One in two men, one in three women and one in 300 children will get some form of cancer in their lifetime. When a close friend, who had survived colon cancer, shared these statistics with Ken Burns, it sparked the idea for Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Burns is the executive producer of this three-part, six-hour documentary series, which has been adapted from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies. The series was aired on PBS last week in the US.
For Burns, who embarked on the project in 2011, this documentary was as close to the bone as a film could get — he had lost his mother to breast cancer when he was 11. When he first read Mukherjee’s well-researched and lyrically narrated book, he found it a “riveting roller coaster of a detective story”, as he says in the film. “The history of cancer and the efforts to fight the disease had all of the drama and power that we have found in other stories,” says Burns.
Directed by Barak Goodman, the series, like the book, tells the comprehensive story of cancer, from its first description in an ancient Egyptian scroll to the gleaming laboratories of modern-day research institutions. Goodman says he had to adopt a radically different approach for the project, a departure from his previous historical films which include Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000) and Clinton (2012). They roped in an animator to make the content comprehensible to a TV audience. The series also uses archival footage, images, newsreels and intersperses the narrative with moving accounts of patients battling the disease, and others who have conquered it.
Among these accounts is the story of Suleika Jaoud, who chronicled her battle with leukemia in an Emmy award-winning column for The New York Times. Then there is Cindy Campbell, who started The Muddy Puddles project — an organisation that celebrates life by seeking fun in the little things — after she lost her five-year-old son to cancer.
Following the lives of patients so closely, there were times when Goodman questioned how much should make it to the film. The story of six-year-old Luca Assante, who died during production, is one such example. “We knew how unlikely he is to survive so we didn’t feel the need to follow his trajectory till death. There was another beautiful scene where a woman on her deathbed got married, in which there is a violin playing in the background, but it felt wrong to include that in the film,” he says.
Cancer is grim but the documentary is optimistic in its approach. Split into three parts, the first segment, Magic Bullets, centres on the story of Sidney Farber, the father of chemotherapy, and how the treatment has saved millions of lives. The second, The Blind Men and the Elephant, follows how the world has made many strides in fighting the disease since Richard Nixon’s declaration of ‘war on cancer’ in 1971. The final part, Finding an Achilles Heel, has scientists talk about making headway in cracking the mystery of the malignant cell. The documentary has also made room to include advances in cancer research since 2010, the year the book was published. However, the story of Dr Surendra Shastri, who discovered the the use of vinegar as a screening tool for cervical cancer, in place of the expensive pap smear, did not make the final cut.
Having screened the series at various cancer centres in the US, the team is in talks to take it to other countries soon. “We will also need to update the series as more breakthroughs emerge, so there will be a follow-up a few years from now,” says Goodman.
shikha. kumar@expressindia.com
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