...And Then There Were Four: A Novel (2015). The first time he read his mother’s diaries as a child he was 12. A few months later he discovered he was an identical twin. A few months after that he knew he was Jewish. In the early 2000s, when he was about to finish graduate school, Kauffman learned about a documentary film about twins, One in a Billion. The film, which was scheduled to premiere at Sundance in the spring of 2005, would chronicle the story of Kauffman’s twin. Kauffman decided to make his film a feature, called Double Double Whammy. He began to reassemble footage of himself and his twin that had been shot between 1992 and 2004. He also found three other pairs of identical twins who were willing to participate, in turn. In order to ensure secrecy, the other participants did not learn that the other people featured in the film were twins. Double Double Whammy was conceived as an exploration of the idea of twinning. Not only was Kauffman’s twin not the subject of the film, but he wasn’t even in it, nor were any of the other people who share Kauffman’s DNA. Kauffman’s twin is a character in a film about twins, and Kauffman is a character in a film about a person who is a twin. For much of Double Double Whammy’s 80 minutes, Kauffman and Kauffman stand alone on the screen, talking about the films they have made, and the films they want to make, and the art projects they have considered pursuing. They are not in a room with anyone else, but rather stand, together, in the middle of a desert. The story of Double Double Whammy involves a variety of relationships: Kauffman’s relationships with his mother, his twin, and himself; his relationships with his colleagues and the people he interviews about twins; and his relationship to the public, who don’t always get him, or what he does, exactly. One of the main themes of Double Double Whammy is that twinship (or tripletship, or more) is inherently difficult to understand. In the film, there are many moments of confrontation, including a scene in which Kauffman’s ex-wife screams at him and asks if he will ever stop searching for his twin, and a scene in which an audience member yells at him and asks why he wants to see someone so ugly, a woman Kauffman calls “Sneaky Sick Sneaky.” When Kauffman tells one of his twins about his desire to pursue a project involving several twins, the other twin asks him, “Don’t you think you’re overreacting? You know how many people want to find their twin? There’s about four billion people on the planet, right? Four billion people. So it’s like . . . one in four billion. We’re going to see him? We’re gonna meet him? He’s going to be at Sundance?” As the film continues, Kauffman is forced to confront the fact that he is on an impossible quest: to meet a human being who looks exactly like him. By the end of Double Double Whammy, Kauffman has been forced to confront another question, too: is he even human? The film has been well reviewed, and Kauffman will be at Sundance showing it. It is one of 11 feature films in this year’s program. Double Double Whammy was produced by Kauffman and Andrew Brackman, co-executive produced by Elizabeth Feygin and Brian Becker, and written and directed by Kauffman. It has been nominated for the Sundance Special Jury Award for Excellence in Filmmaking. —A. M. Doughty *** In its own way, Kauffman’s film is a portrait of an individual, of the type that tends to make its own rules and is not so easily characterized. An artist and writer who also finds a calling in the film world, Kauffman has been working to make film his vocation since he was a kid. But he has had more than his fair share of struggles as a filmmaker. In addition to Double Double Whammy, he has a fiction feature, a project called “My Dad’s An Asshole,” that was a Sundance favorite, as well as multiple works-in-progress and one film that became a notorious flop. Some films never even reach a finish; the abandoned work is not one that he will talk about. The genesis of Double Double Whammy came in 2003, when Kauffman found a series of diaries his mother had kept as a little girl. She was 9 when she wrote them. “She was a writer,” Kauffman said, “and a painter, and a thinker.” He told her he wanted to use them in a film. He never actually said the word “film.” Though she didn’t take the news well, she gave him her permission to use the diaries. Kauffman also found out that his mother was identical to him. “It was a shock to me that she had shared so much of her experience with her twin,” he says. “I just assumed that her twin was dead.” When he was eight, his parents died. Their death certificate made it appear as if their remains had been placed in separate graves, but according to Kauffman, they were interred in a shared burial site. Kauffman and his twin first bonded when he was around 14, during a trip to Europe with his parents. At one point, he said, “I felt like my mind and heart were on two different planets.” The twins eventually settled in Los Angeles, where they were raised in the projects. As twins, they were teased by other children, who thought they were each other’s doubles, which led Kauffman to wonder: “What would it be like to have two of me? Is that possible? Because why do I feel like I feel so little?” Kauffman grew up around gangs and drugs, though his life was otherwise very normal. “It was a very different time and place than it is now,” he says, which made him feel isolated from his peers. He went to an alternative high school where he discovered a group of students who were “very weird, very interesting, and very smart,” he says. “It was a small community, a community of outliers.” In 1999, Kauffman was accepted into the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he took a class that helped him to realize that what he wanted to do wasn’t film. “I was doing a documentary and I hated it, because it was about nothing,” he says. “I was doing narrative projects because it seemed I could do anything, which wasn’t true. There was nothing special about me or the films I made.” He has since lost interest in feature filmmaking, though he doesn’t rule out the possibility of trying to make a movie again in the future. “I don’t know how to make a narrative film,” he says. “But I do know how to document other people’s narratives. I know how to document emotions. The films that came from that interest never took me away from my interests in fiction filmmaking.” Kauffman continued to work at the film school while working as a production assistant, but, on one of his first productions, Double Double Whammy, as a special effects assistant, he took a turn. He and his twin were assigned to fix a broken scene of a sword-and-sandal epic. Kauffman felt overwhelmed; it was his first real time as an assistant on a film. “I thought, ‘I would rather not be doing this right now,’ ” he says. But he also found it liberating, a process in which he became an auteur in his own right: “I can look at a moment and then put myself in it. I wasn’t controlling the action. I was in the moment with the camera. For that hour, I felt like I was writing a script. The entire crew was my cast, and I felt like I was playing a part. When you’re in front of the camera, you have to let it all hang out.” But the experience was upsetting, too. “You become the one who’s going to do everything, but you don’t have