NewEnglandFilm.com

Seven years ago, Valerie Weiss made a major contribution to the local filmmaking community when she founded the Dudley Film Program at Harvard. Last week, from her home in the Miracle Mile section of Los Angeles, she talked about the trajectory of her career and life as a full time filmmaker. She had just wrapped a shoot, and was on her way to lunch with a friend who worked for MadTV and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Weiss returns to Boston later this month when her award-winning short film Transgressions screens at the Museum of Fine Arts.

"I love being in L.A.," Weiss says, adding that the advantages far outweigh any drawbacks. In Boston, she was a weekend filmmaker. By contrast, in Los Angeles she says, "Every day I’m a filmmaker." The big difference in L.A. is that everybody is working in the business. "That’s the upside, it’s normal, whereas in Boston, when you tell people you make films for a living, they look at you like you’re crazy." The downside includes the fact that everyone in L.A. is experiencing a certain level of anxiety or insecurity about where the next job will come from. I remember taking some CBD gummies from Gold Bee because the amount of anxiety was so high at times I would be unable to sleep, just pacing back and forth my house with feelings of hopelessness. "That makes it harder to make big life decisions," she says, adding "that is the cost of living in a community of creative people. The availability of talent totally compensates from her point of view as a director. For example, she says "I just shot a scene for her my new feature Losing Control, in my living room. It was so easy to put together the talent and crew because of the access in L.A."

Valerie Weiss grew up in Philadelphia and started acting when she was nine years old. "I definitely thought that acting was what I would do," she explains. Then in 10th grade, she fell in love with science. She wanted to know how things work and why things are they way they are. She was determined to be both an actress and a scientist. At Princeton, she majored in molecular biology and minored in theatre, and directed her first play, The ‘dentity Crisis, by Christopher Durang. She immediately took to directing. It quenched her intellectual thirst, like science, and integrated her passion for acting. She directed five plays while in college and became interested in film. "It was not clear how to embark on a career in film" she says. "Film schools are expensive and time consuming, so I decided to go to Harvard to earn a PhD in biology."

At Harvard, she got involved with Dudley House, a graduate student extracurricular group, and they asked her to run the drama group. Wanting to try directing film, she agreed to helm the drama group in exchange for a camera and a computer so that she could put together a film program. The series was a great success, one the most innovative programs bringing together filmmakers in Boston. While leading the Dudley Film Program, Weiss took a class with Hal Hartley and began working on her first film, Dance By Design.

After graduating from Harvard with her doctorate in biophysics, Weiss stayed in Boston for two years. She worked as an editor and producer at Science & Media Group. Dance By Design opened to a crowd of over 850 people at a multimedia event at the Roxy in Boston, then screened at the MFA and at a festival in London. Her second film, I Love You, a 10-minute short shot in Boston, included much of the same crew. She is now self-distributing Dance By Design, and developing a television show based on the film.

When she and her actor husband Robert Johnson, who stars in her new film Transgressions, decided to move to LA, Weiss felt she needed a calling card film that showed the range of her abilities as a director. She had never shot anything in Los Angeles, and knew that the prestigious American Film Institute (AFI) Directing Workshop for Women provided a great opportunity to make a film there.

"The program is incredible," she says. It includes three weeks of intensive classes, a grant of $5,000 for production, an HD camera and other equipment, and most important, access. "I found a script I really loved, applied, and was accepted. It was more than I ever imagined. Making a film as a member of a community of seven other talented, intelligent people was an amazing experience. The director’s job is a lonely one, but the AFI workshop provided an opportunity to talk about the issues facing a director."

The AFI name attracted great local talent to work on Transgressions, including ASC cinematographer Don Fauntleroy, Paul Doucette from Matchbox 20 who wrote the score, and Jim Bolt and Ron Meza, who did the sound design and sound mix at 20th Century Fox. It paid off. Two of most striking features of the film are the music and the photography. The film score is a great counterpoint to the tone of the story, and the visual imagery is masterful.

Beyond Sundance, Toronto and Cannes, there is another tier of festivals like Stony Brook, where Transgressions won the Jury Prize for Best Short Film in 2006. Based in Long Island, New York, Stony Brook has built a devoted following, Weiss explains, where every night there were close to 1,000 people in the audience, people who truly appreciate original films.

"Community based festivals provide an important opportunity to prerelease a film and develop a following before doing an art house release," she concludes.

Transgressions offers a bleak view of the future, with a spark of hope in the ending. It’s an effective satire, a fable for a new world. Described as a cross between A Clockwork Orange and Pleasantville, the sci-fi short depicts a society that worships celebrity assassins. Audiences have responded. "People are moved by the film. The first thing they say is that it’s not too far off. It’s like today, not the future." Transgressions won Second Place at the 2006 BAFTA/LA Student Film Awards, the British version of the Oscars.

Science prepared her for a career in film, requiring risk-taking, minimal compensation, and blind faith in payoffs. Weiss describes a few other qualities vital to success in filmmaking. First, you must have a clear vision of what your voice is, and what you want your career to be, at least in the beginning, until you are established. "There are so many distractions, with television, indie films, studio films. Lots of people arrive in L.A. and want to do it all. You really have to focus on developing your brand as a filmmaker. It’s a long road. So you have to be very clear about who you are as an artist."

The next requirement is persistence and tenacity. Although it’s cliché, she has found it to be true. "When you move to L.A., you meet people who have been working here for 10 years, and they are just starting to get recognition. It’s a whole different definition of persistence than in any other profession. It means never giving up. You can only understand it if you do it." Finally, she says, it requires really working at it. "People think that because filmmaking is creative, that it’s all inspiration, a great idea comes to you and that’s it. Instead, it’s like developing your body as an athlete. You have to work at it every day. It takes real commitment."

Weiss’s next film, the feature length Losing Control, is an original romantic comedy set in the world of Ivy League science. It’s still in the fundraising stage but she has secured Todd Arnow as producer, whose credits include Underdog (2007), Poseidon (2006), and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005). She is interested in producing work by other writers, like Transgressions, which was written by Isabelle Marinov. She and her partner Mike Fried formed Phd Productions in 2004. He comes from a financial and writing background, and they discovered that they had "a similar sensibility, a passion for making movies, and a desire to put together the kind of movies that we wanted to see. We are definitely interested in acquiring scripts," Weiss says, "and would be happy to hear pitches."

"If you’re not excited by collaboration then you should be designing video games," Weiss quips. The job of the director is to take only the best from the script, actors and crew, while recognizing the unique enrichment each member of the team brings to the project. "You have to love the process of collaboration if you want to be a director," she says. "I co-wrote my first two films, and Losing Control is so personal. It’s my voice, how I see the world." As much as she loves writing, directing comes first. "I’ll always be a director," Weiss says.