Citizen Nim: An interview with James Marsh

“I wasn't that interested in the science of it, although that's a very important starting point. I was interested in the story of Nim. The objective was to tell the story of an animal's life,” director James Marsh reflects. He first learned of Nim's story when Simon Chinn, producer of this film and Marsh's Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, brought a book by Elizabeth Hess to his attention. Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp That Would Be Human, had a big impact on the director. “I read it and was gripped by the narrative and also intrigued at the possibility of making a film that was devoted to an animal's life. Could an audience get with – and stay with – the story of an animal?”

In a word, yes. In the 1970s a series of experiments were conducted, focusing on language capabilities among primates. Among these was Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee named in reference to acclaimed linguist Noam Chomsky. Taken from his mother shortly after birth, Nim spent the first five years of his life in an exclusively human environment. He was initially raised alongside several children in a town house in New York while being taught sign language to test whether he was capable of learning to communicate with his adopted human family.

Project Nim is, as Marsh emphasises, not a scientifically inclined film, and the language experiments Nim participates in are but a small part of his chaotic, disrupted and harrowing life. As Nim matures and begins displaying typical male chimpanzee traits, it becomes impractical – and potentially dangerous – to keep him in the company of people. Coupled with the experiment reaching its end, Nim no longer serves a purpose, and goes from living among men and women in a beautiful, spacious mansion, to being the subject of vaccine testing and development in a research laboratory.

Nim's life and the way he was treated by the people around him – whether their intentions were well-meaning or not – raises many ethical and moral issues, but Marsh's documentary is careful to reserve judgement. Its aim is simply to recount the life of a chimpanzee, and although Marsh does this without prejudice, can a filmmaker ever be completely objective? “There's no such thing as objective in any human endeavour, apart from science,” he states. “It's a very subjective rendering of a story, but at the same time I don't make overt judgements on people's behaviour. I just present it and the judgements – if they're made – will be made by audiences. But I'm selecting the story, which, I think, is a truthful rendering. You can create a film that makes judgements about what was right and what was wrong, but I don't think those judgements need to be made overtly, and I don't think anyone is overtly condemned in the film, even though some of their actions might seem a little, you know, regrettable in hindsight.”

There are many aspects of Nim's upbringing that may benefit from the clarity of hindsight. It was the liberal, experimental 1970s, and little thought was given to the consequences of raising and breast-feeding a chimpanzee alongside human children, or letting him smoke weed and drink beer with the adults. Yet regardless of how unnatural his early life was, it pales in comparison to his later years when he, along with several other primates, was sold to an animal testing laboratory. It is a testament to Marsh's non-judgemental approach that he managed to persuade the lab's vet, James Mahoney, to participate. “He was very reluctant to be in the film, but eventually agreed. I think he represents something that many people have a real problem with and because he symbolises a whole area of humanity that many people would deplore, he knows that people would have an immediate idea, a caricature of what he was like. I reassured him that our agenda wasn't to get into the animal rights issues, but to tell the story, which he was a witness to.”

While early scenes of Nim's life, regardless of the viewer's personal opinion, portray a generally happy life, later footage of the testing facility is powerful and distressing, particularly knowing that Nim's situation is not unique. Marsh comments on how fortunate he was to have so much footage at his disposal. “We found a lot more than what we were expecting, some extraordinary pieces of archive were found. For example, Nim's first meeting with another chimpanzee. We had no idea that existed before making the film and there it was, this extraordinarily profound moment in his life – a chimpanzee for five years not knowing another chimpanzee, and you see that play out in real time. It's amazing. Likewise, the footage of the lab – we had no idea we actually had footage of that time and place when Nim was there. We could put people directly into the environment he was in.”

It is difficult to imagine any viewer leaving a screening of Project Nim and not having an opinion regarding it. Because of Marsh's careful, matter-of-fact approach to the subject, and because of the narrative style of the documentary, viewers are invited to explore their own thoughts and feelings about a range of issues that are implied but not overtly stated. But how does the director want his film to be received?

Marsh considers this for a moment. “What I know, so far, is that there are actually many different responses available. In a sense that's the virtue of the story – it's not much to do with me. The story has so many layers to it that you can come at it differently if you're a man or a woman, if you're a parent or have a dog. The range of responses is what I'm pleased about: whether you like it or not there's an engagement with it. I don't want to spoonfeed you some moral that we should be nice to animals or that we should do this or that, that's not what I do. I don't feel comfortable being a moralist, and I just hope that the responses I've glimpsed already continue.”