During the final days of filming The Informant!, the director Steven Soderbergh asked me what I planned on writing next. I told him I’d been contemplating a science-based pandemic movie tracking a novel virus that had randomly jumped into the human population.
My father, Dr. Neal M. Burns, an aerospace engineer turned academic, had been concerned since the late 90s that a strain of avian flu (H5) might mutate in such a way that it could be transmitted from a migrating bird to livestock to human to human to … you get the idea.
