Steven Soderbergh & Jennifer Ehle Interview For ‘Contagion’

Steven Soderbergh’s new film “Contagion” depicts a scenario where a deadly virus breaks out across the globe, inspiring fear and paranoia among even close friends and relatives. In spite of the film’s portrayal of the threat, which is as deadly as it is invisible as it is ubiquitous, several of the members of the cast and crew, including Soderbergh, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Ehle, and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns seemed unafraid to sit down next to one another at a recent Los Angeles press day. That said, Soderbergh admitted that he was more conscious of the potential threat of germs having made a film about their imminent danger.


“I don’t know if my behavior has changed, but I’m just really aware of it now,” Soderbergh said. “I’m aware of the fact that all of you have touched all of these recorders that are in front of us, and somebody set up this microphone. That I was handed some lip balm by one of the makeup people, which I took a Kleenex and cleaned off, but who knows if that worked. So don’t get near my mouth. It was fun during the preview to watch the lights come up and four hundred people realize that they’re next to a bunch of strangers and that they’ve touched everything. You could tell they weren’t happy.”


Soderbergh’s developing germophobia was but one of the subjects he and the cast discussed at the press day for “Contagion.” Meanwhile, check out our review from the Venice Film Festival this past weekend.


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.