Sloan Science and Film

The Sloan Film Summit, which ran from November 5 to 8 in Los Angeles, introduced grant winners to scientists, scientists to film professionals, film professionals to budding filmmakers and playwrights, in a kind of melding effort that mirrored the Sloan mission itself—the integration of an accurate and engaging portrayal of science in the popular arts.

Writer-director Alex Rivera and co-writer David Riker discuss their Sloan award-winning feature, Sleep Dealer, a mix of sci-fi speculation and social realism.

Writer and director Leeson, winner of a Sloan award for Teknolust (2002), discusses her new feature, a drama-documentary hybrid that chronicles the ongoing case of Steve Kurtz, an art professor and activist who became a bioterrorism suspect while working on a project on genetically modified food.

Danny Boyle’s new film, about a manned mission to the dying sun, borrows its plot from cutting-edge particle physics and was made with the help of a leading experimental physicist. But how plausible is it?

The science of robotics has developed at a rapid clip. But the most realistic robots can still be found in the science fiction classics of the ’70s and ’80s, not in the fanciful likes of Transformers.

An interview with David Freeman, whose A First Class Man is this year’s winning screenplay in the Tribeca/Sloan Screenplay Development Program. A First Class Man examines the life of Indian mathematician and untutored genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).

Every episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation deals with the use of science in law enforcement. A member of the TV show’s writing staff offers an inside look at how real science is depicted on the hit series.

Hollywood embraced the biopic in the heyday of the studio system, and many early films in the genre portray the lives of well-known research scientists. The genesis of these early biopics shed light on the history of entertainment and popular science in the 1930s and ’40s.

Breaking into Hollywood as a writer is hard, and for writers attracted to stories inspired by science or mathematics, it can feel impossible. Screenwriter Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz offers a personal account of the 2005 Sloan Film Summit.

The key to making a compelling movie about science is often to focus on the scientist as much as on the scientific process. Bill Condon’s Kinsey, winner of the 2004 Sloan prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival, incorporates the scientist’s investigative process into its narrative.

Does a film about alternative explanations for the creation of life undermine biologists’ accepted theory of evolution? And is a science museum justified in refusing to screen such a film?

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man represents the culmination of many of the filmmaker’s longstanding themes: a fascination with madness, the use of the natural environment as protagonist, and the questioning of man’s fundamental relationship to nature.