In Conversation With Alexis Gambis About “The Fly Room,” Filmmaking, and Scientists as Directors
Alexis Gambis is Artistic Director and Founder at Imagine Science Films, as well as founder of Labocine. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology & Genetics studying the genetic systems of fruit flies. He teaches at NYU.
He is also a prolific filmmaker. I talked to him about his first feature film, “The Fly Room,” which is currently on an epic world screening tour.
“The Fly Room” explores the true story of the relationship between a 10-year old daughter and her brilliant, troubled father-scientist.
I called Alexis to talk about “The Fly Room” while he was presenting the film in Lexington, Kentucky, ahead of its theatrical premiere in New York City.
Edward: How’s it going there?
Alexis Gambis: Things are good. I just gave some opening remarks here in Lexington, Kentucky. They have a three week series celebrating Thomas Hunt Morgan’s 150 birthday. He was the head of the lab depicted in the movie. He received a Nobel prize in 1933 for his work in genetics.
He’s an important part of the modern science of genetics, but we don’t focus on him in the movie. I was most interested in the people doing the science.
In the so-called “Fly Room.”
That’s right. The actual “Fly Room” was a laboratory at Columbia where they basically discovered the gene. It was a run by Thomas Morgan, but it was an interesting lab because it was small, a kind of closet space where a bunch of kids were working.
It was almost like a club, a little bit like Dead Poets Society, but for scientists.
They were known as the “fly boys.” They were surrounded by rotten bananas and fruit flies. They were in their 20’s and they discovered modern genetics.
It was almost like a club, a little bit like Dead Poets Society, but for scientists.
How did this become important to you — important enough to make a film?
As I was doing my own PhD in fruit fly genetics,, I began considering adapting this story into a film. I started writing a treatment, and then I met Betsey Bridges, the daughter of one of the scientists who worked in the lab.
That became the story in the movie. It’s her story, about a little girl who spends a day with her father.
It’s not really about the science. It’s about a father/daughter relationship. It’s about a little girl that enters into this world a that’s bit like a scientific version of Pan’s Labyrinth.
She gets a strange education in sexuality and genetics. But just as she gets closer to her father for a brief moment, he leaves. He moves to California, when the lab moves to Pasadena.
You’re talking about Calvin Bridges — Betsy Bridges father. I didn’t know who he was before this movie. I certainly didn’t know he was such a colorful character. A genius, flamboyant — but troubled.
He was, as you said, a very complex figure. That’s clear in his daughter’s contradictory admiration and hatred of her father. She would go back and forth from like both extremes.
She would brag about his discoveries. He was the first to determine that chromosomes contain genes, and the first to characterize the genes on the X sex chromosome.
But he was a womanizer. And being a father and a husband came a distant second to his scientific pursuits.
The same obsessive nature that brought him scientific recognition became a destructive force in his personal life.
The same obsessive nature that brought him scientific recognition became a destructive force in his personal life. He had an uncontrollable desire for women, resulting in many affairs.
He had kind of a James Dean look. But then there’s that hair! A huge plume.
The hair that you see in the film is actually downplayed. In the photos he had really bushy eyebrows and this insane hair, and he actually was known for hiding fly vials in the hair. Crazy stories like that.
What happened to Calvin after he moved to California?
He moved in 1928. The film takes place in 1927. When he went to California, his life degenerated. He left his family back in New Jersey. He would occasionally visit, but was an absent father.
Betsey heard about her father’s death during the World Fair in New York. She read about it in the New York Times.
Back to a comment you made about choosing not to focus on the head of the lab, but the actual people in the lab doing the science.
The grad students. These 20 year old kids that were hanging out in the village in speakeasies and brothels.
A lot of people ask me, why not make it about Thomas Hunt Morgan, who actually got the Nobel prize? But we almost pass by him as if he’s a supporting actor. You know, in a way, making a film about the students and the scientists is also Morgan’s legacy.
I think we’re living in a time when we’re beginning to recognize the collaborative nature of science, and the contributions of people whose names aren’t in the headlines. Graduate students, research assistants, researchers and so forth.
It’s important to focus on working scientists. With Imagine Science, we attract a lot of PhD students and postdocs, and they’re all artists, they’re all musicians. And showing “The Fly Room,” I’ve been invited around the world to show this film. The people who receive me are the PhD students. That’s been the case in Tokyo, in New Delhi.
“I think it’s important to focus on working scientists.”
Not to be critical about film festivals, but they’re often elitist. Here, it’s genuine. Tonight, in this old cinema, people are excited. They organize fly genetic workshops. They have tee shirts. In Mexico, we had a showing during the Day of the Dead, and people were dressed as flies. Insane, right?
That’s incredible.
Scientists deserve and need films about what they work on.
Well, it’s interesting, because we also live in a time everybody wants to know about the latest scientific discovery, but there’s not necessarily a lot of widespread appreciation for the sort of grunt work of research, the huge investment of time and thought and energy to get to that breakthrough or press conference or trending research paper.
To get to that moment of “Ah ha!”
For example, people are really beginning to talk about CRISPR …
Yeah, Cas9.
Exactly. Everyone seems to know about it and is talking about it. It troubles them— but at the same time, we already almost take it for granted.
“The Fly Room” takes place in 1927. The topics discussed now are exactly the same issues discussed then. There’s a scene in the movie where a Popular Science reporter comes in and says, “Can you rearrange the genome?” Even though these people were just discovering the gene.
And there was the John Scopes trial was happening, between Creationists and scientists. A lot of it is actually very reminiscent of our times.
If you go back a hundred years, the same excitement, the same fears, are still really pertinent.
Clavin Bridges and the other Fly Room scientists used fruit flies as the model specimen for their research. I was out last night and mentioned something about fruit flies, and someone immediately chimed in with the best way to trap and kill them. But your interest in the fruit fly precedes the movie.
Right. Fruit flies are annoying. They invade our kitchens. Nobody really knows how to kill them, because they hatch larvae and these things can also be like in hibernation for a while in the mess in our kitchens, but I have a huge, like, it sounds bizarre, but I almost feel like I owe the flies so much, because, first of all, I spent most of my 20’s looking at them under the microscope.
I saw these insects magnified all day long, and studied their behavior. I was studying the eye, actually, the fly eye.
But I killed so many flies as part of my research, putting them in this morgue full of ethanol, I still have nightmares about it.
It’s called the morgue?
Yeah, it’s called the fly morgue. It sits on everybody’s bench. Like, there’s a huge flask full of ethanol, and like millions of flies are dead in there.
So much of what we understand about autism, nerve degeneration, sleep, and genetics comes from flies.
I think it’s important for people also to realize that everything we understand about this stuff is because of these model organisms, these animals that we use, and flies and rats and zebrafish and so forth.
How did you jump from PhD research on the structure of the fly eye to filmmaking?
My mother’s a filmmaker, so I grew up in that environment. She went to NYU in the early ’80s, when I was a kid. I was surrounded by actors. Growing up in New York, I was always in that environment.
My dad’s a painter. I grew up in a very kind of artsy environment, and so I’ve always been interested in the aesthetics of science.
Midway through my PhD I realized, “My God, this is such a crazy world.”
I did like a short, brief film, thinking I would become a film major, and then ultimately realized that I couldn’t fit in. I didn’t really know what I was going to talk about. I didn’t really have a story that I had to say.
But midway through my PhD I realized, “My God, this is such a crazy world.” Working in a lab on fruit flies — I’ve never seen that on film.
So I started taking film classes. I was most interested in fiction, actually. I wanted to make films that about kind of jumping into worlds of the imagination and surrealism.
I made a film about a guy who falls in love with a girl who lives in a petri dish, and he has to go through the microscope, and they have this weird encounter, and he has to leave.
Through that, I realized that doing science is actually much more subjective than one would think, and much more emotionally charged.
That’s how I got interested in film. That’s how I got interested in making stories. I’m especially interested in kind of the microscopic world.
But for “The Fly Room” specifically, my mom was just recovering from breast cancer. I was working on cancer research. It was during the 2008 election. And out of nowhere, Sarah Palin made a comment and fruit flies. She said, “Why would anybody ever work on fruit fly research in Paris, France?”
That was the moment, where I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m definitely making this film now.” There was all these weird links.
In The Fly Room, you have real scientists who play characters in the movie. Can you talk about why you did that and how it went?
I’m frustrated, always, by this idea that scientists are not actively involved in science films. There’s this idea of having a scientific advisor, somebody that kind of gives a stamp of approval on a script, but I feel like scientists should become film makers, should be actors, should be involved in all aspects of production design and set design.
I had this idea: why not have some key roles in “The Fly Room” played by real scientists? So, for example, why not have the chair of the Columbia biology department today play Morgan, who was the chair of the biology department then?
We have a well known developmental biologist, Ali Brivanlou in the film, dissecting a frog as Betsey walks into the lad.
There’s a scene where Calvin is in a speakeasy, kind of like a scene in “Midnight in Paris.” They’re all hanging out, talking about memory, and one of them is a very famous memory scientist named Joe LeDoux. He worked on the amygdala and emotional memory. We have all these little cameos.
One of the main roles is the woman who does the illustrations of the slides. Her name is Leslie Vosshall. She’s a very famous neurobiologist and has never acted.
They turn out to be the best actors in the film, in addition to the father and daughter.
There are so many amazing, crazy scientists out there.
There are so many amazing, crazy scientists out there. They’re actually very hard to get ahold of, but they bring so much with them. They want to make sure the science sounds right. They also teach the non-scientists about the science when we’re not shooting.
Enough of these pop scientists from shitty TV talk shows. It’s always the same faces. It’s so frustrating.
Talk about the aesthetics of science.
I think it’s really important to find visual metaphors to explain what we do in the lab. What’s really cool about scientists in labs is that, all scientists are directors. When you film something through a microscope, you’re also directing.
All scientists are directors.
You’re deciding how you’re going to take the photo, how are you going to crop it, so there’s this whole visual subjective aspect to how you present the images and how you direct your own experiment that I think people forget that it’s not objective in that sense, and there’s an aesthetic to it as you mentioned.
Circling back to the film, tell us a more about Betsey.
Betsey passed away about a year and a half ago, right after the premier of the film in Woodstock. She was instrumental in making this film, because it’s her story. A huge phase in making this film was based on interviews and documentary, and going to see her.
She was very reluctant to speak about her father, but she ultimately opened up and shared many, many stories. I decided to make the film about her.
I was really interested in the story of a little girl that doesn’t have the greatest father, although the father tries, but yet, he’s the father of genetics. I thought it was such a bizarre paradox.
Betsey, in her older days, she actually was analyzing why her father acted in the way he did. She just spoke beautifully. She was almost like a psychoanalyst. From her point of view, she said “He confused sex with love.”
What’s next for you, by the way?
“The Fly Room” is my first feature. I’m shooting my next film next summer. It’s about memory, which is a big, big subject. It’s not a period film. It’s about, basically, the different types of experiments we use, especially one in particular, called the water maze. It’s a really crazy story.
Where can people expect to see The Fly Room?
The theatrical release will be in New York. It’ll play in three different cinemas. The first release is on September 29th, at Cobble Hill Cinemas in Brooklyn, where it’ll play for two days. Then it’ll play at IFP Media Center.
Then it’s going to play at Anthology Film Archive on October 18th and 19th.
After that, on December 1st, there will be an amazing DVD compilation that will include a documentary with Betsey, and photos, and postcards, and the film.
“After the theatrical release, it will screen at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm.”
It’s also going to be on VOD, definitely Amazon, iTunes.
And I continue my tour. At the very end, after the theatrical release, it will screen at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. They invited me to show the film there, so that’s really exciting.
That’s incredible! Congratulations!
That’ll be the end.
Well, who knows?
It’s been two years. But yeah, who knows!
Visit TheFlyRoom.com for screening dates and additional background information, videos, and photos connected to the events in the film.
