The director Steven Soderbergh has “terrifying” ideas for a sequel to Contagion, his 2011 film about a global pandemic which enjoyed a resurgence under Covid-19, but feels it would be “irresponsible” to base a movie around them.
“We talk about it and have come up with some terrifying ideas,” Soderbergh said, while describing conversations with pandemic experts. “There would have to be, I think, a plot that doesn’t feel predictable.
“I don’t want to torture people,” he said. “There are scenarios that you could come up with that I would categorise as irresponsible. You know, that I would go, ‘That’s a big idea, but I’m not sure I want to put that idea out there, frankly.’ I do think about that.”
Soderbergh was speaking to One Decision, a podcast whose co-hosts include Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of the British intelligence service MI6, the former CIA director Leon Panetta and now Kate McCann, a Times Radio presenter. True to Dearlove and Panetta’s background, Soderbergh was there to discuss his new film, Black Bag, an espionage thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett.
But conversation also turned to Contagion. Staring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard, the film surged back to prominence in early 2020, as Covid emerged from China and much of the world locked down. In the UK, thanks to then health secretary Matt Hancock, Soderbergh’s movie even informed vaccine policy.
At the time, Scott Z Burns, who wrote Contagion, told NPR he and Soderbergh wanted to depict a “plausible” outbreak, “not a Hollywood exaggeration”.
“We were trying to tell a story that was credible within the boundaries of scientific understanding, but also illuminate how our world might respond – that is why the poster of the movie says ‘Nothing spreads like fear’,” Burns said.
Soderbergh told One Decision: “They found a vaccine in the movie faster than you would have been able to then. In the interim, a couple of years before Covid, new technology allowed us to get to a vaccine in a shockingly short period of time.
“I mean, the scientific community was aware of what was happening in Wuhan in November and by January, they had a working vaccine [US authorities say Covid was detected in December 2019, with the first human vaccine trials in March 2020]. That’s insane how fast that happened and how many lives were saved. This typically when we made Contagion would have been three to four years.”
Responding to Dearlove’s description of his belief that Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory, a theory at first downplayed but increasingly taken seriously instead of the position that the virus spread from a food market, Soderbergh said “the people I’m talking to” about pandemics believed Covid came from a lab but had “a zoonotic origin”.
“We think it was scooped up and we think, to use the phrase from Contagion, it walked out of there on somebody’s shoe. That’s what I’ve heard.”
Returning to the espionage theme – and his dislike of James Bond films – Dearlove said: “There’s a real design flaw in the Bond villain plan to engineer a virus [Ernst Stavro Blofeld, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service] which is the virus doesn’t respect any boundary and will go everywhere including back into your house.”
McCann asked if Soderbergh was considering a sequel to Contagion. Soderbergh mentioned his “terrifying” ideas, and said: “It’s [about] being responsible and understanding how people take things in … I have my own standard of what I think is being deeply irresponsible and exciting.
“I think about that whenever I’m about to unleash something to the public, whether that’s a post or a movie or a TV show or an article, I think it’s important to run through the potential consequences of what you’re saying. And first of all, I would hope that whatever you’re saying is true and that it’s defensible and that you can lay out the logic of what you’re saying.
“But secondly, I don’t want to contribute to what I consider to be noise. I want to be signal. I don’t want to be noise. And noise to me is just things that are insincere, ultimately. If not downright cynical.”
