Christina White: ‘Discovery requires the human element’

I really love theatre and independent movies. I’m a huge fan of people like Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, who tell great stories that also have underlying commentary about the human condition. I also like the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos who did The Favourite and The Lobster.

For a year, I was a theatre major in college. I studied directing and had the opportunity to direct School Daze, a play based on a Spike Lee movie. I was pretty proud of that at the time, but I am not sure what I would think if I saw it now. At the same time, thanks to the insistence of my pharmacist mom and engineer dad, I was taking chemistry, and it was a revelation that [chemistry] could also be a very creative form of expression. You’re creating things that, even though they follow the rules of nature, don’t necessarily exist in nature. That really appealed to me.