Steven Soderbergh & Jennifer Ehle Interview For ‘Contagion’

Directed by Steven Soderbergh from an original screenplay by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum,The Informant!), ‘Contagion’ follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself. At the same time, ordinary people struggle to survive in a society coming apart. Matt Damon stars as Dr. Ally Hextall alongside a stellar cast which includes the likes of Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishbourne, Bryan Cranston, Demitri Martin, Sanaa Lathan and Elliott Gould. ‘Contagion’ opens September 9th in the US, and October 21st in the UK.

Can you tell us how you managed the epic and intimate scenes of the movie?

Steven Soderbergh: To be honest I was just trying to keep it very very simple, and that meant the entire film is shot with two lenses basically. And when I would look at a scene I would try to figure out how few shots I needed as opposed to how many – I really wanted it to be, in terms of style, one of the simplest movies that I have ever made. Often that can require more thought than just walking in and saying, ‘I’m just going to cover the hell out of this and figure it out later.’ When you’re going in saying, ‘I really want to keep this simple, I want every shot to have a purpose, and I want every cut to have a purpose. I don’t want any waste.’ If you pulled one shot out it meant something would be diminished, that was my approach. So that was really it, eye level, no crane shots, no like throwing the camera around. Just keep it simple so that all that you were paying attention to were the performances.

Jennifer, what kind of research did you do for your role?

Jennifer Ehle: I had two really fascinating mornings with Dr. Ian Lipkin and his team up at Columbia Univercity in New York, at his lab doing experiments. Basically they gave me a crash course, and I did all sorts of extraordinary things – pigs brains with encephalitis, growing bacteria, growing viruses, and finding the DNA sequences from a sample. It was really an extraordinary couple of days, and then at the end I got a certificate that said I was now qualified as a microbiologist to practice absolutely nowhere (laughs). It was wonderful. Dr. Lipkin e was very, very present during the shoot, and very hands on. So the research was kind of ongoing while we were shooting.

How was filming Gwyneth Paltrow’s autopsy scene?

Steven Soderbergh: Gwyneth is a trooper, we got into that room and we had an actual medical examiner there who does this sort of thing all the time. We asked her to walk us through the steps in which someone has died under these circumstances. And when she got to the part where she said, ‘Well, we cut here and we peel the skin over the front of the face,’ I immediately turned to Greg and said, ‘Okay, we need to find a flap of something that looks like pizza up on one end without the sauce, that we could attach some wig hair to so that we could do this.’ And so we scrambled around and we found we were able to do that. And while it took about forty minutes of having Gwyneth in that position, Greg actually ended up being the person who put the skin flap over. And she was stalk still and didn’t say a word.

She asked the medical examiner, ‘Talk to me about the rest of my face. What about my mouth?’ And the women said, ‘Okay, your tongue would be extruded just a little bit.’ She said, ‘You’ll have some sort of yellowish fluid coming out of your nose.’ And she wanted it to be exactly right. I think she had a feeling this was going to be some sort of weird iconic image somehow. There were no tricks there, no freeze frame, no high speed frame rate. That was just her being stalk still with some really good effects.

You cast Jennifer Ehle because of her performance in Michael Clayton (which in the end was cut). What did you see in that that made you want to cast her?

Steven Soderbergh: That was an amazing performance and so… that sounds horrible, I had known who Jennifer was for a long time, and honestly this didn’t take a lot of thought. I have a long, somewhat long, list of people that I’ve seen in the course of my career and thought, ‘Wow, they would be great to work with.’ And I did know from Tony Gilroy that they had really good experience and I wasn’t in any danger. So I’m just glad that worked out, and of course now she’s re-teamed with George Clooney in ‘The Ides of March,’ so it’s all happening this year.
Was there something that made her right for that role in particular?

Steven Soderbergh: I knew that by her saying yes she was willing to take a run at some very complex language. I mean, one of the most difficult scenes in terms of the language in the movie is the explanation and when she says, ‘Okay, we know what it is now. The green part is this. The red is that,’ Scott had written it in sort of general terms and then Dr Ian Lipkin was on the set and we wrote it right there. It’s not really fair to throw dialogue like that at someone at the last minute. I was hoping the fear of having to say it would translate as excitement and the high emotional stakes for the world, because it was a lot. It’s hard, It looked hard.

Jennifer Ehle: Well, I just have to say ’Contagion’ came out of the blue for me. I usually have to audition and sort of jump through hoops and I didn’t for this. It completely blew me away to be asked to do it, for somebody that I admire as much as Steven Soderbergh to have that kind of faith that I could do it. I also took it assuming that, the same way I took the part in ‘Michael Clayton,’ assuming that probably it would be cut, but that I would have a wonderful experience meanwhile doing it, and that didn’t happen this time.