Well, Elizabeth Blackburn, as we heard in the program there, talks about getting to
the bottom of how life works, which essentially describes what her work is all about.
But Elizabeth Blackburn, of course, is a superstar of the scientific world, but not in the sense
of seeking the spotlight or, heaven forbid, behaving like a celebrity.
So Sonia, how did you get her to say yes?
I stalked her for two years, I did.
I had started following her work probably in some detail around about 2005, 2006, and
I kept reading articles and thinking, wow, this is interesting.
All I could think was scientists from Tasmania discovers a way to immortalise human cells
or discovers how cells do the countdown to death and then discover the enzyme that can
get in the way of that.
And it seemed too good to be true, and I did some research and talked to some people
and realised that actually it was solid.
And remembering this is four or five years before she won the Nobel Prize, but she'd
won some other big prizes.
And so I contacted her and I said, you know, I've made lots of science films, I'd like
to come and make a film with you.
But she had just recently, just prior to that, become one of Time magazine's most 100 influential
people in 2006, I think it was.
And she was so embarrassed by that that she said, oh, I don't want any more media, thank
you very much.
And it was lovely.
And anyway, she said, no, thank you, you're not interested, go away.
And so then I flew myself to San Francisco thinking, I'll show you, I'm really keen.
And still, she said, no, thank you.
And she's very polite about it.
And just no, she didn't want to do any media, it was not important, she had too much work
to get on with, and she also just didn't want to do it.
And then I had to ask a mutual sort of friend, colleague, I heard that she was coming out
to Australia and that she'd be going to a dinner at Monash.
And so I rang somebody who I knew would be hosting that dinner.
And I said, hi, Alan, I hear you're having Liz for dinner tomorrow night.
And he said, how the hell do you know that?
And I said, I'm a researcher.
And I said, could you put in a good word and tell her that I'm all right, and that I won't
treat this with disrespect.
And the next morning I get a phone call going, well, you're very tenacious aren't you?
Well, okay, I'll give you 10 minutes.
And so she gave me 10 minutes and a couple of days time and I booked it in.
And I think I had barely slept, I kept rereading all her papers, you know, and rereading everything
because it's very dense.
I mean, I hope we've managed to make it accessible.
But it's incredibly dense that the mixture of aging and cancer and stress and you could
come at it from a thousand different angles.
And that's what was so mind boggling about it.
And I also knew that she'd been really annoyed with the reporting in the 80s that made it
out to be the town of youth.
And she was really worried about that.
But anyway, so when I went in to meet her, I'd swatted all night and I was all full
of beans and she said, right, well, I'll assume you know everything there is to know about
me.
So tell me about you.
And she proceeded to grill me and just really interviewed me.
And at the end of that 10 minutes, she said, well, if you still want me to do this, we'll
talk, we'll meet her.
And so so began it.
But it was actually not easy to get her.
She didn't want any more media.
She didn't want to do television.
She has no interest in any more publicity.
And I'm very grateful that she was able to give me her trust that we could do it.
Because the promise I made her was that I wanted to call it immortal right from the beginning.
And she goes, oh, please don't call it that.
Oh, gosh, hey, that.
And I said, look, it is about immortality, actually, on a cellular level.
And let's go there.
But I need to play with the title immortality to get people to watch.
Because you're not going to watch a film if I say it's about selves living longer.
It has to be, it's about, it is about the essence of immortality.
You seem to have tremendous access to her during that period.
No.
No.
She won the Nobel Prize in the middle of filming.
And I'd been through it twice before in two previous films, where I'd started filming
films, one with Barry Marshall and Robin Warren and then with Harold Zurhouse and before Liz.
And in each time, it just went crazy.
And so I think the whole film, we had it for three days.
We had three and a half hours with her in Tasmania.
That's including interview and all the overlay.
And it was a one kilometer trip with all the gear up and down the waterfall.
So we had three hours with her to do the interview and all that filming.
So her time is so valuable.
I mean, she doesn't want to waste it on Telly.
You said you started reading about her in 2005.
We know you've got a long history of making this kind of a program, a sort of science
based program.
What got you interested in her in the first place?
I'd been making films about cancer and a particular film called Catching Cancer with
Ian Fraser.
And I got very interested in how cancer starts.
And I always pictured them as a double act for two films.
But luckily, SBS jumped up and said they wanted immortals.
So that was great and I could do it that way.
But I was always interested in how cancer starts.
And so I'd been reading and reading and reading about cancer.
