Editor's note: Sara Alexandra Pelaez is one of three recipients of the Sundance Institute's Roger Ebert Fellowship for Film Criticism for 2016. The scholarship meant she participated in the Indiewire | Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism, a workshop at the Sundance Film Festival for aspiring film critics started by Eric Kohn, the chief film critic and senior editor of Indiewire.
Gift stores almost always have a given
tackiness about them, but Southwest Indian Traders, located underneath the Sundance
Filmmaker Lodge on Main Street, provided a very Utah atmosphere for my
conversation with Doron Weber of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a group that
gives a Feature Film Prize to films with science and technology as a theme.
Past winners include "The Stanford Prison Experiment" and "I Origins," and this
year's prize went to "Embrace of the Serpent."
We both were situated on fur-lined benches (which
kind of animals, I did not care to find out), encapsulated by long wooden skis
and snowshoes the size of mammoth's feet. Gazing around the lumbered mom-and-pop,
I saw antique Native American carved boats suspended from the ceiling, mounted
animal heads, and cheeky artisan signs that had hand painted guns on them and
read "We don't call 911."
Mr. Weber was very candid with me, asking me
questions about myself as well as giving me constructive criticism throughout
the conversation. He said I was "ambitious, in the best sense of the word" at
the very beginning.
I understand that
your ultimate motivations here at the festival are to support and award films
that creatively present science and technology in an accessible way.
That's only half of it.
Could you explain the other half?
Well, we also support screenwriters, one through the lab and
one through commissioning grants, in order to develop films ourselves that have
to do with science. We have a kind of farm system, like a developmental
pipeline. Sundance is one of four or five of my partners. And we might often
give a grant at Sundance, then they'll go on to making another film, and it
keeps them going. And so, I say that's as important. The public sees the film
that wins the award, and that's nice and that's important … but it's the new
word that we're trying to get into that pipeline and start off and encourage
younger filmmakers and screenwriters to take on this subject matter. We've been
doing it now for, like, this is our thirteenth year at Sundance, I think. And
so we've arguably helped to move the culture a little bit towards this through
funding all the film schools. I also do books, radio, theatre, all towards the
same goal: to show people that science and technology are a part of modern
life, and scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are human beings like me
and you. And to understand the nature of their work.
Mr. Weber went on to
explain the argument presented by C.P. Snow in which the languages of
scientists, mathematicians, and engineers veer off into their specializations
so deeply that they develop their own exclusive language. This language then
becomes increasingly inaccessible to the larger group, including the
humanitarians. These artists, playwrights, developers speak much more easily to
the larger group, but they also never intersect with the scientists. In effect,
they forget how to speak to one another, which is tragic beyond belief. His aim,
with the work he does at Sundance, is trying to bring those two cultures of
Shakespearians and Einsteins together, using film as a universal vehicle to
reach the public.
The division is artificial, between science and art. You have
to see the whole thing to see how each piece fits.
So let me see if I'm
understanding you correctly; in order for you to do your job more successfully,
you need to find more generalists in the world? Like finding more Renaissance
individuals.
I would say my
ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a version of Leonardo da Vinci.
Perfect. He saw the world holistically.
He was a great scientist and a great artist. It's really a
question of the fullest most comprehensive view of life, that's really my
personal drive. That's what animates me in terms of what I'm doing, what
animates me as a writer in my own endeavors. I'm not trying to get anyone to do
anything other than to open themselves up. A lot of the stuff I do is through
entertainment. I'm also a big funder of PBS documentaries, for example, which
are more overtly didactic. But this effort is very much about entertainment. We
want you to come, you know, for fun.
Yeah, for fun and
enjoyment and to also just get people thinking. For people to walk out of the
theatre with something left on their minds, and to create conversations that
they probably might not have had if they had not seen a particular film. Or to
contribute to a bigger conversation.
Yes, exactly.
That brings me to my
inquiry, for me as an individual I very much value representation of women, and
representation of diversity–
Oh, I definitely look for stories about women. I want these
things to be equal, I prefer to back women directors, women writers, not just
in film but in many things that I do. Because there are voices that we need to
bring us back to the fuller picture. You're missing like half the story.
I mean, women are
half of the human population.
And we have a lot of projects, I'd be happy to tell you
about, which are finally seeing the light of day.
Could you tell me about some?
Sure! The one
I've been pushing the longest, over 10 years, is the Hedy Lamarr story.
Hedy Lamarr, born
Hedwig Kiesler, was an Austrian-American film actress and "a brilliant
technological pioneer" who was discredited for her impeccable brains for her
controversial performance as the first naked woman in film. She developed
ungodly technological advances for the Allies in World War II, including frequency-hopping. Frequency-hopping is one of the foundations of your modern day
smartphone, and when she presented it to the Pentagon, they immediately
dismissed her, as they didn't take her seriously because of her acting career.
When the 1950s rolled around, they realized just how important this invention
was. In good spirits towards Lamarr and her scientific advances, Doron Weber
has since commissioned a book, a play, a documentary, and a four-part mini-series
was optioned from the previously mentioned book. Behind the documentary are two
women producers, and a woman director. Other women in science stories that Weber has
been supporting through film, television, and theatre are Rosalind Franklin
(x-ray crystallographer who made the discovery of the double-helix nature of
DNA), Jane Goodall (primatologist best known for her five-decade study of
chimpanzee interactions), Marie Curie (chemist/physicist who pioneered research
on radioactivity, first woman to win the Nobel Prize, first person to win it
twice), and Lisa Meitner (one of the first physicists who discovered nuclear
fission in uranium).
And then there's a book I gave a grant to called "Hidden
Figures," the story of the African-American women mathematicians who helped
NASA and the US win the space race. One of those women mentioned in the book is
Katherine Johnson, and she just received the Presidental Medal of Freedom from
Obama in December. And now that book is going to be turned into a movie.
Personally, I would even like for these stories told by women, in other words,
it'd be great to have a woman director.
And a woman producer,
and a woman writer.
Yeah, because the sensibility is different. And since many
of these women have to overcome all kinds of prejudice, women are going to
understand that better than men. Maybe not better, but differently, and we want
to hear their perspective.
Now do you anticipate
these films to be more narrative-driven or more nonfiction-documentary style?
Well, mostly
they're narrative-driven.
Creating more entertainment because it
receives a wider audience.
Yeah, because a film can take some poetic license. If you're
more interested, you can read the book, read deeper, and then we have time to
explain all the nuances.
Weber then elaborated
upon his and the Foundation's involvement with the recently released Alan Turing's
movie, "The Imitation Game," starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The British government
issued an apology because the film was coming out. This individual, Alan Turing,
died in the fifties, and it took the British government 60 years to issue a
public apology for how they had smeared his name and relevance. And they did it
when they knew the film was coming out and there would be all this attention
prodding at them. Weber cited this as an example of filmmaking having a
positive impact.
In terms of your question about diversity, we want to tell
more stories about women, and people of color. And it's a challenge to find
those stories, but it's worth it. Another film I'm very fond of is a short film
called "Afronauts." It's about the Zambian Space Academy in the 1960s, when
they decided they were going to beat us to the moon and it's told by a Ghanaian
female filmmaker. It inverts our prejudices because the notion that a bunch of
people thought they could, and they tried to build a rocket ship is a wonderful
way of offending stereotypical assumptions. And so film and books have the
capacity to bring those kinds of sensibilities. Having said that, we could
still do better.
I totally agree. I'm
going to go bring you to our next topic then. There are many influential
individuals in the world of science on either side of the artificial
intelligence debate. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking all agree that
it poses an imminent threat to mankind whereas Allen's Artificial Intelligence
Institute and Stanford University stand opposed. Can you please contribute your
own stance on AI and its representations?
[Chuckles] Well, I'm not an expert, first of all, but we did
just host a conference on AI at NYU, in fact. And, my view is I think the word
"imminent" I would take issue with. I think artificial intelligence poses a
potential risk, and so it's worth taking time out to explore it, but I don't
think we're on the verge of having super-intelligence come and start ruling us.
Frankly, we're not that good yet, we haven't come close. We're better at single
task stuff. You know, when they did the Human Genome project they said that 5%
of all the funding would go to looking at the ethical implications. I think
anytime you get a powerful new tool, and AI is certainly a powerful new tool,
the ethical and social ramifications are fundamental. And since that's not
necessarily always a scientist's first concern, it's important that people are
exploring this. So, I welcome more debate, more discussion, as the technology
evolves we should keep the conversation open. I think there are a lot of things
going on now that worry me even more than the potential with AI, though it's a
completely legitimate subject to raise issues about. Also people working in AI
are not as worried about it, you know.
Because it's their field?
Because it's their field but also we're so far away from the
super-intelligence thing. You know the scene with Hal, in "2001: A Space
Odyssey"?
Yes, I watched it when I was younger, but I
vaguely, vaguely remember.
It's the one of the most famous scenes, where the astronauts
are speaking, and they're saying they're going to need to disconnect Hal, and
he's like reading their lips and he knows what they're saying.
Yes.
So, with him having that capability, and that film was made
in 1968, we still cannot technologically build something like that. Even
driverless cars, which is an actual thing, I have my own questions about.
Unless everyone was in a driverless car, then it would work. But as long as you
have humans on the road–
There's always human error.
Unpredictability, more so than error. By definition,
technology enhances our capabilities, right? AI is another tool, and I'm
completely comfortable with the questions being raised, but I think certainly
we should support the research. But I also think science should always have an
ethical component. There's implications for every decision we make.
We continued to
discuss other areas of our conversation thus far, about diversity, women in
film, privacy issues, etc. We discussed Aziz Ansari's Netflix series, "Master
of None," and how his second episode "Parents" affected me as a first
generation American-Colombian-Arab. Weber also verbalized his colleague's efforts
to get more African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans into the
sciences. His efforts are more so to communicate with the percentage of people
who will not be scientists and engineers, and getting them to be more
comfortable with science. He then dropped the Colombian title "Embrace the
Serpent" with high praise; little did I know that it would win the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation Prize that very next day. I honestly don't know if he knew it
would win either, because he articulated he was not on the jury.
It's a beautiful film, and the committee will have
discussion because it doesn't have overt science, though underneath it it's
about the people who made that voyage ultimately wrote very scientifically
important treatises on plants. See if I could support a film like that, I would
love to, but for me I always have to say "Is there enough science in it?"
Yeah, absolutely
that's your defining factor. You can't just play advocate for the sake of it.
You don't do
anyone a favor when you do that.
No, absolutely not,
cause it discredits you and the Foundation and what you guys do. You are
specifically looking for science-oriented films. And you know what, I don't
blame you, it's very difficult to find those kinds of diverse stories because
the matter of the fact is that throughout US history there just hasn't been a
lot of people with those kinds of stories. Systematic prejudice has disallowed
people of color and other backgrounds to advance in these fields. Something
that I think is really worth looking into are the astronomers from the Middle
East.
Yes, they dominated the world centuries before anyone else
in that field. In the Islamic world, which was in the 1200s, they were light years
ahead of everybody. The thing about science is that it's actually very
democratic because anyone can overthrow authority with science. Like, tomorrow
a 12-year-old kid can actually prove Einstein was wrong, and he'll become the
new Einstein. There's nothing that is
sacred in science, because it's all about proof and evidence. If you promote
science, you promote open thinking, and challenging authority. Dictatorships
don't like science. The Russians, during Stalin, they also suppressed science,
because they needed to control the message.
Let's move onto my
third and final question I have lined up for you. So, would you say that
virtual reality isn't a very good standalone medium?
Well, it's an open question. Virtual reality is exciting,
huge amounts of money are going into it. So, something is going to happen, with
that many people placing their bets. And Google, Amazon, everybody's getting
into the game. What I'm saying is that it's a technology in search of its
ultimate form.
Because it's so young still?
It's so young, and movies specifically, how they're going to
harness that. I think it's already a powerful tool for gaming, and for
individual experiences. I mean, for a
five or ten-minute immersive experience of being in a Syrian camp or
watching Ebola or running with an animal, those kinds of things it can do very
well. But they're almost more like special effects or single experiences.
Rather than a storyline?
Right. But I'm curious enough to explore it a little bit.
See what it could do because it's not yet clear.
This is a subject I am
very optimistically predisposed towards, so when my interviewee articulated his
hesitations on the medium, I was fiercely unsettled. His rationale was markedly
cogent. He described to me his skepticism, especially concerning the lack of
communal ambience virtual reality lacks. I cited a metaphor verbalized during
the YouTube panel I had attended: you read a book as an individual but the
social dimension of it is discussing it with others. To this, Weber replied
that although that is true, words of a book exist visualized within our
imagination and virtual reality is what the director wants you to see. You can
choose within the experience where to look, but ultimately your imagination has
control over that aspect only. When a book turns into a movie, someone might
say about a character, "that is not at all how I pictured them" when the actor
is exactly how someone else pictured them. Words are a lot more malleable in
this way, and this point was disconcerting to me to say the least.
The director has created a 360-degree frame, and you can
look at any part of that that you want, but it's still only 360 degrees they've
picked out for you. What about what's outside of the frame? I don't want to
criticize it. VR is imaginative; it does new things. I just wouldn't say it's
like a book.
