A robot helps an elderly man in the “near future” of upstate New York; a rural boatman in the lake region of conflict-ravaged Kashmir learns about environmental sustainability.

While Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints—two films supported by the Sloan Foundation that recently premiered at Sundance—couldn’t be more different in story and style, these disparate projects raise surprisingly similar concerns about traditional ways versus new technologies, the future of life on earth, and science’s role, and our own, in shaping that destiny.

In Robot & Frank, veteran actor Frank Langella stars as a retired jewel thief and second-story man who has grown increasingly cantankerous and forgetful in his old age. When his adult son buys him a caretaker robot, Frank initially resists his new-fangled computerized companion. After he realizes that the advanced machine can pick locks, a new friendship is forged. But what exactly does that futuristic relationship entail?

As director Jake Schreier put it in a recent phone interview: “What are the limits and advantages of that relationship? And what does the human relationship supply that the robot can’t?”

For research, Schreier and screenwriter Christopher Ford studied cutting-edge robotics, and the new wave of elder-care robots coming out of the U.S. and Japan, such as Honda’s Asimo and Toyota’s Partner robot and Boston Dynamics’ animal-based designs. Ford says the level of technology in the script was “far beyond” what engineers considered possible. Rather, the script was “influenced by the kinds of questions we’ll be asking about robot use,” he explains. “Is it more humanizing to be able to use technology to interact, or do we just end up only interacting with technology?”

It was also essential for Schreier and Ford that their robot be more realistic—neither the kindly No. 5 of Short Circuit nor the malevolent HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and avoiding the cliché of the machine that miraculously takes on human traits.

“Instead of the robot magically ‘coming alive’ in the end,” says Ford, “crying a single tear that makes its head blow up, I wanted it to be important to the plot that the robot was just a robot. He was a tool that Frank used to steal.”

In this way, Robot & Frank becomes about how the fuddy-duddy Frank embraces technology, as a means to commit first-degree robbery and revitalize his deteriorating mind. But it’s also about how technology allows the character to come to grips with those realities and take responsibility for his actions.

Though set half a world away in contemporary Kashmir, Valley of Saints also focuses on an old-fashioned protagonist unexpectedly confronting the world of science, and finding it to be a catalyst for change. Gulzar is a traditional boatman who works on Kashmir’s famous Dal Lake. Together with his friend Afzal, he hopes to escape the area’s political tumult for a better life. But after he meets Asifa, a Western-trained female scientist who is studying the deterioration of the lake, he decides to stay and work toward preserving his community, both socially and ecologically.

“I wanted to explore this concept of resilience,” says writer-director Musa Syeed. “The science really helped me understand that change can be viewed not only as a disruption. But there’s also a way to dynamically adapt to change.”

While researching the area, Syeed learned that there have been many attempts to solve the environmental crises surrounding Dal Lake, which has been plagued by sewage, and silt polluting its waters. One of the solutions offered is to relocate people from the lake into other parts of the city. But Syeed was more interested in community-based methods and using new tools to “empower the locals to take care of their own ecosystem, and to realize their full responsibility,” he says.

In the film, for instance, Gulzar eventually builds a compost toilet—which requires little water and helps keep waste from contaminating the lake. It’s a small effort, but one that signals a major moment of transformation for the character.

A compost toilet may be a far cry from a robot, but both films ultimately show technological and scientific changes as constructive and self-empowering. As Syeed says, “I have a very hopeful perspective about how science can be used, especially in traditional communities.”

But for all the scientific background, both Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints are also shrewd in avoiding facts and figures or technological jargon in favor of more human stories.

Syeed spent a lot of time researching Dal Lake, spending a summer there living with the boatmen and talking to scientists, scholars and environmental activists. He also brought on renowned lake expert Steve Carpenter from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to consult on the screenplay. But as he got closer to production, and political violence in the region became more intense and the situation more volatile, he dropped that initial script, which included far more overt scientific references—the lead female was originally an English-speaking American scientist—and dwelled more on the characters and their urgent circumstances, such as Gulzar’s struggles with the military crackdown

“I think it helped the film,” says Syeed. “Science can be seen as this blunt object forced into a story. But it didn’t have to be and I wanted to find a way to talk about the bigger issues in a way that fit in with the film’s lyrical feel. That was part of the balance to strike. And I think we were able to do it in a way where it doesn’t feel like it’s advocacy or it’s a social issue film or self-righteous or preachy, but fits in an organic way.”

Similarly, despite the decade Ford spent researching robotics, he finally chose to be more speculative with his film’s sci-fi elements, instead focusing “more about the ideas and possibilities of technology than anything specific,” he says. “I never got too bogged down in detail.”

“It was really about taking one major conceit,” adds Schreier, referring to the robot in Frank’s life. “But it becomes more of a human drama. And any good science fiction film will do that.”

Indeed, both Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints may use scientific elements, but they are mainly about people and relationships, and what science can—or can’t—do for our selves and our communities.

As Schreier says, “In the end, we’re certainly more interested in the characters than making a statement about the future.”

Sharon Greene was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship at the Sundance Institute in 2012 for Operator

Logan Kibens was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship at the Sundance Institute in 2012 for Operator

Jake Schreier won the Feature Film award at The Sundance Film festival in 2012 for Robot and Frank

The Sloan Student Liaisons will keep the word going about the Sloan Film Programs at their school; will be in touch with past or prospective grantees; and, most importantly, will make monthly posts about the progress of their screenplays and productions. They will provide the Sloan Science and Film readers with behind-the-scenes perspectives on the writing, researching, and production of their science-related films. Here is Dan O’Neil’s first entry: his impressions on the 2011 Sloan Summit!

Attending the Sloan Summit 2011 in New York City was in many ways the perfect follow-up to my graduate school experience as a screenwriter; at Carnegie Mellon, we few writers wander the corridors of the campus, vastly outnumbered by robotics majors, chemical engineers, mathematicians, and programmers galore. Our task there (as it pertains to creating a Sloan-eligible screenplay) is simple; grab any of those scientists rushing by us, wrestle them to the ground if necessary, and find out what they think would make a great movie. They are often surprised by this, but less often now since we’ve been holding a symposium to which six or seven of them are invited to speak on the particularly interesting or strange or simply dramatic scientific issues and themes they deal with on a daily basis.

From these seeds of an idea we proceed to write a script, redraft it, and workshop it. Our chosen scientist weighs in on both the first and final draft and finally it makes its way to the Sloan Foundation, after which a lucky few of us are bestowed with grant money. The question I had regarding receiving a grant such as this was: there are no scientists left to wrestle, and the rest of my colleagues are just like me, with a screenplay under arm but no camera, no production network. What are we to do next?

Enter the Sloan Film Summit of 2011! Gathering together all the winners of Sloan awards over the past three years, the Summit serves to bring the finest and brightest filmmakers together for three days and nights in either New York or L.A. (this year, New York), serve them lots of wine and appetizers (in this way it was similar to my Carnegie Mellon experience), and encourage them to encourage and inspire each other. Films are shown! Staged readings of screenplays are read! Out loud! In front of other people! For a screenwriter, the sensation is that of having fuel thrown over our small flame of a script. O.k., we say, yes! This is what can become of this thing I wrote, and here’s how other people are doing it. Many of the attendees are active filmmakers currently working on their own scripts and projects but we meet them with the hopes that we’ll all meet again, soon, on some movie set, collaborating, bringing our skill sets together, and thankful that Sloan brought us together first.

A brief synopsis of the three days must include a first-night pitch session that allowed anyone with a project in front of a microphone with about a minute or two to update the group as to where they were with their Sloan-funded project. Pitches ranged from, “I just need another three million dollars to go along with the seven we’ve already raised,” to “I don’t know what’s happening with my script but if it weren’t for the Sloan, I wouldn’t have written it at all.” Both responses were received equally, and while it manifests itself in different ways, I came to understand that the Sloan Foundation funds work to help change our mindset as to how we think of science in the first place; it’s a subject matter that’s hardly exotic (everything we touch, every story we tell contains some element of science, even if it’s as basic as day turning to night) and yet, severely underrepresented in our culture and in our stories. The Sloan Foundation simply encourages us, as storytellers, to include it.

The second day includes an industry lunch that brings impressive and influential producers, agents, and film companies together with the Sloan grantees; based on reading over the synopses, these industry people select whom they’d like to meet. In these meetings, they generally ask for a short pitch of the idea, and then request the full script. (I’m not sure what happens for filmmakers with active projects; I speak only as a screenwriter here.) I’ll report later on as to what happens after they’ve read these scripts, but hopefully, it moves them one step closer to production. At the least, it introduces them to us and us to them, which would not have happened otherwise.

Also on the second day, we watch a series of shorts, which all look incredible and all deal, in some way or another, with a scientific theme or character. It’s interesting to observe how difficult this task is, especially in short form. There is cultural tension between our archetype of the “scientist,” with his or (not very often) her crazy hair and crazy ideas, versus the honest depiction of one. We want them to have an epiphany or discover a cure, but often the most successful film treatment is to simply watch them work. They have a problem, and they try different ways of solving their problem. It’s storytelling at its most basic, which is comforting to me; the idea that screenwriters and scientists make use of the same basic methodology to solve our problems is a unifying one.

The third and final day of the Summit, it snows. We watch the huge snowflakes collect on the ground outside the amazing stretch of windows at the wonderful Museum of the Moving Image. We watch a feature-length film in a huge and impressive screening room called Whaling City that I hope makes it onto screens across the country one day. We wander the museum, replete with a short film by Jim Henson, vintage video games (they have one of the first versions of Pong!) and a whole floor devoted to an exhibition on the Muppets. Also of interest to the screenwriter are original drafts of movie scripts ranging back to the ’50s, with pencil scribbling in the margins. It’s already hard to imagine a time without computers. No wonder so many more people are trying to be writers these days; you just write it and it looks done (even though we know it’s not).

Later on, there’s a staged reading in front of our peers of seven of the screenplays that received Sloan Awards. The collected cast includes former stars of The Young and the Restless as well as a former Tony winner and member of the Broadway Hall of Fame. It’s inspiring to hear them breathe life into the screenplays just by reading them aloud in front of people, and I think, not for the first time, how beautifully simple our craft can be; just people in a room, reading a script, and yet, we all experience something at the same time.

Finally, a strong panel of collected scientists, producers, and writers discuss in depth and with great humor the benefits and pitfalls of writing scientifically engaged screenplays. Then we all get on a bus that takes us to a fancy cocktail lounge where we drink out the night. And then, already, it’s over. We go back to (in my case) our apartments or (in the out-of-towner’s case) the tiny pod-like cabins at Yotel, sleep, dream, and wake up inspired and ready to keep going, keep pushing, keep creating, keep thinking of stories that don’t ignore their science, to keep doing what we do, which is, in the end, the better gift from all this; we feel supported, and thus, we fight on.

Photographs by Marisa McGrody.

The Sloan Student Liaisons will keep the word going about the Sloan Film Programs at their school; will be in touch with past or prospective grantees; and, most importantly, will make monthly posts about the progress of their screenplays and productions. They will provide the Sloan Science and Film readers with behind-the-scenes perspectives on the writing, researching, and production of their science-related films. Here is Morgan von Ancken’s first entry: his impressions on the 2011 Sloan Summit!

I remember telling fellow Sloan grantee Joe Greco, as we tromped through the wind towards the first night of the summit, that I hoped they’d be serving food—I had only eaten breakfast that day, and fighting through what seemed like a localized hurricane was making me hungry.

Boy, was I going to the right summit.

When I finally arrived at the Yotel (a mix between the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange and the packaging of a Pokémon action figure) I was greeted with endless waves of delicious hors d’oeuvres and drinks, as well as a group of excited and slightly intoxicated writers and filmmakers. What followed was a pleasant hour or so, where we all earnestly conversed about our projects and where I covertly tried to stuff as much shrimp cocktail into my face as humanly possible. Next, we congregated in a back room where, after an eloquent introduction speech by Doron Weber, we all got up in front of the crowd and discussed our projects. This exercise, while fraught with a bit of high-school science-fair nervousness, turned out to be an immediate ice-breaker, and hearing everyone’s ideas was incredibly inspiring. Now all instant best friends, we continued to imbibe and talk; I left the Yotel about an hour later, in good spirits and completely full.

The next day began with a rousing talk by Ted Hope, which segued into another delicious lunch (a recurring theme, I realized). Then, after a few meetings—generously arranged by the Sloan Foundation—we adjourned to the nearby Director’s Guild Theater, where we ended the evening with a number of screenings and a panel. I found the short films we watched to be uniformly excellent—each one explored “science” in a distinct and imaginative way, from a mystery set across the period grime of 19th-century London to the terrifying tale of a suburban drone pilot. I also found the snippets of features we watched fascinating; as a feature-length screenwriter, it’s inspiring to see ambitious independent films actually in the can. Hearing from the filmmakers about what went on behind the camera piqued my interest even more.

On that note, the third day began with a screening of Jay Burke’s excellent film Whaling City, a dramatic narrative steeped in New Bedford’s fishing subculture. When we left the theater we were greeted by the first snowstorm of the season, a suitably surreal sight that is probably symptomatic of some sort of calamitous climate change (and which would probably make a good Sloan Script, now that I think about it). After paying homage to Gonzo and friends in a brief foray around the fascinating Museum of the Moving Image, we reconvened to hear excerpts from several feature-length screenplays. Again, these scripts displayed considerable imagination across a wide variety of genres, from Dan O’Neil’s wryly comic feature about a musician who is convinced he’s a black hole to the nuanced meltdown of the protagonist in Rob Cohen’s script Bystander. After that, things seemed to fly by rather quickly: They snapped a group photo (which, incidentally, I’d love to see, if anyone has it—I’m the tall bearded man lurking creepily in the background), convened another panel and, a few hours later, we found ourselves in the ritzy Above Allen, drinking, scarfing more hors d’oeuvres, and vowing to stay in touch via Facebook.

My final impression is that the Sloan Summit is a wonderful, vital gathering. The content of the panels and screenings was excellent, and the chance to meet like-minded filmmakers in such a welcoming, well-catered environment was incredible, really perhaps the best part of the weekend. In fact, I’m already looking forward to next year—I’ll be out of grad school by then, ostensibly a working writer… and I’ll need all the free food I can get.

Photographs by Marisa McGrody.