As news of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic started hitting, interest in filmed works about viral outbreaks are all the rage.
However the public isn’t going for classics like Robert Wise’s solid adaptation of Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain,” the star power of Wolfgang Petersen’s cheesy but interesting “Outbreak,” Terry Gilliam’s stone cold cinema classic “12 Monkeys,” or the more recent solid if divergent mini-series adaptation of Richard Preston’s iconic Ebola outbreak novel “The Hot Zone”.
Nope, the movie that everyone seems to be watching or re-watching is Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 well-received feature “Contagion” which hails from scribe Scott Z. Burns. Burns spoke to Slate about the renewed interest in the film:
“It has been very strange to me, whether on social media or in conversations with friends, that people will say to me, ‘This is uncanny how similar it is.’ And I don’t find it to be that surprising, because the scientists I spoke to, and there were a lot of them, all said that this was a matter of when, not if. So, I guess my feeling as someone who believes in science is that when scientists tell us those things we would do well to listen.”
Burns’ researched covered the protocols set in place by the CDC and study of the Department of Health’s response measures to a pandemic. He calls out how poorly the current Trump administration’s response to the pandemic has been:
“It is incredible to me that we are not letting the really amazing public health people in this country lead the response – that we are finding out that we don’t have enough test kits and have for some reason disbanded our pandemic-preparedness teams.
When I was at the CDC researching the movie in 2009 and 2010, those people were extraordinary. It was no different than the feeling you might get if you went to a firehouse and saw how committed those first responders are to keeping people safe. Slashing the budgets of those things is something I would have never contemplated as a screenwriter.
When people tell me that the movie seems to be coming true, I say to them that I never contemplated that we would have leadership in this country that would gut our defense. This administration and this Republican Party talk about protecting people with a wall, and we can’t even make test kits.
We were in a better place to deal with this when I was doing research on the movie. We had a Department of Homeland Security that had a pandemic-preparedness team in place. There were people who understood how public health works… When you look at the amount of testing this country has done compared to other countries, that’s the part that is scary to me.”
Soderbergh’s film was made on a budget of $60 million and grossed $135 million at the box-office along with scoring high praise by reviewers and scientists for its accuracy.
