When filmmaker Jan Oliver Lucks (aka Ollie) and his girlfriend got engaged, they decided to do away with the tradition of monogamy and take the plunge into an open relationship.
The couple, who lived at opposite ends of the country due to professional reasons, decided to document their polyamorous experiment, in which they are each allowed to date and sleep with other people for a year leading up to their wedding.
Using cellphones, the couple recorded their experience in the hopes that the resulting documentary would make them poster children for an alternative to monogamy. But things didn’t quite go to plan.
Lucks joins Kim Hill from Canada before he heads to New York.
“A bit of development after the film came out: a lovely woman got in touch with me who’s based in New York and, long story short, we’re engaged and I’m en route to be with her in New York.”
This time around, it won’t be an open relationship.
“I hope I learnt my lessons from that experiment.”
In fact, the documentary makes a pretty good case for monogamy in relationships.
“It started off as making the case for non-monogamy. We were so enthusiastic about this new way of living that we had found for ourselves. No one in our circle of friends at the time was doing what we were doing.
“We felt like we were discovering new land and wanted to turn our phones on ourselves and document what we were doing.”
Here’s a spoiler that won’t affect people’s enjoyment of the film: Lucks’ fiancée fell for someone else a year into the experiment and ends up being played by actor and co-writer Natalie Medlock.
“That was the big challenge with this project. We had 40 hours of documentary footage from the actual relationship and then we had to do some recreations with Natalie as Zoe. The challenge there was to blur the lines so that the viewer isn’t quite able to tell what was filmed when and how.
“That meant I had to play myself and recreate certain scenes which freaked me out for a few years between finishing my last relationship and starting the actual filming. I’m not an actor so I was freaking out about the acting part… it turned out it was quite easy to play myself on camera.”
At a certain point in his relationship with Zoe, Lucks had a sense things were going awry but says he ran away from the reality of it.
“I sort of held the camera up as a shield, as I say in the film, and being quite busy with full time work and co-directing my first feature and having a girlfriend in Auckland and a fiancée… this was the busiest period in my life and it was easy enough, at the time, to push reality away and not confront it.
“Obviously there were some confirmations about my status as being special and a fiancée that gave me the idea that I was safe, that there wouldn’t just be a break up all of a sudden – which is what ended up happening, to my surprise.
“The great advantage of this was having the material seeing the months up to the break up and seeing so clearly, as you would have, that the writing was on the wall and it was a car crash waiting to happen.”
At one point, the couple try a threesome with another man. Zoe enjoys it, as does the other man, but Lucks looks sick. Zoe and the other man go off for a shower whereas Lucks says he doesn’t like showering with other people – because it’s inefficient.
“Rather than dealing with the difficult conversations to be had, I cracked a joke hoping that someday, someone would see it an see the humour in it.”
One of the books that gave Lucks and Zoe the idea to try a relationship was Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, a best-selling popular science book which argued that polyamory was common and evolutionarily significant. The book was rejected by an academic publisher due to failing peer review and has been heavily criticised by anthropologists and psychologists for making leaps in conclusions.
“What I’d say to that is that I think some people can make open relationships work. I think polyamory can work for a smaller amount of people… but I definitely think it took me down the wrong path. I’m glad I had that journey and we tried it but, as you see in the film, it’s definitely not for me. I have too big an ego and can’t overcome my jealousy.”
His current fiancée got in touch with Lucks after seeing the film. She’s a writer and illustrator writing a book about people who go through difficult things in their life and come out the other end.
“After seeing the film, she asked to interview me about my journey and then, afterwards, we kept chatting and talking for a few months via facetime. Then, in the middle of a pandemic, I decided to travel halfway around the globe to meet her in New York. I booked a hotel room just in case but never ended up staying in it. We hit it off straight away and now we’re engaged.”
Whether he and his former fiancée would have remained together if they hadn’t opened up their relationship is a open question.
“I think it was a time-lapse of some hard, important, intense discussions we had in that time to make it work and, I have to say, it worked well for a while before it fell apart. But I think, in the end, we each saved each other a lot of time by doing this because I don’t think we would have been successful as a couple. We were fundamentally mismatched in some ways.”
There Is No I In Threesome is screening as part of NZIFF. Head over here for details.
