Film makes pandemic feel real
LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood disaster movie typically comes with quakes, asteroids, tornadoes or aliens ripping the planet to shreds and manly heroes tossing around wisecracks as they carry out impossible deeds to save the world.
Yet Steven Soderbergh figured the more authentic a potential apocalypse feels, the scarier it becomes.
Soderbergh's “Contagion” lays out a terrifying scenario — the swift spread of a deadly new virus around the globe — with a mix of personal drama and merciless realism that makes it both riveting and foreboding.
From the start, director Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns aimed for an ultra-realistic tale of a pandemic so genuine and lacking in Hollywood egotism that — spoiler alert — the character played by one of the top names among its A-list cast, Gwyneth Paltrow, dies horribly in the opening minutes.
“The key phrase was `ultra-realistic.' At the end of the day, to have everything in the film either be scientifically accurate or emotionally and practically plausible would make it scarier,” Soderbergh said. “We wanted to remove this barrier between the audience and the story in which you could write it off as sort of movie (bull).”
Like 2000's “Traffic,” the drug-war saga that earned Soderbergh an Academy Award for best director, “Contagion” follows a huge cast and weaves together divergent plot lines into a tight, feverishly paced narrative.
To develop a realistic story, screenwriter Burns worked with top virologists to determine what truly could happen.
The scenario he and Soderbergh settled on — an epidemic from a virus jumping species — is one the scientists say is likely someday as human expansion continues, Burns said.
“Everything I learned says that we are overdue, and that it is inevitable as we go into these ecotones and encroach into the wild spaces,” Burns said. “We're going to put bats closer to pigs and dogs, and we're going to shake things out of the treetops that we haven't seen before.”
“Contagion” also touches on another sort of infection, the spread of information — and misinformation — and the fright that can follow.
Law's character is a lone blogger with his own agenda for fanning public distrust and alarm. Damon worries that traditional newspapers and TV networks also might stoke people's anxiety.
“In times of peace and quiet, they sell fear, but I wonder if in a time of genuine fear, if they'd have the restraint to actually push out good information to kind of keep people calm,” Damon said.
“Because a lot would depend on how the media behaved. If people are almost panicked, you can get them to cross the line very easily. It doesn't take a lot, but I wonder if the decision would be made in the board rooms that too much panic would actually get people to turn the TV off, and then the ad revenue wouldn't be as good. So it might be, `Wait a minute, let's sell a little reason here.' Hopefully, that would be the decision that was reached.”
