Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (10 page)

faster than the speed of wi-fi

Seeing Anaïs on Skype was unreal. I mean, we had to be twins. I had never seen anyone who looked even remotely like me, let alone my exact mirror reflection. She had my laugh, my freckles, and that profile. When she turned to the side during that first Skype conversation, I was blown away. I stopped for a second and freaked out inside.

But what if we weren’t sisters? What would that mean? Would it mean that dinosaurs really walked the earth with Jesus? I mean, that’s how crazy it felt, right?! There was no way we weren’t related. But I guess there are no guarantees in life.

If we were sisters, then maybe Anaïs would have medical issues similar to mine. Maybe she would know where her freckles came from, and her dry skin, and her eczema! What if she was lactose intolerant?

Being adopted and being asked to fill out a medical history form at the doctor’s office was always sad in a way. I’d come to the part of the sheet that asked if I had any family members with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc., and I
would draw a big cross on the section and write “N/A.” I had no medical history. I didn’t know if my mother had or has had breast cancer, or lung cancer, or sensitive skin, which meant I didn’t know to watch out for these things. I could never be prepared, and it made me a hypochondriac. Every time something was remotely wrong, I’d assume the worst . . . I’m dying. Then I’d go on the Internet and type in my symptoms, and it was confirmed. Instant death. It was so ridiculous. These websites were crazy. Headache? Check. Sore throat? Check. Stomachache? Check. Rash? Maybe.

Perhaps now I would finally have a medical history, or at least have someone to share my hypochondria with. It turned out that Anaïs and I had experienced very similar nerve disorders at around the same age. For me, it was during the fall of 2011, pretty soon after I moved to California, and I thought I was dying! For a time, I had phantom pains in my right foot, which was thought to be nerve damage in my leg. After much testing, it turned out to be nothing, just my nerves sending mixed signals to my body, which translated into pain. My body wanting attention—rude. Anaïs also had phantom pains, except hers were in her back and neck. The only conclusion to reasonably come to is that we are both insane.

Our Skype call really got us thinking about our similarities. Over the next few nights, I couldn’t wait for our calls to take place again. I was becoming an Anaïs Bordier addict—I couldn’t get enough of her, and I was getting the feeling that she couldn’t get enough of me, either. I guess you could say that we were becoming self-obsessed. All I did was talk about her to all my friends, which luckily didn’t seem to bore them, and I wouldn’t have cared if it had. Anaïs was my new focus in life, and thankfully everyone around me seemed to be just as excited.

Being in Hollywood, of course, meant that I got bombarded with suggestions of how to turn our story into a moneymaker. From the moment I first heard from Anaïs and told people that I might be a twin, my friends and agents started thinking, project! That first night, at my premiere of
21 & Over
, all I heard was, “We gotta make a movie. WE GOTTA MAKE A MOVIE!” That kind of chatter almost overpowered the incredible event that was happening in my life! “You should record it, if you talk to her!” someone said. “Don’t miss that! You should record it!” said another. I wanted everyone to SHUSH! I agreed that making a movie about it would be cool, if it turned out that we were twins, but for now, SHUSH! I was going through something crazy, something insanely wonderful, and I wanted to be present in the immediate moment of ecstasy, not planning a project.

My manager told me to delay talking to Anaïs. She had some things she wanted to think through before the call took place. I, on the other hand, wanted the event to be totally private, Anaïs and I alone. I didn’t want our moment to be corrupted or exploited by intrusions, especially not by the business that provided my livelihood.

On the other hand, when I thought about it, I imagined how cool it would be to have the moment recorded, even if it was just for personal use. When I asked permission from Anaïs, and she said it was okay, I downloaded a recorder. I am so glad I did, so relieved. In real time, the moment we first “saw” each other has no words; it was simply indescribable. But, having recorded it, I can watch that moment again and again, and I can share it with my friends and family.

In addition to taping the Skype call, my friends and I were floating the idea of making a documentary. I was still up in the air about whether or not we should commercialize
the whole crazy happenstance. I know how ugly Hollywood can get. There are some really bizarre reality shows that do nothing but exploit their subjects, and I didn’t want that for Anaïs and me. I especially didn’t want to scare Anaïs away. I started weighing the pros and cons and soliciting everyone’s opinions about it. Should Anaïs and I make a movie? Should I just write a screenplay about it, but not make a documentary? Should I really film our interactions? What could we do with all the footage? How would the documentary look? Would it be like old pictures of us and memories of our childhoods? We didn’t even know for sure if we were twins. Finally, Anaïs and I decided to go forward with the documentary idea, although we’d proceed cautiously.

Deciding to do something like a documentary with someone you had never met was strange. Essentially, I was entering into a business plan with someone across the world in order to share our most intimate moments with anyone who would watch. I mean, that’s weird, right? Why on earth would Anaïs and I take an important moment like this, tarnish it with cameras and cameramen, and then release it to the world? Well, being an actress and being in the business, I was very aware that the events unfolding before me were completely extraordinary. Doing the documentary was also doing something creative and possibly even therapeutic at the same time, which was a huge upside. In a way, it was giving us a means to express and process the crazy information that had come out of nowhere. Not many people have something this insane happen in their lives.

We decided we wanted to do a full-length documentary rather than something shorter. We would start by filming our getting to know each other, which would be through our video blogs, video diaries, and Skype conversations. The film
crew would then follow us as we made preparations to meet in person for the first time.

We really wanted to capture our families on film, too. As much as Anaïs and I had been through, our families were going through their own emotions. Our parents were still very fearful that we might end up with an unfathomable disappointment, but they were also excited, knowing how identical we looked, and how we shared the same birth date and birthplace. They had a lot of questions, but they were totally willing to believe we were related and had found each other. My parents were fully on board for a documentary. My mother had been around the business since I was a kid, so she didn’t mind the cameras, and my dad’s a ham. Anaïs’s dad was the most reluctant about the project. The Bordiers are very private people and not accustomed to Hollywood voyeurism. They didn’t say they would absolutely not participate, but they were not enthusiastic. Anaïs knew her father was just being protective. French culture is very good about keeping people’s private lives private, much different from the disrespect for privacy in the United States.

As soon as we gave the project the green light, I got to work finding a production crew. I had just filmed a movie in Hawaii with Justin Chon, Kevin Wu, and James Yi called
Man-Up!
The three of them had been with me when I first heard from Anaïs on premiere night, and now they wanted to be on board for this project. Kanoa wanted to join in, too. Justin would be our executive producer, and Kanoa, James, and I would be producing. My manager also came on board as a producer. James set up a $40,000 budget to cover the small crew’s trip to London—housing, flights, and food; postproduction costs; and the camera equipment. Now we had to raise the money. We all knew the level of excitement the
story could attract, but that didn’t guarantee big sponsorship. We reached out to a few private investors and organizations, but we couldn’t find anything substantial, and the last thing I wanted was to sell our life rights to some Hollywood studio that would turn our amazing story into the Asian
Parent Trap
. If we were going to share our lives, I wanted us to do it right and make it authentic, not embellished and not from the perspective of a Hollywood producer with dollar signs in his eyes.

I was anxious to get to London, not wanting to wait another moment to meet Anaïs. If it were a matter of finding a cameraman, I would just shoot it on an iPhone if I had to, but I wanted to get going already. But Anaïs had also been considering the timing. She thought that maybe, if we could wait until mid-May, I could be there to see her fashion show at Central Saint Martins. She said the show was always a huge deal, an extravaganza, where the students created the most spectacular outfits imaginable.

Anaïs’s parents were coming to London to attend the event, so that would be an added bonus for me, my chance to meet them as well. I asked Anaïs what she thought if I invited my parents to London, too, and she loved the idea. A full-blown event, if they agreed. Anaïs and I would meet first, of course, not as family units, but just the two of us, and then we would introduce our families. Already, Anaïs’s mother was anxious to contact my mother to introduce herself.

The production crew liked the idea of the London trip in May, because it would give us enough time to fund and organize the documentary. I reluctantly agreed, curbing my disappointment that I would have to wait almost three months to actually meet Anaïs in person. In the meantime, I continued to
virtually
meet her pretty much every day on
Skype, as we bided our time until we could actually hug and poke each other’s noses in person.

As for raising the money, the team finally landed on the idea of crowdfunding to gain our production financing, which now seemed like the only way to do it. Social media had played such a huge role in Anaïs and me finding each other. Why shouldn’t we crowdfund? I knew that there was potential for our story to go viral, which meant a lot of exposure and perhaps a lot of donations.

Kanoa and I considered a few crowdfunders, primarily Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Finally, we decided to go with Kickstarter, the largest and best-known crowdfunding platform out there. First, we read all the tips about the website and talked to friends who had run successful campaigns using it. The familiarization process was filled with long nights of the production crew and me sitting at my dining room table, mulling over ideas for the documentary’s title and a name for our production company. Finally, we decided to call the film
Twinsters
. It was a decision made over a few drinks after sitting for hours at my dining room table. We wanted to merge some words together and coin a term. Twin . . . sisters . . . twins . . . twinsters. Aha! As for the production company, we settled on the name Small Package Films. Once we had our names and set up our project, I wrote the plea for funding:

Why we need your help!

We are firm supporters of the social media world, which includes crowd sourcing & funding platforms like Kickstarter! Without the world of social media, Anaïs & Samantha may have never been able to connect!

We plan to gain the entirety of our budget through this Kickstarter campaign. Creating a documentary can be very expensive, especially when you are traveling to Europe! Your donations will help us to fund production expenses, which include: travel, equipment rental/insurance, crew expenses & a DNA test for Samantha & Anaïs. They will also cover our post-production expenses, which include hiring a sound/picture editor, a graphic designer and everything in between.

As the launch date approached, we were feeling the pressure. We didn’t know if it was possible to raise that much money, and at the last moment, we decided to downsize the dollar amount to $30,000 and be frugal with our budget. We needed to raise the $30,000 in three and a half weeks, leaving us with two weeks to process the funds and still get us to London by May 16, in time for Anaïs’s fashion show. The rule with Kickstarter is if you reach your goal, then you keep the money, minus a 5 percent commission and some payment charges, and if you don’t reach your goal, then you forfeit it all. Only slightly more than half the projects succeed.

The night before the launch, I was up all night working on last-minute details. At seven the next morning, we were officially under way. Within a few minutes, our first donation, $100 from Eileen, came through. After that, the money started flowing. By nine, we already had something like $2,000, and by the end of the day, we had raised around $5,000. It was insane. I never expected people’s generosity toward a project for which there was very little in it for them, except to see an artistic endeavor come to fruition, happen so
quickly. At the rate we were going, we’d need far less time than the twenty-eight days we had allotted.

Then followed the interest from the media. This part had me worried even before the launch, on account of Anaïs’s trepidation about making our story public. She was far more private than I, and I was worried that media bombardment might scare her off. I woke up the next morning to e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter messages, and Kickstarter messages from reporters from every major news network. Several of them had even tracked down my father and called him at work to get more details on the story. I wasn’t sure what to do! I hope they are not harassing Anaïs! was my first thought. When I checked in with her, sure enough, a reporter had contacted her, too. There were people messaging her Facebook friends and trying to call them by telephone. This was what I had been scared about: people intruding into Anaïs’s life. Luckily, Justin’s publicist was willing to field the media, so that was a relief.

One outstanding task was finding a cinematographer. Justin suggested Ryan Miyamoto, a friend of a friend. After watching an old reel on his website, I was overly impressed. Plus, he was dang cute, too. He looked like a Hawaiian Ken doll. Not too shabby to have around for several stressful weeks, eh? And he was available to leave the following week and spend some time away from home. He was the first and only option.