By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Director Steven Soderbergh, who has PRESENCE currently in theaters, has only dabbled in horror a few times over the course of his long, expansive career. One such film, which is generally considered a thriller but definitely has its horrific sides, is CONTAGION, his 2011 film about a fast-spreading disease overtaking the world, and the efforts of a group of scientists to stop it. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns and heavily researched, it proved to be remarkably prescient when COVID-19 took over the planet nine years later. While speaking to RUE MORGUE about PRESENCE (see that interview here and here), Soderbergh also looked back on CONTAGION–and among other things, revealed that he and Burns considered a different source for their onscreen plague, rather than the one that wound up closer to the facts of the pandemic.
CONTAGION is a past film of yours that could almost be considered horror, and today it obviously feels very forward-thinking. How did you feel several years back when so much of what was going on played similarly to what you had dramatized almost a decade before?
Well, to your point, I always described it to the studio, and to anyone who asked, as a horror film; I said, “We’re making a horror film here.” That’s how I viewed it, as kind of an Irwin Allen-style/POSEIDON ADVENTURE horror film, where you get to kill some movie stars.
It was odd to watch the real world grapple with these ideas that we had been working with nine years earlier. Nobody involved in the movie would tell you they were surprised, because all of the consultants we worked with, either inside or outside of the CDC, said, “There will be a pandemic at some point, and we all think that it will begin in a wet market in Asia.” That was the general consensus.
The second most discussed jumping-off point [for the storyline] was an animal discovered via the melting of the permafrost, which is a thing that’s happening fairly rapidly now. And it is absolutely conceivable; this could still happen. We could uncover an animal that hasn’t existed for many thousands of years, and it might be carrying a disease we have no defense against at all. That was kind of Plan B, if Plan A didn’t work out.
The thing that we got wrong, or at least the one that we failed to imagine, was that the Jude Law character [conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede, pictured above] would be the President of the United States. We didn’t see that coming. It was supposed to be a sort of fringe position, or a single note in a larger chord, and we never would have imagined that that note would become the chord itself–that you’d have somebody in a position of power who was actively working against the efforts of the CDC to control the pandemic. It would have seemed too far-fetched to us in 2011.
Like a lot of people in the early days of the pandemic, I watched CONTAGION with a group of friends, and one thing that surprised us was someone using the term “social distancing,” which we hadn’t heard prior to the pandemic ramping up.
Part of the reason I have the best job in the world is the ability to spend a year, year and a half, sometimes more, immersed in a certain subject, talking to people who have spent their whole lives studying that subject. Working on CONTAGION with the consultants was fascinating, and we wanted to make sure we got the science right. One of the things that changed between when we made the film and COVID actually happening was, the mRNA technology that allowed us to get to a vaccine as quickly as we did, that didn’t exist in 2011. In CONTAGION, we get to the vaccine pretty quickly, but in reality, if COVID had hit back then, it would have taken years for us to come up with one. My understanding was, there was a working prototype for the vaccine that ended up being what we all took, so that happened fast. It saved a lot of lives; that’s why those people recently won a Nobel Prize.
When the pandemic began, did anyone come to you and Burns based on all the research you had done on the subject?
No, but the creative team and the consultants got together with the cast and we made some short videos about all those issues–hand-washing, social distancing, masking, all that kind of stuff–just to get people to think about them and take them seriously. But my takeaway from having made CONTAGION when we finished the film was, I believed it when they said there was going to be an event like this at some point. And I also believed in their ability to solve it. From the people I interacted with, and the conversations I had, I felt like, yeah, it’s gonna happen, but we will figure it out.
