OK, give me all your germs!' Steven Soderbergh jokes after arriving for his press duties. But as his new film Contagion shows, the spread of a deadly pandemic is no laughing matter. Particularly when it starts in Hong Kong. The film may pinball us around the world, from London to Geneva, Tokyo and a series of US cities, but the geographical origin of the film's fictionalised MEV-1 virus will revive horrific memories among those who lived through the nightmare of Sars in 2003. 'A lot of the movie is modelled on Sars,' admits screenwriter Scott Burns. 'So Hong Kong was the easiest place to set it.'
Burns calls the region a 'hot-spot' for cultivating infectious diseases. 'It has a huge harbour and port, where a lot of people come in and out of. And it also has access to the mainland, where there are people who don't always have a lot of refrigeration. So, sometimes, they're going to wet markets and they're buying live animals. It's one of these places where you have a large population in contact with livestock.' To be fair, he comes well armed with facts and figures; he conducted his research with Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett. 'Both were in Hong Kong during Sars,' he says.
While the film may boast an A-list cast, including Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Matt Damon, it's less a thriller than a clinically precise depiction of how such an outbreak might spread and how the authorities would cope. Yet Contagion's attempts to present a global perspective on the crisis falter, with most of the main characters American in nationality, including Laurence Fishburne's Ellis Cheever, the head of the US Centre For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 'That was a necessity for us because the CDC was really the operation centre of how this thing was going to get solved,' shrugs Soderbergh. 'So it made sense to set it primarily in the US.'
Burns is more apologetic. 'If we had more money and more time I think we would've liked to go to more places and see how different countries respond to it. I tried to make it as global as I possibly could. Again, I'm also limited. As much as I want to have a world perspective, you tend to write what you know.'
Yet actress Jennifer Ehle, who plays a lab technician trying to find a vaccine, believes the film's universality comes from showing how different countries react and interact. 'That's one of the scariest things,' she says. 'If a pandemic were to happen, our salvation from it might be in the hands of people who don't necessarily have global interests at heart.'
From the 1918 spread of Spanish flu (the first of two pandemics involving the H1N1 influenza virus; the second being the 2009 outbreak), the threats have thankfully been resolved before global disaster. Yet what if it's not a natural disease? Martin Rees, in his 2003 book Our Final Hour, predicted that by 2020 'bio-terror or bio-error will lead to one million casualties in a single event'. He reasoned that there were untold numbers of people capable of causing a catastrophic biological disaster. 'My concern is not only organised terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses.'
With a reference to the virus being a possible act of bio-terrorism, it might seem like Contagion contains a streak of post 9/11 paranoia - not least through the character of Alan Krumwiede (Law), a conspiracy-prone blogger.