the immortal life of henrietta lacks characters

The immortal life of henrietta lacks characters movie#

You can see that in the movie, you can see gears clicking in 'Rebecca's' head, and you can see her putting the pieces together about race without saying anything about it it's a really good visualization of something that is an undercurrent in the book. It's really showing what does it mean to have a white reporter and a black woman who is being written about - what does it mean that the reporter is white, how does that play out? In the course of working on the book, I really saw that I was privileged, that I could walk into a room and ask questions in ways that didn't exist for Deborah.

The immortal life of henrietta lacks characters movie#

That's one of the places where I think the movie does add quite a bit. In the movie that doesn't work - a character can't be one-dimensional in a movie. In the book, I tell the history of all the other journalists who came along, and the impact that their reporting had on the family - and in doing that I realized it would be dishonest if I left myself out.Īnd I very intentionally left out everything personal about myself - I was just 'Rebecca the reporter,' so it's a very one-dimensional character. Skloot: I was very resistant to putting myself in the book at all! Eventually I realized that the book is about a lot of different things, and one of them is the ethics of journalism and telling people's stories. Live Science: Did you see yourself as a character in the story when you were writing it, and did that change when you became involved with the film adaptation? And together, they paint this really rich picture. I didn't want the movie to be a Cliffs Notes version of the book - my hope was that it would be a companion piece, that it and the book would exist in a way that added to each other. There are things in a movie that visually would convey a very powerful message, that would take me many pages to convey in a book, and would feel very different. One thing about film is how much can be conveyed in a split second between two characters where nothing is said - or just a facial expression on a really good actor - and the emotions that can evoke. There's a lot in the book that couldn't be in the film - I had 400 pages to flesh out the whole story - but the things you can show on a page are definitely different than what you can show on the screen. Skloot: There are things movies can do that books can't do, and vice versa. Live Science: Are there parts of Henrietta's story that emerge more clearly in the film, because it's a more visual medium? This is one of the only known photos of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in Baltimore, Maryland in 1951, when she was 31 years old. And during filming, me and over one dozen Lacks' family members visited various locations on set, and they would let us watch. I provided audio tapes from my research process so the actors could listen to characters for their scenes. We talked with actors - several members of the family and I spent time with Oprah. I didn't want the movie to add to that, to fictionalize in a way that would add to lack of clarity about who she was and what her legacy was.

Part of the story of Henrietta and her family is the misinformation that was put into world - with the family not involved, her name incorrect, various stories that weren't true. I thought it was really important that the story stick as close to the facts as possible without being overly fictionalized. One of the reasons I was comfortable doing the movie with HBO in the first place was they were open to having me and the family involved. I've read drafts of the script, offered feedback on it as it evolved, helped with research and developing characters along the way. Rebecca Skloot: I'm a consultant on the film - so are some of the members of the Lacks family - and I've been involved from the beginning. Live Science: What was your role in the process of adapting your book to the HBO movie? This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.