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

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.