Experts add truth to 'Contagion'

LOS ANGELES -

At one point in Steven Soderbergh's pandemic thriller "Contagion," Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) gives herself an injection in such a rush that she doesn't even roll up her pants. Dr. Ian Lipkin, one of the film's science advisers, took one look at the scene and started, well, needling the filmmakers.

"They tried to persuade me that it was OK - that she's in a real hurry," said Lipkin, the director of Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity. "And I said, 'No, no, she's not in that much of a hurry.' " At Lipkin's urging, Soderbergh reshot the sequence.

In a movie filled with epidemiological lingo like R naughts (the rate an infectious disease spreads), three-dimensional and mathematical models of a killer virus (the film's fictional bug is called MEV-1) and dialogue about encephalitis, genetic mutation and fomite transmission (where pathogens move by contact with inanimate objects), "Contagion" blunders could pile up as fast as the film's body count.

So Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns decided to make the movie as accurate as possible without turning "Contagion," opening today, into a med-school lecture or a documentary. Instead, it's intended to be a terrifying drama that could have been ripped from tomorrow's headlines: Not only is this kind of pandemic possible, but it's also likely, according to experts.

Movies traveling in scientific waters often sacrifice - if not torpedo - accuracy for dramatic effect. The asteroid assault in "Armageddon" is obviously hokum, and no matter how much you liked "Source Code," time travel, even going back for just eight minutes, isn't a reality. But junk science infects a number of medical movies that presumably have tried to cross their technical T's and dotted their immunological I's. Lipkin, for one, says the viral explanations in 1995's "Outbreak" "made no sense at all."

"Contagion" is essentially three interlocking narratives, woven together like Soderbergh's 2000 drug-war drama "Traffic." The first plot follows the virus as it races around the globe, infecting and killing its victims at a terrifyingly fast rate. The second tale focuses on the medical, epidemiological, governmental and civilian response, principally the work done by Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Geneva's World Health Organization, as doctors try to slow the virus' spread and identify its point of origin. The final story tracks the plight of Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), who's desperately trying to keep the only other member of his immediate family alive.

For his research, Burns contacted Lipkin, who is recognized for his work with the West Nile virus and SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Lipkin spent six weeks collaborating on "Contagion's" script and four more weeks on its production, honing the story's plot and its facts.

"I wanted to make sure first of all that the science was accurate," Lipkin said. "The truth can be more interesting than anything you fabricate."

Balancing the science and the drama proved to be difficult, but one key decision was to anthropomorphize MEV-1 so that the film's virus becomes a character. "The virus wants to succeed," Burns said. "It wants to proliferate." The filmmakers debated how deadly their make-believe virus would actually be, and even downsized their projections.

"If it got too crazy," Soderbergh said, "you just wouldn't believe it."