“My goal was to be faithful to her mind, to her spirit” - Marjane Satrapi on making Marie Curie biopic Radioactive

Iranian director Marjane Satrapi on the set of Radioactive

When Marjane Satrapi was researching Radioactive, her new movie about Marie Curie, she spent a lot of time visiting the lab of the two-time Nobel Prize-winning scientist in an effort to get close to her subject. The lab is the centrepiece of the Marie Curie Museum in Paris, where the Polish-born Curie worked and the Iranian born Satrapi now lives.  Or at least, a version of the lab is the centrepiece of the museum… 

“They had to rebuild it from scratch,” says Satrapi on a flying visit to the Glasgow Film Festival for Radioactive’s UK premiere. “Everything was so radioactive. The only thing they haven’t changed is the handle on the door. That is still radioactive. And when I was going there to look at all the documents and talk to people, each time I was going in I was rubbing my hands like crazy on the door handle to have a little bit of the radioactivity of Marie Curie!” She laughs. “I rub my hands so much on this handle you won’t believe it!”  

I’m not sure I do believe it, but it’s an amusing story and it’s reflective of the mischievous spirit Satrapi injects into what could have been a pretty dry and worthy biopic of Curie, whose joint discovery with her physicist husband Pierre Curie of radium and polonium revolutionised our understanding of the world. In one sequence in the film, for instance, Satrapi, who shot to fame with her graphic novel memoir Persepolis and its subsequent Oscar-nominated film version, takes grim delight in showing how the Curies’ discoveries were quickly exploited and marketed for everyday household use – Radioactive toothpaste! Radioactive cigarettes! – before the deadly toxic effects were fully understood. But the film, which stars Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie and Sam Riley as Pierre, also uses dramatic irony in other interesting ways to break from the story at hand and jump ahead in time to show the positive and negative ripple effects their work had. 

“The world before the discovery of radioactivity and after the discovery of radioactivity is not the same world,” says Satrapi when I ask why she approached it in this way. “But it’s important to show that this woman, but also this man because this is actually the meeting of two great minds … Pierre was a great physicist, and she was a really great chemist … it’s important to show that really, because they met, this was all possible. But somehow you cannot talk about that without talking about the result it has had in the world. The best result of that is the treatment of cancer. But 11 years after their marriage you have the Hiroshima atom bomb. Is it related to them? Of course it’s not because they just discovered something. Is it completely unrelated to them? Of course it’s not. So it brings up the question of the ethics that we as human beings have when we discover new stuff and we have new possibilities. How do we use it?” The film itself is based on Laura Redniss’s acclaimed 2011 graphic novel of the same name, though it’s interesting that given Satrapi’s affiliation with the format she had no idea about the book’s existence when her agent gave her the script by prolific British screenwriter Jack Thorne (The Aeronauts).  

“It was only after about two months, three months, when I got closer to the project, that they told me it was based on this book. I would not call it a graphic novel,” she counters. “It’s an art book, but what we kept from this book is this narration where she [Redniss] makes it about the life of this couple.”  

Intriguingly, the book does begin with an apology to Marie Curie, who once stated, “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life.” Like the book, the film ignores this proclamation, fusing the personal with the professional, even projecting onto Marie a made-up phobia of hospitals (one rooted in her own mother’s death from tuberculosis) as a motivation for her work and her subsequent invention of the mobile x-ray unit that saved countless lives during the First World War.  

Satrapi cheerfully admits the need to take creative license with certain aspects of her subjects’ lives, if only to make them dramatically interesting on screen. But as she points out, in this particular case, Marie and Pierre Curie’s relationship, their work and their deaths are intimately bound up in radioactivity (although Pierre Curie was trampled by a horse, he’d been weakened by the radiation poisoning that would later kill Madame Curie).  “Their love story, their discoveries and their death is the same story,” Satrapi says. “My goal was to be extremely faithful to her mind, to her spirit, to who I thought she was, which again is my own subjective point of view. But you know, I’m making the film, I have to be subjective about it.” 

Fair enough. She also thought it worth examining Marie Curie’s dilemmas and struggles as a Polish emigre working in a very male-dominated field, especially given that Curie is the only person in history to have two Nobel prizes in two different scientific fields (chemistry and physics). At one point in the film, Pike’s Marie describes radium as an element that doesn’t behave the way it should, which functions as a useful metaphor for Curie herself – one that chimed with Satrapi, whose own rebellious adolescence at the time of the Iranian Revolution inspired Persepolis.  

“You have the stereotypes imposed on you whether you want them or not,” she says. “Like when you’re a girl and you’re growing up, they always repeat to you that you have to be a lady and that a lady wouldn’t do that, you know? And I was at an age where I understood that, you know, ‘F*** the lady.’ If being a lady means you don’t have any freedom, then OK, I’m not a lady, so what? Now I’m free. But you know, in a weird way you always have to fight for it for some reason or other – and that’s never fun.”

 Radioactive is released on 20 March