Jude Law, right, in the film Contagion. Photo: Warner Bros Entertainment Inc
WHEN Professor Ian Lipkin was first approached to work on a movie about a pandemic virus, he was wary.
”Every few years a filmmaker imagined a world in which a virus transformed humans into flesh-eating zombies,” he recalled in The New York Times, ”or scientists discovered and delivered the cure for a lethal infectious disease in an impossibly short period of time.”
But director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) assured him it would be different; that he and his writer wanted their movie Contagion (opening next month in Australia, starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law) to convey the real risks of a global outbreak, more terrifying than zombies.
Lipkin wanted those risks to come across. The growth of international travel, the growing interface of animals and humans, make us more vulnerable than ever to devastating infection. Shots in the film linger on such banal horrors as a metal pole on a crowded bus, contaminated by the sweaty, feverish hand of a character battling a killer virus ready to transmit to a new host.
”All of us are in a battle that is potentially devastating,” Lipkin wrote. ”Could a movie be an effective vehicle for sounding the alarm?”
He signed on as a paid technical consultant. He and his colleagues ”constructed” a new virus that could wreak havoc, basing it on the Nipah virus which jumped from bats to pigs to humans in Malaysia in the late 1990s, killing more than 100 people before it was contained. Lipkin and his colleagues mixed in Australia’s own Hendra virus, and upped the level of contagion. As the script developed, the writers even based a character on Lipkin – played by Elliot Gould.
Lipkin’s team built a 3D model of the agent for use in the film, and calculated how it would spread around the world, based on Lipkin’s experience of SARS. He advised how governments and medical experts would react, their likely successes and failures. Lipkin helped actors get access to real-life laboratories so they could practise using medical and research equipment. He advised Gwyneth Paltrow, who asked him, ”What does a seizure look like?” and told her to tone it down from the Hollywood cliche.
He spent weeks on set correcting little bits of dialogue or pointing out where people should stand in a lab setting. He even insisted a scene in which a doctor gives herself an injection through her trousers was re-shot.
”They tried to persuade me that it was OK – that she’s in a real hurry,” Lipkin said. ”And I said, ‘No, no, she’s not in that much of a hurry’.”
In the end, Lipkin still has quibbles with the science of Contagion. For example (spoiler alert), the eventual vaccine is produced too quickly. But he’s happy that it’s Hollywood’s best effort yet on his turf, and that the ”nerds” of the film are its heroes, perhaps making science more attractive as a career.
Article source: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/movies/hollywood-discovers-science-is-scarier-than-zombies-20110917-1keym.html
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