Scientists as cinematic superheroes
Director, lead actor hope ‘Radioactive’ inspires audiences
The new film “Radioactive” is a portrait of scientist Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and still the only woman to win it twice.
Directed by Marjane Satrapi from a screenplay by Jack Thorne, the film stars Rosamund Pike as Curie; Sam Riley as her husband and collaborator, Pierre Curie; and Anya Taylor-Joy as their daughter Irène, who would herself go on to win a Nobel Prize.
Besides telling the story of the Curies’ romance and Marie’s life and career after Pierre’s untimely death, the film flashes forward for scenes that show the impact of their work in discovering radioactivity, from cancer treatments to the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
“Radioactive” premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival (and is now available on Amazon Prime Video), but its release arrives within a raging cultural and political debate on the role of science in fighting a global pandemic. And the movie can be seen not only as a biopic of Marie Curie but also as a spirited defense of science itself.
That’s just fine by Satrapi. “The problem that I cannot understand, first of all, is how can you not like science?” said Satrapi during a recent call from her home in Paris. “Science is basically human beings that were big monkeys and instead of being scared —‘Oh, there’s an earthquake, there’s a flood, there’s a volcano’ — instead of being scared they try to understand the secrets of nature,
discover them and understand what are the rules, which brings you to mathematics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics.
“This is what science is. The curiosity of the big monkey who tries to understand and therefore he becomes a human being,” said Satrapi. “So if you deny science, basically you go back to your condition of being a big monkey.”
The film is very sensitive to the unintended ripples of the Curies’ work and is particularly attuned to the importance of science and the work of scien
tists on the frontiers of understanding the world.
“I just want to say that our film does not in any way say that Marie Curie is responsible for the atomic bomb,” said Pike. “And I think that’s very important to say, just to stress that point that the scientist unveils the mysteries of the world and mankind is the perpetrator of either ill or good with those discoveries.”
When Satrapi was first sent Thorne’s screenplay, she didn’t realize it was an adaptation of a graphic novel, Lauren Redniss’
“Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Satrapi was taken by both the boldness of Curie’s character and the presentation of science in the story.
“I thought it was kind of a complete story because, first of all, you talk about the scientists and you actually really do talk about the science,” said Satrapi. “It’s not like the science is in the background.”
Once Pike, an Oscar nominee and two-time Golden
Globe nominee, was cast in the lead role, the actor took science classes to prepare. As she explained during a recent phone call from Prague, where she is staying while waiting for production to resume on the upcoming series “Wheel of Time,” the benefit of the lessons was twofold.
“It was putting her in her scientific context,” said Pike. “Her understanding of radioactivity obviously has to come out of what was available knowledge at the time, not what we know now. And when she was distilling something or trying to evaporate a solution, what was she looking for? It has to be thoughts that are related to her.
“And then I had to learn how to do all those technical things with my left hand, because she was left-handed. So you’re handling this flask like you do it all the time,” said Pike. “And I’m very particular about my hand inserts on every movie, I’m very reluctant to let them double my hands because I feel that the way the character handles something is very important. All the shots of her scraping away at this crystallization, that’s all me.”
Among the experts the production used to ensure the science in the film was as accurate as possible was Csaba Barta, an associate professor of chemistry at Semmelweis University in Budapest. (The movie was filmed on location in Budapest and Spain.)
“To depict science is not very easy, especially to show it in an interesting way in a movie,” said Barta during a recent call from Budapest. “And of course nuclear fission is something you can’t see, radioactivity you can’t see. Therefore it’s really challenging to try to show it on the screen.”
Satrapi wants the film’s depiction of Curie and science itself to be inspirational to young people, in particular young women. She noted that fewer women studied mathematics in 2020 than in the 1980s, and that many women were pilots in the early days of aviation before it came to be seen as a male-dominated field.
For Pike, the film presents both the scientist and the science itself as heroic, something intended to inspire people to achieve more.
As she said, “We presume a child will relate to Wonder Woman more readily than she’ll relate to Marie Curie. But why?”