment and that they have a twin, possibly deceased, who they’ve never met. It’s a huge decision and I do understand why the organization in question is nervous about releasing all the records. Personally I feel they should.
What are your own feelings on nature versus nurture?
TW: During the five years it took to develop and make this film, I got married and had a son, and that changed how I thought about Nature vs Nurture. On a personal level, I would love to believe that environment is absolutely key, but biology is clearly very powerful. From the moment my own son was born, he had a personality. We think that we have free will and that we can shape our lives and the lives of our children but actually that’s only half the story. I think the simplest way of saying it, as Lawrence Wright puts it in the film, is that your genetics give you a tendency to move in certain directions and behave in certain ways and your environment shapes whether and how those biological impulses are expressed.