From Sciences Po to the Big Screen: Victor Pigasse
For Victor Pigasse ('16), Sciences Po was an unexpected starting point for a career in filmmaking. Originally drawn to the university's multidisciplinary curriculum, he discovered his passion for writing and directing through its artistic workshops and student projects. After gaining experience in Paris and Los Angeles, he moved to New York to study filmmaking at NYU. Now a director and producer, he recently won Best Comedy Feature at the Rhode Island International Film Festival for his latest film, Bottled Up. This article is part of a series of portraits published in partnership with the Sciences Po American Foundation to show the diversity of Alumni careers throughout the world and especially in the US.
Written by Tanya Akl
Filmaker Victor Pigasse ('16) - All Rights Reserved
For Victor Pigasse ('16), filmmaking was not always the plan. Growing up in Paris, he loved movies but had never seriously considered becoming a director. He simply did not know how films were made- or how someone like him could enter the industry. Sciences Po gave him the space to find out.
“I chose Sciences Po because of all the different classes you could take,” Pigasse says. “I didn't want to specialize, going to business school or engineering school or being a lawyer, because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go yet.”
Today, Pigasse is a director and producer based in New York. His latest feature, Bottled Up, which he wrote, directed, and produced, premiered at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, where it won Best Comedy Feature. It will screen in New York on October 18 as part of the Chelsea Film Festival.
His path to filmmaking began in an unexpected place: a social sciences university in Paris.
Pigasse entered Sciences Po's Bachelor program in 2013, spending his first two years in Paris before heading to Boston College for his third year. The opportunity to spend a full year abroad was one of the things that initially attracted him to Sciences Po, and Boston gave him his first extended experience of life in the United States.
Back in Paris, he pursued a master's degree in Finance and Strategy while continuing to explore film. Through Sciences Po's ‘ateliers artistiques’, he took classes in directing, screenwriting, and acting, including with an instructor affiliated with the Comédie-Française. He began reading scripts from films he admired and writing his own.
“I've always loved movies,” he says. “But I was really unsure of how to make movies. At Sciences Po, I actually took my first writing classes.”
He soon moved from writing to making. Through Sciences Po TV, he created Pipo, a mockumentary web series inspired by the school's own culture and reputation. It was an early opportunity to bring together writing, acting, and directing—and, in his words, “really start to explore filmmaking.”
During his master's, he took a gap year to work at production companies in Los Angeles and Paris, including Iconoclast and Les Films du Worso. There, he discovered another side of the industry: producing.
“I wanted to have that time to learn more about financial skills and budgeting,” he says. “Which, as a producer, I do every single day.”
After Sciences Po, Pigasse moved to New York to pursue an MFA in Film and Television Production at NYU. The program was intensely hands-on: students made films every semester, working across directing, producing, writing, and editing.
“We just went out and filmed every single semester,” he says. “I made many shorts, many commercials. It was very, very practical. That's what I needed to learn.”
Those experiences helped bring Bottled Up to life. Pigasse began writing the comedy while at NYU, drawing on both American screwball comedy and French comedy and theater. Set largely inside a sprawling nineteenth-century house in Providence, Rhode Island, the film turns the location itself into part of the story.
Pigasse rewrote the script around the house after finding it during weeks of scouting. He and cinematographer Sam Motamedi digitally mapped the property to plan shots and movements before filming began. The four-week shoot brought together local Providence actors and crew with collaborators from Pigasse's wider professional network. The financing was equally collaborative, combining NYU grants, private investment from the United States and France, and Rhode Island's film tax credit.
For Pigasse, directing and producing go hand in hand. “As a filmmaker, you have to learn to know a little bit of everything,” he says. “Depending on the projects, I can jump and do anything.”
His recent work reflects that versatility. Alongside Bottled Up, he has worked on projects with Spike Lee, Oliver Stone's upcoming feature White Lies, filmed in Italy and Bulgaria, and the official FIFA World Cup documentary, for which he directed footage of fans and players across the U.S.
Yet Pigasse sees the most important part of his education as something that happened outside film school.
He often returns to an idea attributed to director J.J. Abrams: when Abrams wanted to attend film school, his father encouraged him to study liberal arts instead, arguing that “it's more important to learn what to make movies about than how to make movies.”
For Pigasse, that is what Sciences Po gave him.
““I think being at Sciences Po, meeting different people who now have very different lives, and learning different things, and not directly learning movies, was actually the best thing that could happen””
His Finance and Strategy training now helps him navigate budgets, financing, and tax credits. His experience with writing and public speaking helps him communicate with collaborators. And his exposure to politics, history, economics, and other disciplines continues to inform the stories he tells.
“In movie schools, you always talk about movies all the time,” he says. “At Sciences Po, you talk about everything else, which I think is more important.”
That breadth has also shaped his decision to build his career in the United States. American cinema has long fascinated him, and New York has given him the chance to work alongside people he grew up watching on screen.
““I want to make a mix of French and American movies.””
Looking back, Pigasse sees his career as a continuation of the curiosity that first drew him to Sciences Po. The school did not teach him how to make a film. Instead, it gave him the freedom to discover that he wanted to.
His advice to current students and recent graduates follows the same philosophy: stay curious. “Just enjoy it and keep learning and try to be open-minded and learn new things every day,” he says. “That's what Sciences Po is all about: learning, discovering, exploring.”
Victor Pigasse's feature film, Bottled Up, will screen in New York on October 18 as part of the Chelsea Film Festival.
