And I guess that proves we’re different in some ways?
You look to chimpanzees, and we’re very close to them genetically. You kind of look for attributes that you can recognize. But we’re very different species, and if there’s a sort of big idea in the film, it’s that instinct is the most powerful force, and you can nurture and condition an animal to do certain things, but you can’t change its very nature.

Despite the results, was anything gained from studying Nim’s behavior?
Oh sure, there was. There aren’t any failed experiments in science. There’s something really quite interesting and idealistic about the question that Herbert Terrace was asking. Maybe the answer that he got wasn’t the one that we would most hope for. It just shows you the limits of what we were doing with Nim. He had no motivation to be inventive with grammar and language, and we found that out by doing this experiment. But the film shows you other things about chimpanzees – that they have an emotional life that’s like ours; they feel sorrow; they feel anger; they get depressed; they get happy. They have all kinds of other emotions that we can recognize, so that is part of the story too. You can understand what a chimpanzee is actually like as a personality through this.