Exclusive Interview: Luke Meyer and Keith Newton Talk About Their Compelling Docuseries, The Fourth Wall

Luke Meyer and Keith Newton are the dynamic duo behind The Fourth Wall.

Making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, The Fourth Wall is an intimate documentary series in which the son of cult leaders investigates the transgressive group in which he was raised. This is the story of the Sullivanians, New York’s secretive “psychotherapy cult,” which was hidden in plain sight on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1970s and ’80s.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Luke and Keith about The Fourth Wall, the ten-year process bringing this project to life, and more.

Please Note: This interview was filmed prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. We stand in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, and will not be conducting further interviews until a fair deal is reached.

PC: Keith, you had a personal tie to this organization up until you were seventeen. At what point did you realize you wanted to make this documentary and how did this partnership with Luke come about?
Keith: I grew up in this, so this was my personal experience. I had been living with it my whole life, but there was so much that I didn’t know. There was so much that I didn’t understand about my own reality, experience, and the world that I lived inside of.

When the group fell apart in 1991, I left New York. I went to college. I stayed away for a long time. Everybody from that group scattered. Somebody described it as a diaspora. Everyone fled in certain ways and rebuilt their lives but did it in hiding. There was all this publicity from the ’80s that really scared people about any exposure.

My family was the same. I totally internalized that. I talked about it with my friends and people I was close to, but I wanted no public association with it. It wasn’t until I returned to New York about a decade later. I got to re-meet some of the other kids from the group. We all had lost touch. We started sharing our stories and realized we all had a lot of the same questions about the past. There were so many things we didn’t know about each other’s lives and experiences and why certain things were the way they were. People had questions about their paternity, which is something that comes up in this episode. There were a lot of crosscurrents. The idea of exploring and investigating this kept building.

I was writing about it, and I always felt like I was blocked in terms of what the story actually was. Then at a certain point, I made the choice that I couldn’t move forward in my life until I really investigated this and understood what it was. That would involve going back to the people that I had once lived among. Many of them had helped raise me since this was a communal family situation. These are people I’d been very close to, but I didn’t understand what their experiences had been. I didn’t know why they were in the group, how they got involved, and what happened afterward.

Even though documentary filmmaking wasn’t my background at that point, I felt like I could bring my skills as a writer and my background to this project. But it had to be done this way. I knew it was such a visual story. The visual storytelling opportunities were extraordinary with the documentary films that the group made (which don’t appear in this episode but come into play later), the media/publicity, and the photo archives. I knew this is the form that it had to take.

Luke and I were actually acquaintances. We had some mutual friends. We actually saw a screening of a documentary together. I started telling him about this right after the screening and how I had this idea for a project. It was that combination of this idea that I had and his experience as a filmmaker and his own interest in the subject matter.

Luke: For part of my childhood, I grew up in a guru-led mediation ashram. I left it when I was a teenager. It’s always been a subject matter that I wanted to get back into regarding groups and turning over control of your life to people. I hadn’t found a story that worked in a way that would satisfy what I was looking for until Keith brought this to me. There’s a lot about this story that’s completely fascinating, but a big part of what really spoke to me, in particular, is how when you looked at this group, you wouldn’t be able to tell they were any different from your average New Yorker at the time. That was one side of these fringe/cult groups that I wanted to explore. Because most of the time when these stories are told, they’re told like a freak show. They’re told in a sensational way and about a group that’s either ideologically or physically far away from normal society. That’s not what this is about. All of us are not that many steps away from joining something like this if the conditions are right. When most of the sensational versions of cult stories are told, they’re told to make us feel safer. We just look at our own life and we’re like, “Things aren’t great, but at least I’m not in a cult.” We’ve seen it in recent years: extreme ways of living are just a couple of steps away for a lot of people. We’ve seen it in various forms of political extremism. A lot of those people who are in extreme positions now in their lives were not there several years ago. It happens quickly and easily.

PC: Luke, one of the most exciting things about documentary filmmaking is there’s an unpredictability that you can’t account for. Often the narrative begins to unfold during the process. Having spent ten years working on this series, how has it evolved over time?
Luke: When we began this, Keith and I fully saw it as this historical documentary. We saw the history of the Fourth Wall and the Sullivanians as this forgotten history that our project was going to unearth from the forgotten history of New York to the general understanding of cults in America. But as we got into it and started to talk to people, it became very clear that even though the group itself ended in the early ’90s, the experience still carried on in them and was very much still present.

As we got deeper into that, we saw that not only was that the case for most of the people we were filming, but it was also very true for Keith. So the more that we filmed, the more it became totally clear to us that Keith’s investigation, which was part of the mechanism of the documentary, was really part of the story. That was the major evolution of this project. It was bringing Keith on screen. In many ways, it becomes the center narrative, even though there are a lot of stories at play. It’s the central narrative that lets people see what this process of investigation and discovery is as he talks to his mother at various stages.

PC: Keith, there’s so much vulnerability and trust that’s needed for a project like this, especially when you’re interviewing an array of different subjects and asking them to recall their experiences with and in this cult. How beneficial was it having those prior relationships with the many different subjects that you featured in this docuseries? How were you able to create an environment where they all felt comfortable sharing their experiences?
Keith: That’s a great question. It took some people months and years to get comfortable with that. My previous relationships were crucial to this. But some of the people I hadn’t seen in years. Some of them didn’t even really know me. I was a child. They were adults. I had to gain the trust of a lot of different people. Luke and I collaborated on that process. It really did take a while. I started with the people closest to me, the friends of my age, but even they had a lot of misgivings about going public with the story and whether I was the right person to tell the story, being the child of the leaders.

I had a lot of convincing to do to prove to people that I was searching for the truth, that I was vulnerable myself about this, and that I was willing to explore whatever it was that I would find and whatever it would say about my parents or my family or the group at large. I had to convince people of that.

That was the process. But that’s absolutely where I was coming from, so I could convince them in earnest about that. That’s what we’re seeing in the results. Luke was just describing the process of me discovering my own part in the story and what changed for me when we started. I was asking other people to go on camera and be vulnerable. When we realized that I was part of the story, I was like, “I’m going to have to do that as well.” I think that really helped people be comfortable because I’m asking people to be vulnerable on camera and tell their stories, explore parts of their lives that they maybe tried to forget or at least haven’t wanted to talk about in an open way. Now I’m going to have to do that too. When people saw that I was doing that as well, that really helped. They were like, “If Keith is putting himself out there as well then…” The truth is that keeping this secret is a huge burden. It was protected by people in a lot of ways. I think a lot of people thought they would never talk about this ever again in public. But I think once the opportunity to tell their story and make sense of this huge part of their life that they’ve been hiding for so long came about, that was an opportunity to really be like, “Oh, no. I can try to integrate this piece of my life that I’ve segregated as this aberration in my personal history. This is a part of who I am. This informed who I am. I want to talk about this.”

PC: Luke, this is also the first time that Wes Craven has publicly spoken about his involvement with the organization. How did that come about?
Luke: By chance. One of our cinematographers happened to be at the same place as him and was talking about this project that he was working on. So Wes Craven was listening and he was like, “Is this the Sullivanians?” He connected it from the description, which led to the interview. We were so fortunate to get it both because he had never spoken publicly about it before and—we didn’t know it at the time—it was also not too far from the end of his life. From talking to him and his widow, I realized it was an important thing for him to actually have a chance to unload this somewhere. So I think that was a very positive thing for me.

I know also from talking to him that this experience, even though it was a small chapter in his life overall, fed into a lot of the themes that he put into his films. It was a very, very seminal moment for him. I’m glad that he got a chance to record it in that way.

PC: This docuseries has been ten years in the making. What’s one thing you know now that you wish you had known when you started this process a decade ago?
Luke: We have not been asked that question before. It’s been a very long project. The last project that I made before this took eleven months. It’s a very different scale. When we started, we were totally hoping and thinking this would be a one- or two-year project. Obviously, that’s not what happened. When you see what happens in the next three episodes after this you’ll realize that time really becomes an element in the story and there’s a passage of time within it that we would never have gotten if it had been a shorter project.

I actually think that’s one of the beauties of documentary filmmaking. It’s really exclusive to documentaries and the kinds that do a long time, which I don’t think anyone ever plans, but the results of that are these unique and amazing things that can only be captured that way. This is one of those projects where it happened to take that long, and there are a lot of positive, beautiful things that came out of it.

Keith: I would say something very similar. To add to that, when we started, we knew that one of the themes we wanted to explore had to do with questions of memory and how people look back on these experiences. A lot of cult stories tell the story of the history and the crazy things that happened. They don’t look at the aftermath of how these things played out over time and how you live with the radical choices you made when you were younger and how those might affect your relationships and yourself when you’re older. It’s a great question to ask about societies and radical or transgressive things that happen within society. How does that affect later generations or the people that took part in them?

We knew that the memory of the past and the exploration of the past were central themes when we started. There would have been less impatience along the way when things were taking longer than we wanted if we had known that there was going to be an element of time in what we were filming and that that would be explored.

PC: The first episode premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it’s been incredibly well received. What do you hope audiences take away after seeing this? What’s next for the docuseries?
Luke: One of the most amazing things about the screening at Tribeca is that this is a New York story. A lot of the people who are in the story or connected to it live in New York or nearby. Even some who live far away came.

The screenings functioned as a reunion for a lot of people and a chance to come together around their shared experiences. It was amazing to have those opportunities. It’s a series. It doesn’t necessarily have a life that exists in a shared viewing environment. As a series, it wasn’t designed for that. So this was a very, very special thing to have available to us. It’s also a nice debut for the project and a way to start talking about it publicly. We’ve kept it really quiet as we’ve been working on it over the years, so it’s nice to be able to do that.

What’s next is that we’re in conversations about distribution to get all four episodes out to people everywhere.

Make sure to follow Luke (Twitter/Instagram) and Keith (Twitter/Instagram)