Several colourful characters pass through Project Nim, James Marsh’s documentary recounting the life of Nim Chimpsky and the story of those aiming to teach sign language to a chimp. But Bob Ingersoll is undoubtedly one of the warmest. After first meeting Nim while the primate was living in an animal sanctuary and recognising the chimp’s distressing living conditions, Bob’s efforts to help led directly to Nim’s story being told in a best-selling book and eventually Marsh’s documentary. LWLies spoke to Ingersoll at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last week, to chat about his role in Nim’s legacy.
LWLies: How did you come to be involved in the Project Nim documentary, and were you a willing participant?
Ingersoll: It followed from my involvement with Elizabeth Hess’s book, ‘Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human’. Elizabeth contacted me because I think she had heard that without me and my experiences with Nim after the sign language project and the poor life he was living then, she didn’t really have a book. After it was published in 2008 it was optioned by Simon Chinn and James Marsh, and I liked them right away. I knew James’ films and that he was a director at the top of his game, but I realised he was really serious when we spoke on the phone and he offered to come and visit me straight away, even though he happened to be as far away as Copenhagen at the time.
It’s a very poignant film, because for the most part the people working with Nim are well-meaning but things went poorly for him anyway.
Yes it’s definitely poignant, and it makes you realise that there is a lot more going on with chimps than anyone ever thought. Chimps are our equals in terms of the beauty and richness of their culture and behaviour, and we should treat them with respect – and treat all other animals with respect too.
How did this lack of respect in the treatment of Nim come about?
The argument should not have been about whether chimps can form sentences and handle grammar and syntax, but instead should have come from an evolutionary biology standpoint. It should have gone back to basics. Chimps certainly have the basic structures of language in them, and probably have had ever since we shared a common ancestor. They can name an object and use a verb correctly, but trying to ask Nim to form sentences with correct grammar was always going to be asking a bit much. But I give the project’s instigator Herb Terrace and the others the benefit of the doubt, since evolutionary biology had not even been coined as a term back then. People were not looking at animal behaviour from that perspective. They might also, incidentally, have considered that human sign language uses a different grammar than the spoken language anyway. I know many deaf people who are annoyed that their language was usurped like this and used without any consultation with them.
Have things improved in animal studies since then?
Good on you guys in the UK and the EU for not doing the kind of research that still goes on today at some places in the US. There chimps can be still be living in small bird cages, which is terrible. Perhaps this film will change things. It looks like it will be screened in Washington, which also means that I will probably get to go and speak in front of Congress. I would have said that I was an unlikely person to have the chance to do that.
Do you think the film successfully conveys Nim’s story and the significance of what happened?
You can’t cram everything into one film, and James’ approach is to deal in broad strokes, but that’s fine. The film maker’s job is to make a beautiful film that leaves you open to finding out more information. And my job is to do what I’m doing now, to take the tool that James made for me and use it to take things further than I otherwise could have done. I feel like I have some friends with me now, out on this limb.
Are you still angry about what happened to Nim?
Sure I’m still angry. I’m angry that 30 or 40 other chimps didn’t get out and died in the same laboratory where Nim had been living, and in the back of my head I know their names. It’s annoying to me when people can assume that Nim was more important just because he was more famous, but those chimps were my friends too.
So do you have any regrets?
I’m sure I’ve made some missteps, but I’m sitting here now talking about the film and the story so I think I must have done something right. I don’t think it was an accident that James and Simon came along and decided to make the film after talking to me, or that they would have made it if what I’ve done wasn’t almost always the right thing to do. There were probably times when I should have been less aggressive and angry, but I was younger then. I should have tried to do more to interface with Cleveland Amory, who ran the Black Beauty ranch where Nim lived on his own after the project ended, because if I had there might not have been so much controversy. But hindsight is always 20/20.
Project Nim is released August 12. For more info on this year’s EIFF visit edfilmfest.org.uk
Bob Ingersoll (text) by Tim Hayes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
