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- Tim, your movie is about three brothers
who kind of learn that they're related as young men,
and they had been through a lot of media attention,
and kind of got burnt by it.
I mean, when you showed up,
did they take convincing to sit for a film?
- It took four years.
I got engaged, married, and had a child
in the space of time it took us to convince them
to take part in the film.
So, it was pretty hard going because of the trauma
that had been inflicted on them,
and kind of sense that they'd been let down
by so many people in the past.
- How does that process work?
Here's this British guy who shows up in New York and says,
"I want to talk about some painful things
"that happened to you in the past."
- I think it helped, actually, being British,
and sometimes being an outsider can be really useful.
Their interest is kind of piqued.
They're sort of intrigued.
Really, it's just a process of earning trust.
You can't do anything without trust,
and spending a lot of time without cameras
just going to meet them,
meet their families, meet their friends,
explain the kind of film we wanted to make.
But I mean to be honest, even when we were filming,
there were days when I thought, are they going to show up?
And for the master end sheets,
we really didn't know if they were going to turn up or not.
- What is the moment like when you complete a film
and you decide to show it
to your subject or your contributor?
Do you do anything to prepare them,
or do you sit nervously to the side of the room?
- It is very nerve-wracking, showing them the film.
The experience I had with the brothers when they watched it,
they both liked it.
I showed them separately, and that was lovely.
They both kind of got up and hugged me afterwards
and it wasn't about liking the film.
It was like, you did what you said you were going to do,
and I realized in that moment, I hadn't realized making it,
they'd been let down so many times by so many people,
that just the act of literally following through
on what I said I was going to do was a huge moment for them.
And I never expected that to be
the big emotional release from them.
- How conscious are you, when you're assembling your film,
of eliciting an emotional response from the audience?
- For me, emotional truth is
what we're striving for in a documentary.
There is a school of thought that documentaries
should be very dispassionate, just the facts kind of thing.
But I think you can have that narrative fidelity,
but if you don't have an emotional truth
to your story-telling,
then the audiences aren't going to connect with it,
and that's part of what makes it cinematic,
is eliciting that emotional response.
I wanted the audience to go through what they went through.
I wanted people to experience the highs and the lows.
And that's very much where
we kept it kind of full perspective.
People talk about the reveals in the film.
There are a lot of twists in Three Identical Strangers.
It's very much just from the perspective of the brothers.
You learn information as they learnt it,
so you're very much on that journey with them,
and that was really, really important to me.
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- How did you go about getting the score for your film?
- My editor put this Billy Joel song in the film
where the lyrics of the song directly reference
to characters from the film.
We actually thought at one point
it was about those characters.
It ends up it was coincidence,
even though he was around at the same time.
My editor had it in the film and the commissioners
and everyone who'd put money in were,
"Oh, we love that, we love that."
And then the record label wanted
crazy, crazy amounts of money.
We had this great music supervisor who just said,
"Just try writing to him."
We didn't even have an email.
I wrote sort of a hand-written letter to Billy Joel,
and he came back and he let us have it
for what was like $1,000 or something,
for all world-wide rights.
- You just made it so every single documentarian is
going to write a letter to Billy Joel.
That's so cool.
- What was the biggest influence growing up
that may have shaped your point of view as a film-maker?
- That's a big question.
I mean, I would say, in documentary terms,
probably Michael Apted's Seven Up!,
also Hoop Dreams, that's a big one,
but then just for story-telling in general,
Kurosawa and Hitchcock.
I think the lines between documentary and drama
are getting increasingly blurred.
And I think documentaries at Broadchurch,
all these influences are increasingly relevant.
- [Man] What's the first thing you do when you wrap a film?
- My documentary is still out there
and a living, breathing thing.
Just a month or so ago,
we got a call from a woman who'd seen the film and said,
"I was adopted from the same agency
"as the triplets in this film,
"and I've just done a DNA test after watching your film,
"and it's matched with another woman".
She was from New York, another woman in California,
and they got together and it turns out they were twins
that had been separated at birth,
at age 54 meeting for the first time.
So it's still out there.
- Got a sequel.
- Yes, still evolving.
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