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Talking about the gobsmacking new documentaryThree Identical Strangersis tricky.
Last night, you talked about this story surfacing among a thousand other stories that passed in your direction.
Im used to seeing a huge turnover of stories at Raw hundreds every year, thousands probably.
And this one just instantly struck me as the best documentary story Id ever heard.
I had to make this film.
Its a human story and a scientific story, with universal themes about family, free will, destiny.
It was instantly compelling.
It had to be made.
What went into convincing the brothers to participate in telling their story?
Obviously, they had been burned before.Theyve been messed around a lot.
People have promised to tell their story so many times.
I think they have a hard time trusting people as well, because of what happened to them.
To be honest with you, getting them to come around was kind of attritional.
We kept meeting them.
Even during filming, we wondered, Are these guys going to stick with us the whole way through?
It was really, really hard to convince them.
It was probably the hardest part of the whole film.
You wonder why nobody has told it before.
And the truth is, when we made the film, we realized that peoplehadtried to tell it before.
And no one could tell us why they got shut down.
He never got an answer as to why.
That made us quite paranoid.
You wonder who got to them.
And thats demonstrably true if you look at the history of it.
What happened to these boys came out of what you referred to a rogue era in psychology.
You had some background in psychology before switching to film.
But it isnt very well-regulated.
The question then becomes, How far can you go as a scientist to further human knowledge?
A huge part of this story is what was driving these [scientists].
It was a quest for knowledge, Im sure, but theres a lot of ego, too.
If you completely divorce yourself from the ethical aspect of this study, its an intriguing experiment.
And it bears out in the film that youve made.
You have to be conscious when youre making a film.
On one level, youre thinking,Oh my God, this is a great story!
And it would be so incredible to discover all the things we were finding out about what happened.
But at the same time, its their lives.
They lived it and it was awful for them.
Maybe it was the forceps used to deliver them.
At no point do they consider, Maybe it was us separating them that caused these problems.
Theyre careful not to allow that to be a factor.
Thats the other thing I wanted to talk about.
The story has so many twists and turns and theyre so explosive in the film.
How much do you want people to know about this story going into it?
Can there be such a thing as spoilers for reality?Its a filmmaking dilemma.
What we generally do is tell the story up to the point where the three boys are reunited.
But its really hard, because theres so much more to talk about.
Theres a pleasure in pure storytelling.
Its a film about storytelling on one level.
In fact, the word story is repeated about ten times in the first 20 minutes.
The film is about the nature of storytelling, and I hope that people go in without much preknowledge.
So every single aspect of the story was a surprise.
Theyd say, Its an incredible story.
This happens and this happens and this happens and this happens.
Amazing twist after amazing twist.
And this happens and this happens and this happens.
And in the end, just a little critique.
The thing about the film is that the story sells itself.
People come out of the theater and want to talk about it.
And so, when people write reviews, they want to talk about the narrative.
We played around with trickier devices, but they just got in the way.
All the people we interviewed for this film are such good storytellers.
So we just let them tell it.
Did you have an idea of how you wanted to shoot this?
Thats what I know.
But being in the U.K., we couldnt do that.
We didnt have endless time to film.
We had to really focus because we were flying in and out of America and had to control costs.
And we knew that two-thirds of the story was in the past tense.
The interview space becomes this verite space for us.
It moves from being a past-tense storytelling with archive reconstruction into the how these people are feeling now.
We needed that gearshift.
Youve presumably shown the film to the brothers and other people involved in this story.
What has been the reaction?I think universally positive.
David told me that he cries every time he watches it.
So there was a huge responsibility.
You said you going to do this and you delivered.
And that was a big deal for me.
We were the custodians of their story.
The film seems to have brought them together, too.
Thats what they say to us.
They definitely werent talking much during the filming process.
They had a very fractured relationship for a long time.
And Im sure there will still be ups and downs.
But making this film was helpful to them, I think.
She saw a lot since then.
And that moment is still as clear to her as the day it happened.
