In the mid 1990s, I was a graduate student in linguistics at Cornell University, working on my dissertation. Inspired by Bartlett’s ([1932] 1995), Worth and Adair’s ([1972] 1997) and Chafe’s (1980) research, I wanted to make my own films to see whether the process of learning a new language may lead L2 learners to ‘see’ things that monolingual speakers of their L1 do not. What I did not know was what those ‘things’ should be. And then I came across an essay on bilingualism, dialogism, and schizophrenia by a French scholar, Tzvetan Todorov (1985, 1994). The essay described an unusual experience Todorov had in translating a conference paper from his L2 French into the L1 Bulgarian – he suddenly found himself changing the argument into its opposite. The essay both puzzled and intrigued me – if only I could capture something like that! And then I caught a lucky break – Todorov came to Cornell to give a talk and kindly agreed to be interviewed. In what follows, I will use this unpublished interview (Todorov, 1997) and Todorov’s (1985, 1994, 1996, 2008) autobiographical writings to guide further inquiry into linguistic thought and the relationship between bilingualism and cognition.