‘Lessons in Chemistry’ director Sarah Adina Smith on helming that shocking inciting incident: ‘It becomes so much more rich’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

When Sarah Adina Smith was first approached about directing “Lessons in Chemistry,” she was not familiar with the Bonnie Garmus novel of the same name on which the series is based. Smith had to “speed-read the book” in one weekend and admits that she was not quite sure at first if a series adaptation was necessary. Set in the 1950s and ’60s, “Lessons” follows Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), a brilliant chemist whose career aspirations are stalled by patriarchal norms but later becomes the star of a cooking show, “Supper at Six,” on which she gets to flex her science know-how.

“To be honest, maybe I’m not supposed to say this, but I was like, ‘Do we need this series?’ Yes, obviously, sexism is alive and well. I don’t need to debate that, but do we need this story about a fictional female scientist in the ’50s facing discrimination in the workplace?” Smith tells Gold Derby during our Directors Guild of America Awards TV nominees panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I felt a little bit like, have we seen this story before? Just searching for what is the deeper thing that this is about. And I really ended up feeling inspired in speaking to [showrunner] Lee Eisenberg and also to Brie Larson as we were all, I think, looking for that deeper message. It wasn’t just what the series purports to be on the surface. It’s not just a show about sexism. I think that would kind of be one level and frankly boring. It’s really a show that has a much more well-rounded humanity about somebody who has really closed herself off from life in a way and about these collisions she keeps having with important people in life that eventually teach her the meaning of life. It’s really about the things you can’t predict.”

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Smith directed the first two episodes of the Apple TV+ limited series and the pair functions as a mini rom-com. One of the aforementioned important people Elizabeth meets is Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), the star researcher at the Hastings Research Institute, where they work, and the two quickly go from frenemies to lab partners to romantic partners. “I was thinking, what is the movie of episodes 1 and 2? And it’s a love story and I had never really gotten to direct just a romance, so that was really new and exciting for me and challenging,” Smith states. “Yes, I wanted to have exciting cinema and shots and things that really brought the story to life from a camera point of view, but more than anything, I wanted to be in service of that love story and tried to make all of my choices in support of character and in support of us getting to be swept away, like falling in love with the two of them as they’re falling in love.”

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The second episode, “Her and Him,” which brought Smith a DGA Award nomination, is bookended by two traumatic events in Elizabeth’s life — one that shows what made her the no-nonsense, closed-off woman she is when viewers meet her and one that sets her on a new path. A flashback at the beginning of the hour reveals that Elizabeth was raped by her thesis advisor at UCLA and exited the doctoral program after refusing to apologize for stabbing him with a pencil. The depiction of the assault was something the whole team “thought very carefully about.”

“When it comes to traumatic events and in particular sexual assault, we feel there’s a great responsibility not to show that just because you’re trying to give your character a backstory, like almost as a substitute for an interesting character,” Smith says. “And I feel as a director, when portraying that, it should feel awful. If we’re going to do it, it should make you feel awful. I didn’t want to sugarcoat it or make it easy, so a lot of my shot choices was about letting it be as horrible as it was for her. But also the most hurtful thing about that episode in Elizabeth’s life is the betrayal. Yes, there was a physical assault, but she was betrayed by someone she trusted. And that, in a way, was probably the most damaging thing.”

With Calvin, Elizabeth learns to trust again, but her world is shaken once more in the final moments of “Her and Him.” While on a run with their newly adopted dog, Six Thirty, Calvin is fatally struck by a bus. It comes out of nowhere and is certainly a shock to the system for non-book readers who may have thought they had just settled into a happily ever after with the couple.

“It was almost like thinking in maximum emotional contrast, I suppose. Thinking about how can we fall in love as deeply as possible so that it hurts as much as possible when that’s suddenly ripped away,” Smith explains. “It takes her a lot of time to realize she can trust Calvin and … when she’s been hurt more than she’s been hurt before in her life when he’s ripped away — how can she possibly recover from that and learn to love again? That’s really the story of the series. It’s weird, but it’s like the end of episode 2 is, like, the inciting incident. She has other love stories. Lee and I talked about how there’s this myth in our culture that the one true love story is your soul mate, but it’s about community. It’s about this entire constellation of love stories with her daughter, with her dog, with her friends. It becomes so much more rich than that.”

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