Inbal B. Lessner, ACE and Cecilia Peck discuss what goes into developing a docu-series about cults
Inbal B. Lessner, ACE and Cecilia Peck's long-standing working relationship has seen this duo work together to reveal the dangerous inner workings of cults. Lessner as an ACE editor and her team: Martin Biehn (Lead Editor,) Kevin Hibbard (Editor,) Troy Takaki (ACE Editor,) and Mimi Wilcox (Editor) are nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing For A Nonfiction Program for "Up in Flames." Their research has resulted in projects such as Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult and Escaping Twin Flames. They discuss the research that went into developing the docuseries, how they started working together, and the process of working on the project as the respective editor and director.
Culturess: How did you start working together?
Inbal B. Lessner: Cecilia and I met through a mutual friend, and she had just made Shut Up And Sing with Barbara Kopple, which I went to watch and really loved, and I invited her to see I Have Never Forgotten You, a documentary I worked on about Simon Wiesenthal. She really liked my work on the film, and we started talking about doing something together. Cecilia was approached by a producer about doing the Linor Abargil story, which became Brave Miss World, about the Israeli beauty queen who was raped seven weeks before she won the Miss World Crown, and we started working on that in 2008. That film premiered on Netflix in 2014 and received an Emmy nomination, and from there, we ended up doing more projects together, including SEDUCED, about the NXIVM Cult and now Escaping Twin Flames about Twin Flames Universe. So, it’s been about a fifteen-year collaboration all in all.
Cecilia Peck: I will just throw in that when I saw Inbal’s film about Simon Wiesenthal, which was an archival historical film, it felt like a verité story that was unfolding in front of your eyes, and I was just so impressed with her editing and storytelling skills. I really wanted to work with her and I feel very grateful for this fifteen-year collaboration.
Culturess: What made you excited about creating a docuseries?
Cecilia Peck: In a docuseries, you have the opportunity to go more in-depth than in a feature doc. Our current docuseries, Escaping Twin Flames, is essentially a three-hour film, which really gave us the opportunity to follow storylines all the way through Twin Flames Universe. And also, having a series on Netflix means it has a global reach. We’re really interested in this subject of coercive control, and how educated, intelligent people are lured into these groups. Doing a Netflix series gave us the opportunity to reach a lot of people, who hopefully will become more enlightened about coercion. I think what’s not understood is the way cults work, through the continuous application of controlling tactics. It’s not just, you sign up for something bizarre, and you must be a little crazy to buy into it. These groups seem very positive at the beginning. But you quickly get separated from your friends and family. We try to break down the emotional abuse, the isolation, the economic restrictions, and all the ways that people are manipulated and controlled inside these groups.
Inbal B. Lessner: We were also excited to pitch and sell this idea to Netflix because we knew it would be the largest platform internationally and it would get the most visibility. There’s a lot of audience for what’s called “True Crime” genre and cult subgenre in particular and a lot of fascination with the psychology of it. So, we had a feeling we had a really powerful story on our hands. An amazing opportunity to shed light, expose, and educate in addition to entertaining.
Culturess: What can you describe about the process of making Escaping Twin Flames?
Inbal B. Lessner: I would say the way we build the delicate relationships with our contributors, the people in front of the camera, is, I think, a trademark of our team. It takes a long time to form this very delicate trust. Weapproach our on-camera contributors as our partners. We help them regain agency over their stories and find a way to work with us to unpack what happened to them. Sometimes, it’s therapeutic. We make sure it’s not adding any harm to people who are already traumatized.
Cecilia Peck: We’re survivor-focused filmmakers but at the same time, we’re investigative journalists. So, we leave no stone unturned in terms of accessing evidence, including any videos or archival materials we could get that showed how the cult leaders were manipulating the victims. We don’t go in with an agenda, but our focus is on the stories of the survivors who have emerged from these groups, as they are beginning to try to understand what happened to them. Dr. Janja Lalich, who appears in the series, a sociologist with expertise in cults, has a term called “bounded choice,” which describes how at a certain point you’ve given up your own individual thinking and you feel compelled and obligated to follow the instructions of the cult leader, so you don’t really have a choice. And sometimes, you’re forced to do things in a cult that cause harm to other people. Doctor Lalich calls that “moral injury.” It’s one of the hardest things to recover from. Those are some of the issues we’re looking at. We rely on a combination of survivor testimonials and actual evidence. What we have on the screen basically amounts to something that could be handed over to authorities to prosecute a cult like this for a number of crimes.
Culturess: How was working on Escaping Twin Flames different than working on Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult?
Inbal B. Lessner: In terms of our approach and process, there are many similarities between the two shows. But Twin Flames Universe is a currently active group. They’re still recruiting, indoctrinating, coercing people to change their sexuality and gender expression. When we started working on NXIVM, the authorities were already active, and we followed the trial of the cult leader, Keith Raniere, and then the aftermath of that trial. There was an active component to that story also obviously. The trial was unfolding, and India Oxenberg, for example, deprogramming and understanding what had happened to her was very much unfolding in real-time. But, it is different when you have people who are very much free and active and litigious. We have to be extra careful with every single claim or assertion that we make to back it up. We have to bring three independent sources to verify every fact that is on screen. Every screenshot. Every email. Every video. So, I’d say that was difficult. Also, the trans aspect was new to us and was very delicate ethically. We were documenting mothers whose children are still in the cult and who have transitioned, and I think finding the way to tell those stories in a sensitive, ethical way was an ongoing challenge.
Cecilia Peck: I think the two groups are very similar in the way they operate. They both have an authoritarian leader. They’re closed societies where you’re quickly separated from your friends and family. They’re both wrapped around an ideology or belief system that has an answer to everything. They both enforce a set of rules and regulations that go from what you can eat, to who you can have as a partner, to actually reassigning gender or sexual identity in Twin Flames Universe. A lot of these cults have the same playbook, and the goal is always to exploit and control people, whether it’s financially or sexually, and always emotionally. Another similarity is the courage of the survivors who come forward to tell their stories. Nobody wants to admit they were in a cult. They’re aware that it can affect their future, their relationships with their family, their job prospects. But, in both cases, in Seduced with India, and Tabby, Naomi, Deb, Kelly, and Ashley, they all came forward because they knew it was important to share their stories so that other women could become aware of the red flags of these groups, and how alluring and positive they seem in the beginning. But how dangerous they actually are. In EscapingTwin Flames, with Keely, Marley, Elle, Jessi, and all the women who are in it, none of them wanted to go on TV and say, ‘I was in a cult.’ But they did it to help other women, and they trusted us because our prior work has been survivor-focused. They knew they were not going to be exploited or embarrassed or shamed in our series.
Inbal B. Lessner: Another similarity that popped in my mind is while these two shows have very extreme stories of extremely abusive cults, I think the common thread is that people can watch them and see similarities to other coercive relationships in their own lives. So, a guru they followed or a coercive relationship in the workplace or in Church or at home. It’s easy to say this is totally out there crazy, never gonna happen to me. But, when people really take a close look, they identify some of these red flags and the dynamics, they really recognize them in their own lives, and that’s where we feel that these shows are very effective because most of us are not gonna be in a sex cult or in Twin Flames Universe. But we can learn a lot from shedding light on these red flags and those dynamics that do exist in many places.
Culturess: When you work toward a docuseries or documentary about a cult, how much research goes into studying the cult, the history of the cult, and the survivors who have come out of it?
Inbal B. Lessner and Cecilia Peck: Years.
Inbal B. Lessner: You know, I think personally, on NXIVM, I had a steeper learning curve. I was new to the issue and to the world of cults. I didn’t completely understand where it tips over from being some self-help class, to being super nefarious and abusive and exploitative. There’s a lot of lingo that’s unique to every cult. It’s one of the typical things within a cult that they have their own special lingo where the members feel like they’re part of their own special group that they can only understand the language within, and nobody outside can understand them, and it makes them cut ties with family members and others outside the group. So, learning all this weird terminology in NXIVM that the former members were still using, and to understand the complex web of courses and ranking and the hierarchy of the group, it’s a lot to learn. But, I feel like once you wrap your head around what are really the basic characteristics of a cult, I think with Twin Flames, it was much faster. I saw the parallels. I saw the similarities, like Cecilia said, between the two groups. The manipulation tactics. It’s starting to look the same, and I think those cult leaders study each other. They see what’s out there, and they use existing tactics; they make a mishmash of some psychology that’s out there, some self-help tools that are proven to work, and they change them to benefit their own greed and sociopathic needs, for either power or money or sex or whatever it would be. So, I would say we do spend a ton of time interviewing, pre-interviewing, really getting to know the people’s lives before, what happened to them during, really diving into asking a lot of questions about details of what happened. Then, once we boil the story down, we sometimes go back and ask more, and memories might resurface and more details might come up. So, I would say the overall thing is that it’s ongoing. It’s not like there’s a research period and there’s a production period. It’s kind of all a parallel process.
Cecilia Peck: Also, part of the research was collecting footage and evidence, and we got access to hundreds of hours of the classes that these members had been subjected to. A lot of cult members will throw hard drives away or burn materials, to get rid of things because they’re trying to put the cult behind them. But our contributors were able to find evidence. We got a hard drive midway through production that revealed the inner workings of the cult. It was called the Holy Grail, and it helped us to establish how the cult leader gained control over the members. You see him make the decision on camera to turn the cult into a religion to avoid paying taxes. So, part of our research was very in-depth work in order to find and accumulate, watch, analyze, and then make use of the evidence that the former members were providing.
Culturess: You co-created the Escaping Twin Flames docuseries, but you also respectively directed and edited it. So, what went into being so involved in the overall finished product?
Inbal B. Lessner: We work closely on all aspects from pre-production and research all the way to the end. Because the schedule was so compressed, Cecilia will go on location and film and do the interviews and be the showrunner in charge of production, while I mostly stay in the editing room with the editors and be the showrunner in charge of post and monitor the shoots remotely. So, I would say we make all major decisions together, and there are countless of them every day, in terms of creative, ethical, legal, and logistical, that come up with personal issues with the former members or family members. So, once production wraps and we’re just in the edit, we pretty much collaborate daily. I was trained as an editor. That’s how my career developed. So, I will do hands-on editing, and I will supervise the editors, try to relay Cecilia’s vision and manage the team so that we work most effectively. It’s a small team, and we have mountains of documents videos and audio recordings and photos, and emails to go through. All this evidence has to be used to find those gems in the haystack, those little needles to really make the best, most concise, most effective story on the screen. So, that requires hands-on management daily.
Cecilia Peck: It’s a complete collaboration from beginning to end. As Inbal said, she’s often managing post-production and then in the editing room and working with the story team. But, sometimes she will come on location, which is great, so we can be together and really hone in on interview questions and what parts of the story need to be filled in, and to make sure the contributors have a through line that makes sense from start to finish. Sometimes, Inbal monitors remotely. I’m always on location on every shoot, prepping interview questions and working with the DP to figure out the framing, the look, and the style of the shoot that day. But we’re basically in touch at all times from start to finish, from pre-production all the way to delivery.
Inbal B. Lessner: I think the shows are successful because we put a lot of effort into choosing the right team. We have a supervising producer who has now worked with us twice, Morgan Poferl, and we put a lot of effort into selecting people who are amazing professionals, but also incredible human beings who bring their heart and passion to the project and know how to collaborate and work together keeping the survivors at the forefront of our minds.
Cecilia Peck: Yes, we should also mention our accomplished associate producer, Nadine Bedrossian, and our story team of Zoe Vlock and Kaitlin McLaughlin. And our incredibly talented editing team. Everybody really gave their utmost to make sure the series was powerful, and we couldn’t have done it without them. We also had a gender-diverse team because we needed to be very sensitive to the trans issues. Even though Twin Flames Universe was forcing people to change their sexual and gender identities, we did not want to suggest in any way that transness can be coerced. That was a unique circumstance.
Inbal B. Lessner: We’re both mothers. We both have daughters. Cecilia also has a son, but we both are mothers to daughters, and I think that also informs our approach and sensitivity and how we approach the stories and the team. We really try to take care of the people in front of the camera and behind the camera, offering psychological and mental health services before, during, and after filming, and to the crew during post-production to make sure everybody feels supported. It’s really difficult to work on such dark topics involving trauma. You never know what it will bring up for you as a filmmaker, as somebody working on a show like this. So, I think being constantly mindful, aware, and supportive of that is the key to us running this production team successfully.
Escaping Twin Flames is available to stream on Netflix. Seduced: Inside The NXIVM Cult is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
6 Hilarious Podcasts to listen to led by Woman Comedians. dark. Next. 6 Hilarious Podcasts to listen to led by Woman Comedians