Project Nim director goes for a chimp's view of the world

Share

James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim is both a charming and deeply disturbing story of a chimpanzee snatched from his mom and placed in the care of a human "surrogate" in a 1970s experiment to determine if a primate raised as a toddler might be able to communicate through language.

From the outset, the director says his mandate was to take a cool, arm's-length approach to the case of an animal who was loved - and also betrayed - by the humans he trusted. His goal was a simple animal "biopic" that would be neither a morality tale nor pro-human rights, but would allow the audience to see the world through the chimp's eyes.

It was no easy feat. Aside from the fact that the "star" of the film is a mercurial primate who died more than a decade ago (more on that below), each of his trainers has a very different take on what happened to Nim over the course of the experiment.

"I wanted to objectively portray his development from a diaper-wearing baby to a fully-grown adult," says Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2008 documentary Man on Wire. "It's a very interesting nature-versus-nurture drama, which asks the question, 'How much can we inhibit the behaviour of this chimpanzee, and how much can we influence him to become more like us?'"

Marsh became captivated with Nim's story after Man on Wire's producer Simon Chinn gave him the book Nim Chimsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, a chronicle of the controversial experiment conducted by Columbia University behavioural psychologist Herbert S. Terrace.

"I read the book and was gripped by the surprising twists and turns Nim's life takes," he says. So the 48-year-old director, who lives in Copenhagen with his wife and children, set about tracking down the trainers and researchers who /had worked with Nim.

Marsh's film - which includes archival footage, re-enactments and countless interviews - begins with Nim's jarring separation from his mother and subsequent placement with a surrogate, Stephanie LaFarge, a student of Terrace and mother of three (yes, humans).

LaFarge immediately bonds with the chimp, who she teaches to use a toilet, eat with utensils, and communicate (through signs) words such as play, orange and pizza. Some viewers may find her bond with Nim a bit too intimate: She's also shown breastfeeding the animal. As Nim grows into adolescence that connection with LaFarge becomes increasingly problematic, as he becomes aggressive - and sexually aware. So Terrace moves the animal to a Columbia University-owned mansion in Riverdale, N.Y., where he's placed with a handful of hippie trainers. They teach the chimp 125 words, encourage him to play - and to share the odd joint with his new "parents."

The idyllic commune comes crashing down, however, when Nim, who'd been taking painful nips at his benevolent captors, bites a chunk from his female trainer's cheek; she subsequently spends weeks in the hospital having reconstructive surgery.

"Chimpanzees are hard-wired to look for dominance over the people around them," explains Marsh. "If they know you're scared of them, they will exploit you. They can't help themselves. That's just the way they are."

All very well. But when Nim turns 5, shortly after his most vicious attack on his caretaker, Terrace decides to pull the plug on his experiment, concluding that the chimp hasn't acquired anything the researchers could designate as "language."

Nim is then shipped to a primate research facility in Oklahoma, where he is caged and miserable. And soon his fate takes an even worse turn as the world-famous chimp winds up at a pharmaceutical animal-testing laboratory. Although he's eventually purchased by an animal-rescue sanctuary in Texas, Nim died in 2000 from a heart attack at the age of 26.

Nim's time at a medical research lab and caged in a research facility is particularly wrenching to watch, as Marsh uses archival footage to show the chimp's confusion and dismay as he's chained and sedated by strangers. Nim slips into a deep depression and won't interact with the new humans around him, or his fellow chimpanzees.

"In the film, you see some of the trainers using a cattle prod on Nim, and slapping him, which might seem cruel. But what I discovered is that you have to be very physically dominant with chimpanzees because aggression is the only thing a male chimpanzee can respect," says Marsh. "Some might say we shouldn't hit them, discipline them or punish them, but if you don't, you're going to be in a whole lot more trouble. That was the problem for some of the women in the film. They didn't feel able to physically dominate Nim, and they suffered accordingly.

"Whenever I make a documentary - and the ones I like to do tend to be ones you wouldn't actually believe if you'd made them up - I try to allow the people who were part of the event to share that with the audience, and not bring any kind of moral judgment on what they did or get caught up in expert commentary," says Marsh, who alternates between docs and feature films, always informed by real events, (including the cult film Wisconsin Death Trip, and an IRA espionage thriller, which he just finished shooting in Dublin, starring Clive Owen). "I don't like being spoon-fed morality in the films I watch. This is not an issue-based film. I'm not trying to campaign for a cause. I'm just trying to tell Nim's story, through his eyes, as he saw it."

That said, Marsh does think Terrace's experiment was doomed from the start for one simple reason: "If you take a creature away from its mother, it feels transgressive, it feels like a violation of the natural order, and in my view, not much good will come of that."

But Marsh doesn't feel the experiment was a failure, either. "No experiment is a failure if it shows you something. If there was failure in Nim's story, it was ambition, hubris and overreaching," he says. "Nim did not learn to communicate as a human. He could make signs to manipulate people to get what he wanted.

"To be fair to Terrace, no one has subsequently disproved his findings. If they had, we'd all be sitting around chatting to chimpanzees and finding out what weed they like."

Project Nim opens in Toronto on Friday, in Montreal on Aug. 5 and in Ottawa on Aug. 12.