Work on the script for Contagion began while Soderbergh was still shooting The Informant! (2009). Initially, Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (who also wrote The Informant!) were going to create a film based on the life of famed German director Leni Riefenstahl and her rise through the Nazi party. However, they ultimately cancelled the project and worked on Contagion instead. It was Burns who suggested that the two begin work on a film based around a pandemic, making "an interesting thriller version of a pandemic movie."
To make the film accurate, Soderbergh and Burns consulted a man named Larry Brilliant (as well as a number of other disease specialists) who was instrumental in eradicating smallpox. Interestingly enough, as the film was being created, the H1N1 ("swine flu") virus spread across the world, which gave Soderbergh and Burns an insight into the world's mindset during a pandemic. "It was really helpful," Burns remarked, and helped him answer the following questions: do you close the schools and if you close the schools, then who stays home with the kids? And will everyone keep their kids at home?
Filming began in 2010 in Hong Kong. Soderbergh insisted on filming on location and refused to shoot inside a studio. Acclaim for the film centered around Soderbergh's sensitive direction. In a 2011 interview with the website Uproxx, Soderbergh told interviewer Mike Ryan, "There were two things that were unsettling. One is that everyone you spoke to said, ‘We’re due for a big one.’ And some of the stories from the people who go out and parachute into the situations, how politics prevented them from doing their work, are really depressing. Where they literally show up somewhere where there’s been an outbreak of a treatable disease and they’re there with supplies ready to go in. And because a volatile political situation existed, they weren’t allowed in to keep people from dying. They don’t have jurisdiction anywhere. You have to ask them to come. They have to be invited.”
