One of Britain's leading filmmakers, James Marsh arrives with his first documentary feature since 2008's Oscar-winning Man on Wire. Like that, Project Nim is an American tale from the 1970s, blending dramatic reconstruction with archive footage and fresh interviews.
Based around a scientific experiment to see if chimpanzees can communicate with humans via sign language, it traces test subject Nim's heart-wrenching journey as he's loved then abandoned by those running the project.
A film where the humans are just as much under observation as Nim is, Marsh brings in several key players - from behavioural psychologist Herbert Terrace, who instigated Project Nim, to Bob Ingersoll, a student at the primate facility where Nim was born who later became one of his biggest champions. Below, the director talks about what drew him to telling Nim's story for a modern audience, how his Oscar win for Man on Wire affected his career and opens up on his next film, Shadow Dancer.
Q: Do you think Project Nim is as much a film about us as it is a chimpanzee?
A: One of the starting points for me in the actual film was what the presence of this animal flushes out in us in terms of behaviour. So that was definitely something...the film has a protagonist, a chimpanzee, but in a sense he's holding a mirror up to us, and how we conduct ourselves and what we do with him, when we have - in a sense - total power over what is an intelligent, sentient creature. I'm not aware of it making any harsh judgement. But I think that the behaviour is there to look at and to understand. And I think I agree, I'm not sure if we do come out of this terribly well.
Q: One of the few humans to emerge in the film with any dignity is Bob Ingersoll. Apparently you bonded over Bob Dylan when you first met...
A: We did! In San Francisco, when I went to meet him. So we had some common ground there already. Of all the people in the story, he's Nim's most steadfast ally. And the person that perhaps understands him best. What is interesting about that is that Bob is merely an undergraduate student at this time - he had no real power. And yet he was this one person is this very picaresque tale that is able to construct a very good relationship with him over years, which no-one else is able to do.
Q: What did you make of Jim Mahoney?
A: He's an extraordinary character in a way. One of my favourite characters in the story. I liked him very much when I met him as a person. He's a very thoughtful, very gentle man. I think you see his agonies, even when he's working with chimpanzees - and part of a culture, perhaps. That's a whole other issue, but he's in that culture in my view, trying to do the best he can, given that culture exists. And towards the end of our film, and his time in that culture, he literally saves sixty odd chimpanzees from a much worse fate they were facing when his facility closes down in the Nineties. And I think he's truly a good man in a bad world.
Q: Sadly, you couldn't meet Nim. So what research did you attempt?
A: I spent time around chimpanzees. I spent a few days in a facility in Lafeyette in Louisiana. I also went to Copenhagen zoo, which had a very good chimp facility there. I'd go there and look at them and hang out. I'd go for hours and hours, looking at their social behaviour. It's very unnatural to see a chimpanzee in captivity - the first thing that one knows, or learns, is that captivity, like for us, is a really terrible thing for chimpanzees. As we find out in the story, isolation is probably the worst thing you can ever do to a chimpanzee - isolate him from other chimpanzees and people to interact with. But, yes, it would've been great to have met Nim - and great to have interviewed him! But that wasn't possible, largely because our story is what it is. It's essentially really quite a tragic story, ultimately.
Q: What are your feelings towards Herb Terrace, in particular when he denounces his findings?
A: Let's be clear about what Terrace's question was: can a chimpanzee construct a sentence? And that implies 'Can you be endlessly creative with language, when you have the paradigm for language?' In the way that children...if you've been around them or had children, in a week of them learning a few words, they stick them together in all kinds of ways. They mimic and repeat the same sentence over and over again. That's his question - and the answer to his question is 'No'. I wouldn't particularly disagree with that conclusion to that particular question. What the film shows is there is a whole repertoire of communication, based on their desire to communicate with us, as well as our desire to impose a construct on them. Which is language. Language is a human construct. We're saying 'Can you learn this very particular human skill?' And of course, the implications that they can't is interesting too. Maybe it is unique to humans.
Q: Yet Bob proves there is a level of communication that can be achieved...
A: Yes. In Bob's testimony and experience, you can have a very rich communication with a chimpanzee, if you're prepared to meet them half way and understand what their needs are and want they're about and how they communicate. They use signs. They use body language, the same way we do. They use hoots and yelps. So Terrace's question is a very minimalist one, and the answer has not been disproved. But there is a whole area of interaction with chimpanzees, which he wasn't really alive to when he was doing the experiment. It was only about 'Can we drill him with words and give him a vocabulary?' I wouldn't disagree with the conclusions, and I don't think anyone has published anything to the contrary. But what Terrace did not set out to evaluate is what level of communication can you achieve with a chimpanzee? Clearly it's quite sophisticated.
Q: Who was most reluctant to come on camera?
A: The person who was most reluctant to talk was Jim Mahoney, for reasons about the potential misunderstanding of his role in medical research, and indeed because of the experience he's had with people who are against someone who was in that world. So his reluctance was based on that. But Terrace himself, this is what he's known for. It's one of his achievements, I guess. He was quite happy to talk about it on the level you see in the film. He wasn't happy to talk about some of the more complicated emotional dimensions to it, which he didn't seem to see at the time. Therefore I wasn't at all surprised that he wasn't very candid about the relationships that were unfolding around Nim. Not just the romantic relationships, but also Joyce's antagonism towards him. He was like, 'She doesn't like me - oh that's strange!' He had no idea. The issue for the film is that there's a level playing field now.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: At the time of the experiment, Terrace is in a position of power and authority. He's in a privileged position. But thirty years on, he's not. There is no hierarchy in the humans anymore. I wanted to know what happened and who saw what. Therefore we don't privilege him with any authority - why should I? It's not about that. It's the story of Nim, the chimpanzee, and not the professor or the experiment. Which of course is a big part of the story - don't get me wrong. But it's not the whole story. I'm suspicious of power structures anyway, and therefore that felt like part of the story. There's a power structure in place during that experiment that created what it created and I didn't want to privilege that thirty years on.
Q: You manage to alternate features with documentaries. Is that a plan?
A: It's by good fortune as much as it is by chance. Certainly, I'm very lucky to be able to do this - and I would like to keep doing this. I really enjoy making documentaries but they do exhaust you in a particular kind of way. They can be much more time-consuming when you start working on them, and there's a slightly different skill-set involved too. On a feature, once you've spent years developing it, once it actually happens, it's a much shorter period of time traditionally, and I like that. I also like the collaboration with actors. The freedom to use the camera in a more sophisticated manner than you can in a documentary - though I do try and, as you know, incorporate reconstructions as if they were scenes in a movie.
Q: Do you think we see a lot of that in Project Nim?
A: They're a bit more discreet than they were in Man on Wire. They're more based on imagery. And the suggestion of events that have either just taken place or are about to happen - they're more elliptical in that way. But they're part of the vocabulary of the film. They're to tell the story, to put you there, to make it immediate, to make it feel like it's unfolding, in a way that a traditional film narrative would unfold. But I'm very lucky to be able to do this and I mean to continue it if I can. I really enjoy both different genres and what they offer creatively.
Q: You're now working on another feature, Shadow Dancer. What can you tell us?
A: It's an espionage thriller that happens to be set around the peace process in Northern Ireland. So it's not a 'Troubles' film in the traditional sense. It's actually taking a part of the conflict that hasn't been examined dramatically so much, and it's a great script. It's based on infiltration of the IRA and visa versa, around the peace process.
Q: Who have you cast?
A: It's Clive Owen, and I'm very excited by that. And Andrea Riseborough, who is essentially playing...the protagonist of the story is essentially a young female IRA volunteer who gets caught red-handed in London, and is then turned into being an informant - much against her wishes. There are all kinds of reasons why she agrees to do that - not least being a mother, which is used to get her to do what they want. So that's the starting point for what becomes a very twisty, plot-driven thriller, with some big surprises. No one in the story knows what's going on.
Q: Did you take a look at films like Hidden Agenda that have dealt with this?
A: I tried to avoid seeing them. What we're trying to do is something...in a sense, there is a prescribed style for that kind of film. You want to say 'Why should there be? Why is this style attaching itself to the Troubles?' And the best of those films is Bloody Sunday, which is an extraordinarily made film. It makes you feel outraged. It's a brilliant piece of work, that. But what we're trying to do is something that is not trapped in a style but feels like you should do it in a gritty way. We're trying to do something that's a bit more sleek, maybe more in keeping with the American thrillers of the Seventies. Let's bring them back again. As a body of work, look at [Alan J.] Pakula's work - and you think 'Wouldn't it be great to be able to do something as good as this but make it feel right in a British or Northern Irish context?'
Q: How much did your Oscar for Man on Wire help your career?
A: I wouldn't know. What I do know is that I decided, on the back of Man on Wire, to come back to Europe - and to work more with European producers and partners and come back to Britain, essentially. I wasn't able particularly to thrive as a filmmaker, doing the work I wanted to do in America. That was quite a conscious choice. There is an assumption that Hollywood comes beating down your door if you make a documentary that wins an Oscar. That didn't happen in anyway whatsoever. And I was glad to make this very positive jump back to Europe where I felt - and I'm right, I think, thus far - you can make work on your own terms, that you believe in - with good producers and good people. Man on Wire was made that way. It wasn't an American production. Red Riding was a lovely experience - the first film I did when I came back to Europe. And then there was Nim, which was funded by British sources.
Q: So Project Nim is not an American production, then?
A: Like Man on Wire, it's set in America, but all the money for Nim is British. And the film I'm about to do is a UK Film Council, BBC and Wild Bunch [co-production]...so this feels like a good choice. I'm not sure on any given year, the number of films that are made in America, how many of those are any good. You either choose - which I've done already - to be very poor and make an independent film for very little resources. Or you go to Hollywood. And there's not much in between those two things. I've done one of them and the other was never an option. So I'm actually very pleased to be in Europe. It's proving to be very productive. You want to be working, making films. I don't want to be spending five or six years not making films. So this has been good. To answer your earlier question, apparently nothing has changed.
Q: Still, there's a lot of good will for Man on Wire...
A: The film has been enormously beneficial. I've been able to work more. And it's curiously liked by people. It feels like it's very hard to dislike this film. And so definitely it's been helpful, when people know you've made that film, it's a film just seem to like a lot. So it creates a soft pallor for you which is very nice.
WATCH:
Project Nim is in cinemas from this Friday, 12th August.