Our driver, Veysal, stares at the ground and shuffles his feet, then whispers: “You must leave. Now. It is very dangerous to stay.”
That’s when my cameraman and partner, Jon Lane, draws himself up to his full height and says, “Well, you’re going to have to shoot us then because we’re not going.”
If it was anyone other than Jon, I might have wobbled. But Jon was an ITN cameraman for 17 years, covering nasty conflicts in some of the maddest places on earth. He knows how to look after himself and I know he won’t put our lives in danger. Still, everyone around us is doing a blindingly good impersonation of being scared witless.
“If you shoot us,” continues Jon calmly to the soldier, “you will be on the BBC news tonight.” (Great! Fame at last!) “Do you really want to take that responsibility?”
He’s judged it well. Turkey’s human rights record is a stumbling block to their acceptance into the EU. This local officer simply can’t take that kind of decision. We tell him we’ll leave later that day and he backs down – although the patrol keeps watch from the roadside. When we do finally leave, we take the precaution of hiding our precious rushes (video footage) in a haystack and arrange for a courier to collect them for us later.
That edited video footage was seen nationwide in the US when “The Family That Walks on All Fours” re-aired recently on PBS as part of the prestigious science series, NOVA. The film first aired in the UK last March and has sold to over 30 countries, securing BBC Worldwide’s biggest-ever sale for a single documentary.
Chuffed? You bet. Passionate Productions [1] is just me and Jon. We live and work out of the dining room of an idyllic thatched cottage in a small Wiltshire village. The receptionist is a flat-coated retriever. And here we are playing with RDF, very successful UK production company.
So what were we doing to so upset the Turkish authorities?
In the summer of 2005, I got a phone call from evolutionary psychologist, Professor Nicholas Humphrey. We’d worked with Nick before, on a film for Discovery about the placebo effect, and had remained friends. “Would you like to make a film about congenital quadrupedalism?” he asked.
“Why thanks, Nick, but we’ve just made one.” (We had just delivered “Can Dogs Smell Cancer?” to BBC4).
“No”, he said. “Human quadrupeds. Alive today. Living in a remote part of Turkey. They’ve just been discovered by a Turkish scientist. No one else knows about them.” Ah, those magic final six words.
A few hours later, we received some grainy footage. It looked real, but we needed to see for ourselves. A week later, Jon was on a plane with Nick to go and meet the family. The footage he returned with was sensational and profoundly moving. We were to spend a further three weeks filming with the family last year, but much of this original material made it into the final cut because Jon’s emotional response to meeting the family for the first time is so apparent in the way he filmed it.
To see adult human beings walking around so like animals is shocking. It touches something very deep inside. Bipedality is the quality, above all else, that defines us as human beings. The Bible is full of morally-loaded words to describe it. Upright. Upstanding. Standing tall.
It is one of the reasons why the story created such a fuss when it broke with our broadcast on BBC2 in March. And why the US is going mad for the Ulas family all over again all after the slightly updated version of our film aired on PBS.
We always knew the footage would sell. We knew we could place it anywhere. But we took it first to BBC2. We had a prior relationship with the BBC's Richard Klein and Roly Keating and it needed to be a channel that would not push us to over-sensationalize.
The story was controversial. The cultural and religious sensitivities demanded a deft touch. Turkey is an Islamic country; the family are Kurdish Muslims; they don’t believe in evolution and yet, with five members of the family affected, the condition has to have a genetic component. It was this link to evolution that so upset the Turkish authorities. It is a crime in Turkey to insult Turks or Turkey and they thought we were portraying Turks as apes.
Scientifically, opinion was also deeply (at times viciously) divided on why the family walked in a way we haven’t walked for more than four million years. And stuck in the middle was the family itself – the sweetest, gentlest, most generous souls you could ever meet. We were incredibly conscious of our duty of care to them and were at pains to point out to them all the horrible things that could happen as a result of the film. Dad Resit just shrugged. Nothing much disturbs the rhythm of their life, which is structured by poverty and prayer. Even Korean film crews lurking behind trees.
Passionate Productions is just the two of us – and our assistant Jim. Jon Lane shoots and produces and I write, direct and edit. We got the story before anyone else because scientists trust us with their reputations and we like to think the “ordinary” people we film can trust us with their dignity.
This was a documentary about a scientific discovery, not a science documentary. Our job was not to prove or disprove, but to observe others’ efforts to do so. Above all, it was to be a sensitive portrayal of the family which questioned scientists’ duty of care to those they study and challenged our own emotional and intellectual response to human beings who could be an echo of our ancestral past.
We managed to keep the story under wraps until two weeks before transmission. And, boy, when it broke, did it explode. Our website got 200,000 hits in one month. The BBC was swamped. And we blasted the front pages of four national newspapers – although we (and the family) could have done without the Daily Mail’s banner headline: “The Truth About the Monkey Children.”
Being such a tiny indy, the documentary’s international success has been amazing for us. Jon and I are on a very specific mission as film-makers: to bring breaking, provocative science stories to a wider audience in a way that touches as much as it informs. We also think people should be more aware of scientists as people, who fall prey to politics and prejudice as the rest of us. At times on “The Family That Walks On All Fours,” it felt like managing a crèche for very gifted children - a wonderfully rich vein for a film-maker to tap.
We’re still in touch with the Ulas family and a percentage of the proceeds of the film has gone to improve their lives. They now have running water inside the house, a well to irrigate their fields and a new terrace where the whole family can sit out in the sunshine. Turkish psychologist Defne Aruoba, who worked with us on the film, is in the process of setting up a foundation to help them and other very poor families struggling with children who have been born with crippling congenital defects.
As we finished filming last summer, the soldiers escorted us off the premises. The family walked with us to our cars to say goodbye. Unknown to Jon, their quadrupedal son Husseyin had just visited their crude lavatory, which was really just a hole in the floor. He is mentally handicapped and his hands, bless him, were smeared with his own faeces. Jon reached out to shake his hand. “Watch out!” I warned, but it was too late.
Jon quickly realized his mistake, but didn’t flinch. Instead, and without missing a beat, he turned to the young lieutenant who had threatened us earlier and grabbed both his hands. “Thank you so much,” he said without a trace of sarcasm, continuing to shake his hands until he’d transferred most of the mess. “Thank you so much for all your help.”
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The original BBC programme, which contains material not seen in the NOVA version, is available at Passionate Productions [2]
Video courtesy of PBS [3]and Passionate Productions [4]
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If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy The Nature Of Altruism: The Family That Walks On All Fours [5] and I Cloned Myself [6].
