Dec 31 11:46 AM

Interview with Sarah McCarthy, director of "The Dark Matter of Love"

Liam Iandoli

Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, "The Dark Matter of Love" fuses the story of the Diaz family learning to love with extremely rare archive footage of science experiments that explore parent-child affection.

Director Sarah McCarthy studied film in her native Australia. She then moved to London, where she worked in development for the BBC and RDF Media before moving into documentary directing.

"The Dark Matter of Love" is McCarthy’s fourth documentary. Her debut, "Murderers on the Dance Floor," told the story behind a YouTube clip, which has been viewed more than 50 million times, of 1,500 Filipino prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s "Thriller." McCarthy's film premiered on Channel 4 in the U.K. She followed it up by developing and producing "Black Widow Granny" for BBC 1. 

 

What inspired you to make this documentary?

I first started thinking about emotions through a kind of evolutionary lens when I went to see this installation by a friend of mine that was part of a Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. And the way it worked was, you walked past a mirror on your way into the exhibition, and next to the mirror were pictures of happy chimps, sad chimps, surprised chimps, angry chimps, and you’re supposed to try and arrange your face to look as much like the chimp as possible.

Then you go through the whole exhibition, and at the end you realize that the mirror is actually a two-way mirror with a little antechamber behind it full of people — mostly kids — who have been pissing themselves laughing at your stupid monkey faces. Then you walk back around past the mirror on your way out, knowing that there are people behind the mirror watching you. And it made me think, ahhh, that’s what separates us from the apes, our ability to be self-aware. And it’s that self-awareness of your own emotional makeup that at least gives you a fighting chance of not repeating the same patterns of relationship that you didn’t like in your own parents.

So I started reading about emotions as products of evolution. Which was really exciting, because it was like a vaguely clever and socially acceptable way of talking and thinking about love and boys all day, every day.

The last two years of my life have been like a New Scientist (magazine) version of those relationship quizzes you do in Cosmopolitan magazine when you’re 17. Anyway, so I discovered that there was a whole branch of science out there dedicated to investigating what are the scientifically proven healthy elements of a parent-child relationship.

Things that good parents do that drive a child’s development, that help them map healthy neural networks in their brains, set them up with the ability to have close relationships with other people for the rest of their lives, teach them what to think of themselves, what to expect from other people, what to value, how to deal with setbacks, it turns out parental love affects all of these things. And scientists have been studying what these elements are for decades now, and they’ve figured out two very simple things that a parent should do to help their child’s brain develop in a way that makes them competent and emotionally healthy, and they are:

1. When the child is exploring and off being competent, delight in those explorations. So when they bring you a piece of Lego with drool all over it, be all "Wow, that’s amazing" — because they see themselves reflected in you.

2. When the child is upset, hungry, sick, tired, whatever, the parent soothes and comforts the child, organizes their feelings for them and gets them back into exploration mode.

And it’s this cycle between these two states that drives every area of a child’s brain development.

A staggering statistic I came across during my research was that scientists can predict with 77 percent accuracy whether a child will graduate from high school based on the strength of their relationship with Mum. Does the mum comfort the child when the child is upset? Is the mum delighted when the child achieves something or is exploring in a competent way?

Incredibly, the strength of the relationship with the parent is a better indicator than IQ. And I was fascinated by all of this research and started talking to scientists who taught families how to build bonds of love with their adoptive children.

"I believe that my film is a powerful tool for demonstrating the difference that the love of a family can make to a child’s life."

Sarah McCarthy

Director of "The Dark Matter of Love"

What inspired you to want to make a film about love?

I think it’s a kind of homage to my parents and a kind of preparation for having kids of my own. We are all products of our histories and our environments, and science has just started to unpack the elements of healthy parent-child relationships that drive a child’s brain development. The love of our parents doesn’t just affect your emotional development, it also affects how competent you are and how resilient. So the fact that my mum picked me up when I cried as a baby showed me that I’d be able to rely on other people, I can share my secrets and talk to people about things that upset me — which the science shows is an absolutely essential element of any healthy relationship. I think our relationships are such an important part of our lives, and I was curious to explore the mechanics of love through a scientific lens.

How did you deal with the delicacy of making a film about sensitive children going through a huge upheaval in their lives?

Obviously this was a huge concern right from the outset of the project.

I consulted a bioethicist called Illina Singh from Kings College, and we discussed the importance of the children being aware of what was going on, and we were careful to ensure that we explained who we were and what we were doing from the outset. We decided that it was important to be very sensitive about the filming process affecting key moments in the building of the relationships between the parents and the children. So, for example, the night after the concert, when Masha cried in front of her parents for the first time, Liam my cameraman and I were there, and we were sort of part of that moment, and it was incredible. Little diamond ice queen Masha, who swore she would never cry, had these big fat tears rolling down her cheeks, and Cheryl was rubbing her leg and saying, "It’s OK, baby." It was a really extraordinary moment.

Liam and I were so torn between being totally immersed in this amazing moment and wanting to film this amazing moment. And we kind of looked at each other and headed down to Masha’s room where the camera was and had a very intense conversation about whether we could come back up the stairs with a rolling camera. And it was hard. I adore Masha, but you live or die by the quality of material that goes through that lens, and we were letting this extraordinary moment pass us by. And we decided that we couldn't do it. It was too important to leave Masha and her new mum alone in that moment. We were kind of jumping up and down on the spot to try and deal with how hard it was. The filmmaker part of me still kind of wishes we had that material, but the human part of me is glad we didn’t shoot it. 

Liam Iandoli

"The Dark Matter of Love," directed by Sarah McCarthy — Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014, 9E/6P


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