There’s a lot at play in this story, between its scientific and human elements.
If you are ferociously committed to telling the truth, and create an environment where people feel safe to discover, and explore, and fail-which is essential for telling the truth-then you end up honoring them by the purity of your investment in telling the story, your undiluted desire to make sure this story gets told in the most truthful way. You make a commitment to make sure this moment is true, and you keep on doing that. I remember when I directed Angels in America on Broadway, I was going “Oh my God! How do I direct a seven-hour play?” And then a voice inside my head said, “One scene at a time.” What you do is you make a commitment. Doing the research, and digging and digging, so that therefore, what you’re doing is coming from the deepest, and hopefully the smartest piece of who you are. It’s doing your job, creating a set where actors feel safe, so they can go to these incredibly complicated emotional places. I think the way you honor people-to honor the book, Deborah-is by not beating yourself up, trying to honor them. Was there a weight of responsibility you felt in taking on this film-not only to honor Henrietta and her memory but also to bring this story to light in a new way? That becomes the aspect of the story that I really loved.
I think Deborah is a very curious person, but I think even more than that, she was driven by the primal desire that we all have-to know who made us, who we come from. You have someone who looks at Jurassic Park and sees they’ve cloned a dinosaur, and she kind of halfway knows they did some cloning in relationship to her mother’s cells, so she gets the film, or she sees something in The Guardian about Henrietta. The dynamic of Rebecca and Deborah was very intriguing to me, but also specifically the furiosity of Deborah’s determination to know her mother. There were chapters just about the science and the HeLa cells, chapters about the family, and what all Henrietta’s children went through. Then, when I got involved, I was intrigued by the challenge, because it’s set in 1951, then it’s set in the ‘70s, then it’s set in 2000. I read the book when it first came out-I thought it was an astonishing read, and very powerful and moving. How did you first come upon Rebecca Skloot’s book, and what made you want to tell this story? 'The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks' Trailer: Oprah Winfrey & Rose Byrne Dig For Truth In HBO Film HBO Adapted from Rebecca Skloot’s bestseller, the film follows the shared journey of Deborah Lacks ( Oprah Winfrey) and Skloot (Rose Byrne), as they search for truths about HeLa and cast a deserved light on Henrietta, herself. Speaking with Deadline, Wolfe discusses working with Oprah on a ferocious and vulnerable performance and the value in placing a spotlight on stories lost to time. Wolfe took on with HBO’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. This is the potent true story that director George C.
Now known as HeLa cells, Henrietta’s “immortal” cells aided in the development of the polio vaccine, and remain an essential resource for medical research today-and yet for years, Lacks remained anonymous in and outside of the medical field, never acknowledged for the gift she gave to the world. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.An African-American woman living through the “peak of segregation,” Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, unaware that cells taken from her body would go on to transform modern medicine and history at large. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine of scientific discovery and faith healing and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.
#The immortal life of henrietta lacks movie#
Made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-taken without her knowledge in 1951-became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa.
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