FILM

How far can or should you go in trying to make a chimpanzee behave like a human? ‘Project Nim’ is a compelling new documentary recounting an American experiment from the 1970s which attempted to answer this question. Robin Askew met director James Marsh.

Three years on from his Oscar-winning 'Man On Wire', British director James Marsh returns with another extraordinary documentary. 'Project Nim' tells the bizarre true story of a 70s American experiment to see whether a chimp could be taught to communicate using sign language by raising him from birth as a human child. It's a film that tells us as much about the humans involved as it does about the unfortunate Nim. Among those taking part are behavioural psychologist Professor Herbert Terrace, who originated the experiment; Deadhead graduate student Bob Ingersoll, who became Nim's staunchest human ally; and Dr James Mahoney, veterinarian at a research lab to which Nim was eventually sold for medical experiments.

It's rare for someone to make both dramatic features and documentaries. Is there much interaction between the two? Your documentaries are strongly narratively driven.

They are. There's an interesting overlap between the two genres. For me, it's all about structure and storytelling, and that is true of both fictional films and documentary films. By working in fiction, and certainly by writing screenplays, I think you become much sharper with structure in documentary films.

How do you go about making a film like 'Project Nim'? Do you investigate what archive footage is available first, or do you track down the participants and find out whether they're prepared to take part?

Really by the basic raw materials of narrative, which is to focus on the people and get to meet them and talk to them and get their stories. Simultaneously, of course, you're keeping an eye on the visual aspects of the film and the archive record. But I was quite confident going into this film that because it was an experiment there would be quite a lot of documentation and imagery of Nim, certainly in the first part of his life - which proved to be the case. But the starting point for me is the basic narrative raw materials, which you get from the people who were there, who saw and did things in this story. Once you feel confident about that, then the film takes on its own life from that point onwards. It's very much a series of subjective viewpoints that you gather from people. There's no definitive story of Nim. It's built up from a mosaic of people's recollections, which are very different and sometimes in conflict with each other. Part of your duty, in a way, is to negotiate those differences. In this case, it was interesting that the professor in Project Nim was, I think, very used to having his view as a definitive view of what happened. I was, for the first time perhaps, putting his recollections in the context of other people who had a very different perspective - both on him, and indeed on Nim - and sometimes were involved with Nim on a day-to-day basis a lot more than he was. So we took away his privileges, I guess, in the story. But that's part of the joy of documentary film-making. You have these very different points of view and it's your job to find your way through them and create something that isn't a definitive truth by any means, but feels like your version of what happened.

You're very careful not to judge those involved, but I felt Professor Terrace came across as a rather arrogant man whose primary interest seemed to be in attractive young ladies.

Well, I wouldn't want to comment on that. He'd be the person to ask that question. But nonetheless, I think I was careful to do two things in this film: one is not to project onto Nim states of mind and feelings that we would want him to have but he didn't actually have. The word, I think, is anthropomorphism. That felt like a problem in Nim's life and I was trying to be careful not to, in a sense, repeat that mistake. The second thing was not to overtly editorialise or pass judgement on what people did at the time. I think that what they did speaks for itself. The film is about what did happen, not what should have happened. That's a very different thing. I want the audience to take away their own impressions of the people and what happened and to make their own judgements. Terrace is a scientist and I think he has a scientific approach to people as well, and can be quite detached - at certain points quite starkly detached - from people's suffering. The damage that Nim was doing to some of the women on the project he seems quite indifferent to. But again, I didn't want to point a finger at him; I wanted him to point a finger at himself.

Judged purely in scientific terms, it seems like an extraordinarily ill-conceived experiment.

I think one of the problems that the experiment has is that it's supposed to be a detached scientific experiment. Scientific experiments have to be verifiable. You have to be able to reproduce them if they're going to have any value. And yet at the same time, by its very nature, he's asking young women to mother a chimpanzee and have a very strong emotional relationship with him. And therein lies the problem in a way. You're dealing with the requirements of science, which have to be without emotion. And yet the very nature of the experiment is full of emotion. That's what plays out in the first part of our story: the conflicts between characters is based on that tension. Whether the science is well executed or not, I just don't know. It reaches a conclusion that is quite instructive. And I think Terrace's conclusions about Project Nim haven't been disproved. Chimpanzees have a more interesting take on language than using it to talk to us. They use it to deceive us and manipulate us. What's interesting is that they discover, in a sense, the treacherous aspect of language, not the direct aspect of it. Nim can say sorry when he's bitten someone. He can use the sign for toilet to get out of situations. That's using language in a very deceptive way.

Although the film itself has no agenda, as you've made clear, how did you respond to Nim's story on a personal level?

Well, it's an interesting question. My first reaction to it was what an interesting, challenging story it is. I mean, it has very many unpredictable twists and turns. That gave me great confidence, going into the project, that I could make a film out of it, because it had these narrative surprises. I guess in the process of making something - particularly something like this - you run into many interesting and quite vexing big ideas. On a very basic level, you can't help but have enormous sympathy for Nim, who has no control over anything that he does. The moment he's born, he's in a cage. He's like a guest in our world, and a guest that we don't treat terribly well. I think the reason you can empathise with him is that he actually is in human institutions under our control throughout his life. If he were a chimp in the wild, it would be very hard to get access to how he feels and what he's doing. But because he's in a human environment that we recognise, we have a better chance of trying to understand his behaviour. Clearly, the story has quite poignant dimensions to it. But it's not all bad. And there are several people involved who are allies of Nim and have a very interesting relationship with him over years and he ends up in a reasonably satisfactory situation. But the film starts with a baby being taken away from its mother. Not much good can come of that.

One of the interesting things about the film was that many of the people around Nim seemed to be essentially well meaning, and yet his life became progressively more miserable.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Some of the most well-meaning of Nim's carers and friends end up putting him in situations that are really quite terrible. I always felt very much for Joyce Butler, who was the person who had to take Nim back and put him in a cage for the very first time. She suffers agonies. She has very good intentions for Nim and then ultimately she's responsible for putting him in a cage, which is very troubling and upsetting for her.

What did you make of James Mahoney? He seems like a deeply conflicted person in that he's responsible for experimenting on these animals and yet at the same time has some of the most insightful things to say about the way they're treated.

Well, my view of him was quite complicated too. I ended up thinking, to put it into one phrase, he's a good man in a bad world. He did have a genuine relationship with the animals under his care and supervision and tried to do the best for them in these extraordinarily difficult circumstances - and at the end of our story is responsible for a big improvement in Nim's life. He comes and saves dozens and dozens of chimpanzees from a terrible fate. When you first meet him in the film, you probably think he represents, as Bob says, 'the devil'. But Bob ends up having a very close relationship with Mahoney and they are friends to this day - which is an extraordinary thing, because of the big gulf between how they regarded animals and chimpanzees in particular. So, yes, he's an extraordinarily interesting character and, on a personal level, someone that I liked very much.

What about Bob? Is it significant that he's an outsider to this experiment?

I think it's significant that he has no power. He's just a graduate student who happens to be in Oklahoma at the time, around Nim and other chimpanzees. But even he has quite a few inner conflicts and isn't able to do what he wants to do at certain points in our story. At the same time, I think if you were to isolate one person who was Nim's human friend, it would be Bob. Over many years he was a friend to Nim and they had a really genuine relationship which you see play out in our footage. They hang out. Bob becomes more like a chimpanzee. It's the first time you see a human being trying to meet Nim halfway. They don't only use sign language, they use body language and they have a very rich form of communication that transcends Terrace's question about whether a chimpanzee can make a sentence or not. It feels like the species are trying to find a bridge between them. And of course they hang out, they smoke pot together - which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do given how aggressive chimpanzees can be. It chills them out, basically. So I wouldn't pass judgement on that, any more than on anything else that happens in the story.

You touched on the question of anthropomorphism. But while there is a danger of sentimentalising animals, is there not an equal danger of denying their emotional lives in order to feel more comfortable about what we do to them?

That's an interesting point and I think a very fair one. There is an emotional overlap between the two species, and you see Nim clearly showing feelings that I think we can recognise. He's confused, he can be scared, he can laugh, he can cry. At certain points in the story, he looks very baffled as to what's being done to him and why it's being done to him. Without anthropomorphising him, I think that would be his state of mind. But you're right; I think there is the opposite danger of not recognising the richness of a chimpanzee's emotional life and how what we do to them has a big impact on that. In Nim's case, I think he suffered more from people projecting stuff on to him than he did from people understanding what he was actually like.

Is there any significance in the fact that the film is coming out on the same date as 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'?

Probably from the distributor's point of view there is. From mine, it's a pleasing coincidence that in the present popular culture you have this huge Hollywood machine generating publicity for its film, and in the slipstream of that here we are with a real story about real chimpanzees. It could be a very interesting 'compare and contrast' exercise.

'Project Nim' opened on August 12. Click here for Venue's review.

DOCUMENTARY BOOM

2011 has become a vintage year for cinema documentaries. Here's the full line-up so far.

Inside Job

Charles Ferguson's brilliant deconstruction of the 2008 financial crash.

Benda Bilili!

Heart-warming account of how a bunch of disabled Congolese musicians became a hit with the world music crowd.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog gets exclusive access to the world's oldest cave art in the first 3D arthouse flick.

Pina

Wim Wenders' 3D celebration of the work of choreographer Pina Bausch.

TT3D: Closer to the Edge

Engrossing Isle of Man TT doc, focussing on reckless bad boy Guy Martin (still alive last time we checked).

From the Ashes

James Erskine celebrates a rare British sporting triumph: the 1981 Ashes.

Fire In Babylon

More cricket, this time exploring the politics of the West Indies team's triumphant turnaround in fortunes.

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie

Portrait of the hairdresser who, it is claimed, "changed the world with a pair of scissors".

Donor Unknown

"Adventures in the sperm trade" as a woman attempts to track down her biological father.

Senna

The biggest documentary hit at the UK box office since 'Touching the Void': Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna's story, told exclusively through archive footage.

Life in a Day

Kevin Macdonald wrangles 4,500 hours of punter-submitted footage for the modish YouTube movie.

Countdown to Zero

Lucy Walker's chilling documentary about the nuclear arms race.

Bobby Fischer Against the World

How the great chess 'genius' became a raving, bonkers anti-Semite.

.…AND STILL TO COME

The Interrupters

See review.

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times

What could be more topical than a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the inner workings of a newspaper? No, the Times isn't a Murdoch title (that's the New York Post), so there's unlikely to be any blagging or hacking. Out: Sept 23

The Green Wave

Ali Samadi Ahadi mixes live action and animation to tell the story of Iran's progressive, youthful 'Green Wave', which was so brutally crushed by President Ahmadinejad. Out: Sept 30

The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan

Follow-up to the 2004 hit 'The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan'. This one tracks Mir from the age of eight to 18, following a journey into adulthood in one of the grimmest places on earth. Out: Sept 30

Four Days Inside Guantanamo

An analysis of the four-day interrogation of a 15-year-old Canadian boy at Guantanamo Bay, featuring excerpts from a secretly-shot seven-hour video whose disclosure was ordered by the Canadian Supreme Court. Out: Oct 7

Pom Wonderful Presents: the Greatest Movie Ever Sold

'Super Size Me' director Morgan Spurlock explores the wacky world of product placement, marketing and advertising in a documentary that "was fully financed through product placement from various brands, all of which are integrated transparently into the film." Out: Oct 14

African Cats

Samuel L. Jackson narrates this Disney pussy cat doc, centred on a lioness and a cheetah and their cubs. Out: Oct 21

Blood in the Mobile

Exploring the link between your mobile phone and civil war in Africa. Tenacious Danish director Frank Poulsen reveals how minerals mined in war-torn African nations are found in almost every mobile phone in the world. He then goes after executives of Nokia, which is responsible for one in three mobile phone sales. Out: Oct 21