If you didn’t read Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry and you’re upset about [REDACTED]’s untimely death, then you have director Sarah Adina Smith to thank for that shocking sequence.
But it wasn’t the only challenging sequence she had to film. While her work was strong on the pilot episode, Smith’s direction of episode two, “Her and Him,” stands out as the best across the entire series. In fact, she received a Directors Guild of America award earlier this year in honor of her work within the episode.
And it makes complete sense when you look at the emotional roller coaster the episode puts Brie Larson’s Elizabeth Zott through. It starts with a flashback to a sexual assault early in her post-graduate career. Then, it deepens the relationship between Elizabeth and Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) in a magical, Christmas-set sequence. It also navigates Elizabeth through an intense series of challenges put upon her by the male-dominated directors of Hastings Research Institute. Finally, it ends with a tragic death that, while beautifully filmed, shocked millions of viewers.
Smith approached her work across the episode with a fresh eye, strenuously avoiding any cliches imposed by similar material. The sexual assault sequence, in particular, truly spoke to her as something she wanted to carefully handle.
“I have a bit of weariness about doing stories of sexual assault onscreen when sometimes they can be used as backstory or a way to make the character to be emotionally compelling. I didn’t want to make it that way. I wanted to make it very true and earned and specific,” Smith explained. “The thing that resonated the most for me… was that the assault itself was obviously very traumatic, but what was perhaps even more traumatic and even more long-lasting was the betrayal.”
Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Smith talks about filming the first two episodes of Lessons in Chemistry and about carrying the audience through the journey that is her DGA Award-winning work in “Her and Him.”
Lessons in Chemistry streams exclusively on AppleTV.
