A Conversation with Valerie Weiss, PhD '01

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Valerie Weiss first felt the lure of the performing arts as a child; by the time she was at Harvard — pursuing a PhD in biophysics — the call was irresistible. As the founder, filmmaker-in-residence, and festival director of the Dudley House Film Program from 1999 to 2003 (she got her PhD in 2001 but stayed around to develop the program), she juggled two passions that, in many people, might each form a single-minded obsession. Now a full-time filmmaker who has written, directed, and produced her first feature-length film, Losing Control — an offbeat romantic comedy about a female scientist who wants proof that her boyfriend is “the one” — Weiss is happy to bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences. Her film premiered as the closing night screening at the Vail Film Festival this spring and recently screened at the Stony Brook (NY) Film Festival and the Wood's Hole Film Festival on Cape Cod. Follow along on Facebook for more information.

What attracts you to both science and the arts?

People think it’s odd to be drawn to the sciences and the performing arts, but for me the connection to science is that I love to understand how things work, how theories can unify observations. For me, theater examined the same connection in a different way: it examined how we can find the heart of the matter. 

So you find similarities between the two?  

Definitely. When I did my PhD, my approach to it was the same approach I had to making a movie: studying the literature and conducting the research, finding the story I wanted to tell and the questions I wanted to examine, developing a hypothesis. For me, the procedures are very similar. Science is a very collaborative process, as is film. 

How did you come to start the Dudley House Film Program? 

When I got to Harvard, I knew I wanted to continue with theater and film [passions she’d indulged as an undergraduate at Princeton]. My first few years, I directed plays at Dudley House, which were performed with graduate student actors. By this time I’d been directing for about six years, and I told Susan Zawalich [Dudley House administrator] that I really wanted to move into films. I became a Dudley drama fellow and got filmmakers like James Toback AB ’66 [Tyson, The Pick-Up Artist, Bugsy] to come and teach classes. We also developed a festival of the film shorts that students had made. 

While I was writing my thesis, I directed my first film, Dance by Design, which was a collaborative project with Harvard dance students. We made it for $5,000 with grants from Harvard and Dudley House, and production-wise, it was my beginning. 

How did you transition from Boston to LA, and from academia to film?  

My husband [Rob Johnson] and I met at Princeton, when we were doing the play Cyrano De Bergerac. He was interested in acting, but then went to Wall Street, and then to law school. When I started making movies, I gave him acting classes as an engagement gift, and it reignited his passion for acting. Once we decided to move to Los Angeles so I could start directing, he decided to return to acting. It was scary, but once you know what you want to do, it’s scarier not to do it. I founded PhD Productions in 2004, and we used that production company from the very start. 

Have you received any explicit film training? 

I was accepted into the Catalyst Workshop at the American Film Institute, which was for scientists who wanted to develop science into movies. I had already begun to develop the idea for Losing Control, but this was the first time I ever discussed it publicly. Later I was accepted to the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women. We went through three weeks of classes and each received some funds and equipment to make a short film within one week. I made a film called Transgressions. 

That was your first time working on a professional level? 

Right. By this point, I’d made shorts and films, but this was working with professional cinematographers, shooting on a soundstage, and working with an incredibly professional team. You never have enough money or time, but it opened a lot of doors and got me an agent. I started writing and re-writing Losing Control, workshopping it with actors, refining my vision and storyboarding it, then shopping it again, and we had a very positive response.  

What was that experience like?  

I always wanted it to be an independent, quirky film that I would direct. Ultimately, I decided to raise funds on my own to make the film I wanted to make. That was a big turning point. Getting a company to make your film can lead to an eternity of meetings, and you can wake up two years later and the film still isn’t accomplished. Once I decided to raise the money to make the film, we raised the entire budget within three and a half weeks. In July 2009 we had our financing, and we started shooting on October 12 of the same year. 

One of the benefits of doing a PhD is the realization that you are the catalyst for everything that happens. You don’t wait for an opportunity to do your work; you have to just do it.  

Was it important to you to portray scientists as three-dimensional characters?

Absolutely. The characters in Losing Control have the curiosity, innocence, and sweetness that the scientists I knew had: they’re offbeat, quirky, unusual characters, rather than the very fringe, evil scientists that you usually see in films.   

The film was partially shot in Boston, and at Harvard, right? 

We got to shoot in laboratories at Harvard Medical School, on the Duck Tours, and on the MBTA. It was an amazing experience. It’s very much an exaggerated experience of my PhD, but it reflects the culture of academic science and the culture of Boston. I’m very proud that we were able to do that.