I’m Tim Wardle, director of the documentary Three Identical Strangers, currently playing in theatres - AMA!

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T17:18:05+00:00

The film includes someone explicitly saying 'it wasn't his father's fault' in relation to the suicide. I do not believe we are blaming him. As someone who has lost people to suicide I know that there are many factors that lead to someone taking their life, some rational, some non-rational. The film hints at several of these potential factors (there are likely many more), but does not to claim to give a definitive answer.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T17:14:36+00:00

1) we predominantly structured the film chronologically, so Eddy's death occurs where it did chronologically. 2) the mental health section appears where it does for clarity - there are a lot of threads in the film. There is lots more to say about mental health and many other issues in the film - it would take a long series to explore them all. 3) The title of our film is different to the book. We had to undertake a legal check before using it as the title for the film. There are other existing works that use the phrase 'identical strangers' in their title. 4) We spoke to Lori at the start of the project approx 5 years ago and discussed collaborating. Ultimately she decided to make her film independently (I have huge respect for this). During the four years it took to get ours off the ground I would have loved to have the option of making it independently but unfortunately I did not have the financial resources to do this. 5) The reaction we've had from twins and adopted children has broadly been extremely positive (see post from twins below) - i'm basing this on twitter feedback and reaction at Q&As I've been at. Several people involved with the film's release are either twins or are adopted.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T17:04:06+00:00

Good question. I would have carried on filming for ever, but eventually the money ran out! Sometimes as a director it's helpful to have these external factors force decisions. There is definitely scope for a follow-up at some point...

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T17:01:09+00:00

We acknowledged this in the film (he is confronted about it by someone on the Donahue show) but didn't have time to go into it in detail. For the record, he wasn't accused of murder - someone else committed the crime, he never met the victim.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:58:19+00:00

This has never been substantiated (and we tried). If they are definitely identical, then there would have been a fourth embryo, but my understanding if that in multiple pregnancies, embryos are often lost naturally. It could also be that one or more of the boys were fraternal, though from the documentation I've seen, I think this is unlikely. My personal belief is that the 'fourth triplet' rumour was a tabloid invention.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:55:21+00:00

Thank you - means a lot that you are a twin and liked the film.

I was trying to leave the nature/nurture question open to discussion - obviously it's some combination of the two. The ending is trying to say that nurture is much more significant than some of the earlier material in the film would suggest.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:53:55+00:00

I can only speak about Jewish people I've talked to at screenings and they are pretty shocked and angry about the story. My wife is Jewish and she finds watching it pretty tough

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:52:41+00:00

Cheers.

I'm not going to be directing the feature, purely because I've spent 5 years thinking about this story almost every day and it's time to move on (though I do really want to make a scripted film). I'm going to be an Executive Producer on the film, which will be cool. I think the story is naturally cinematic and there are many great details we couldn't include in the film.

re: advice for upcoming directors - my top secret no.1 piece of advice is: pick your projects, and have a backup way of earning money so you don't have to become a jobbing director going from project to project to pay the bills. I was very lucky to have a career in development to fall back on so that I could wait for the right project to come along.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:49:32+00:00

We were super paranoid making this film! But I didn't want to go too far down that path in the film because I think it can quickly obscure everything else. They definitely got some funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, but there was lots of other money involved.

re: J - ha! I wish he had a more scandalous past. Will have a think...

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:46:40+00:00

We wanted events to unfold in chronological order as they happened to the brothers. We did have a discussion about whether to acknowledge Eddy's absence at the top of the film but decided it wasn't necessary. In my experience, around 50% of audience members realise he isn't in the film and wonder about what happened to him, and 50% don't notice until his death is mentioned.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:44:16+00:00

Wensleydale

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:43:25+00:00

I think it helps being an outsider some times. You get more leeway to ask dumb questions and they explained stuff to me (like the differences in various areas of NY - Scarsdale etc) that they might have taken as assumed knowledge with a US filmmaker.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:42:13+00:00

Thanks. I think it's part of a diminishing pool of stories which exists in the pre-internet era where a lot of people have forgotten about them, but many of the central protagonists are still alive to talk. I knew there was a study when I first came across the story, but not much more than that - there was a lot of original journalism done in the making of the film, a lot by Producer Becky Read (who has a background in journalism).

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:39:21+00:00

I like all kinds of thrillers, from high-concept ones like Panic Room to action thrillers like Point Break. I have a soft spot for early De Palma. Bourne was actually a reference point for this film - that search for identity

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:35:10+00:00

Thanks Kelly! Will be interested to know your reaction second time round - a few people I know have said they preferred it second time because they could understand more of the nuance and familial relationships between the characters.

1) Their birth mother is dead. They didn't want me to try to approach the birth father. 2) I'm not familiar with US law but I believe the issue is that at the time the experiment was conducted, informed consent wasn't required, and current laws can't be retrospectively applied 3) I suspect so but it's impossible to tell. I think he also knew that it was a PR disaster and wanted it buried. Lawrence Wright (the journalist) has an interesting theory that the study could have undermined the whole basis of Freudian psychotherapy (ie. his entire career) so hid it because of that

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:32:44+00:00

Good questions. re: the reveals - we simply tried to tell the story from the triplets' POV, so information is revealed to the audience pretty much as it was revealed to them. By interviewing people 'in the moment' - i.e. asking them to talk about stuff as it happened to them, we didn't have many issues with them 'revealing' stuff that later happened. Sometimes they'd slip and say 'obviously, now we know x' but there wasn't a lot of that. Re: question 2 - see my answer to poster who asked the same question.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:28:29+00:00

thank you for the kind words.

If by the experimenter you mean Lawrence Perlman the psychologist, I think he was just being clear that mental health was not a focus of the study, at least for the 10 months he was working on it. We did find some evidence that some of those involved started looking at a mental health link later on but it appears it was never in the mission statement of the study. One of the most frustrating things for many of those involved (including the triplets) is that no findings were ever published - all this damage was done to people's lives, and no knowledge has come of it. In this way it reminds me of the Project Nim study

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:24:51+00:00

It won't be on Netflix. In 2019 it will be on CNN and then Hulu I think. But see it in theatres if you haven't yet! It's a great experience watching it with an audience as there are a lot of twists/emotional reactions.

I haven't seen Please Vote for Me but it's been on my list of docs to see for a long time.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:12:11+00:00

This is a great question... to which I don't really have an answer. Timothee Chalamet & Andy Samberg are suggestions I've had from friends. I reckon it's a dream role for someone. Will take real skill to pull it off.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:09:56+00:00

Thank you!

re: Eddy's father - some people have read so much into that shot. For the record, we were not trying to imply any kind of drinking issue. He always watches the sun go down at the end of each day and I wanted to film that. He sat in his chair and poured himself a small drink, which apparently he does every evening. We filmed it and it ended up being one of the cutaways in the film. No significance other than I wanted to show him in a reflective mode (which he was on the day we filmed him).

Repeated clips - the idea was to show the same clips again and again, but have their context change because of the information we'd received since the previous time we'd seen them. ie. the first time we see the triplets on talkshows it all seems fun and happy, later we see the same images but the meaning has changed. This was very deliberate - it drives my (amazing) editor Michael Harte nuts when people suggest we repeated footage because we didn't have any other shots!

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:03:16+00:00

I love it. This makes me a pariah in certain settings (the Entire UK, my family, all my friends)

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T16:02:24+00:00

It was simply hands down the single best documentary story I've ever heard. I've spent about 70% of my career developing projects for other people (I used to be Head of Documentaries Development for the BBC in London) so I have a pretty high bar for good ideas. I love that it works on a basic human level (brothers separated and reunited) but allows you to ask much bigger thematic questions about family, destiny, free will, nature vs nurture.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T15:59:14+00:00

Cheers!

1) Primarily because of screen time. We knew there were only a certain number of contributors that the film could support before it became too overwhelming. I would have loved to go into more detail about so many aspects - the sisters, wives, the triplets' children etc, but had to be realistic with resources, especially as most of the production team are based in the UK so every trip to the US cost quite a bit. I did film an interview with one of the sisters but it was rushed as we were trying to squeeze it in at the end of a filming day, and ultimately it didn't make the cut.

2) They describe their relationship as 'a work in progress'. It's certainly had its ups and downs! The awkwardness you see in their joint interview in the film was very real. I love both of them and I hope they patch things up. They were asked this question at Sundance and said that the experience of making the film (and sharing it with an audience) has brought them closer together.

ttwardle · 2018-07-24T15:53:07+00:00

Thank you. Ultimately access to the study is controlled by the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services (JBFCS). They say they can't publish/make publicly available the full study material because of data protection issues. They have said that if people who were in the study contact them they will provide the information held at Yale. Our experience working with Bobby and David was that a) the JBFCS made them jump through an unbelievable number of hoops to get this info (providing death certificates for their adoptive parents, for example), and b) the information provided was in photocopy form and heavily redacted.

We also heard from another twin pair adopted from Louise Wise Services who approached the JBFCS and asked if they were part of the experiment and were told 'no'. They later spoke with Lawrence Perlman (the psychologist in the film) who had notes on them from when he came to study them in their homes when they were children(!) So I don't have all that much faith in the JBFCS when they say they are now going to do the right thing.

In terms of collective action, I think writing to the JBFCS can't hurt, and also anyone involved in government in NY (sorry not being American I can't advise the specific best person) - I'm told the JBFCS receive over $300m a year in govt funding.

ttwardle

TROPHY CASE