Burns revealed that while making “The Informant!,” he and the director began discussing a scene in which Scott Bakula‘s agent character sneezes, causing Whiteacre (Matt Damon) to go on a rant about who will pay for his getting sick, etc. Burns says he and Soderbergh began dissecting the topic of germs and how the nature of a virus could be used to deal with “issues of sovereignty” and as a metaphor for the way “information and misinformation travel” in contemporary society. Burns and Soderbergh developed the idea for a “virus movie” that Burns describes in “pitch meeting speak” as ‘Traffic‘ meets ‘Outbreak,‘ ” although he’s quick to point out that his script is only superficially similar to the latter.
With three months of work and sixty pages already under his belt, Burns said he was well on his way through his first draft when the swine flu hit last spring.
“So now I’ve kind of had to stop because I want to see where it plays out,” said Burns. “It’s been really interesting because all the people I’ve interviewed for the movie are people who are making policy decisions now, so every day I get tons of news stories about [various details] like how surgical masks are too small to protect you from the flu.”
However, Burns notes that he has no interest in making a “TV movie” and wishes to wait til “we get a little further down” and see what happens with the swine flu epidemic before continuing with the project. When prompted by Goldsmith to explain what he thinks could happen, Burns noted that if H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (bird flu) were to combine, the results could be very deadly. While he didn’t reveal whether that was the plot to his film, Burns seems to think the possibility of a deadly pandemic is very real, and if not, at least there’s a great and truly terrifying movie in there. Keep in mind Burns was a producer (and at one time slated to be director) on “An Inconvenient Truth,“ so clearly he’s not shy about revealing the threat of deadly global disasters to mass audiences.
Perhaps they could deliver a “28 Days Later,”-type smart, horror/thriller minus the zombies, and with large, overreaching political tones? We’ll see. It does sound a ways off.
Burns also mentioned a couple of other non-Soderbergh related projects he hoped to see come to fruition: his next film as director will be “Side Effects,” the follow up to his 2006 debut, “Pu-239.” The film deals with society’s reliance on drugs to cure depression, or what Burns calls the “war on sadness.” Burns said he also wishes to do a feature adaptation of the 2006 documentary “Deep Water,” which traced the true story of Donald Crowhurst, a British businessman and amateur sailor who, in 1968, entered a Sunday Times race to sail around the world in the hopes of winning a cash-prize to aid his failing business.
You can listen to the Creative Screenwriting podcast here. Thanks to Chris B’s Flickr page that has a shot of Burns and Soderbergh at a Festival du Film Américain de Deauville event that took place earlier this month. — Stephen Belden
