BBC Four: The second film suggests that, aside from the vaccine, something could be done about malaria fairly easily if there were the political will?
Kevin Hull: As Jeffrey Sachs says in the film, that's the outrage. Once I found that the vaccine story wasn't there, I thought what was important was to show that there are solutions and to explore the reasons why more isn't being done."
BBC Four: How did you go about finding the characters to follow in the second film?
KH: The vaccine story was where we started, and scientist Adrian Hill was the head of the field so he was the natural choice. Jeff Sachs, special advisor to the United Nations, is the man who is changing things. He's the first person to really bring it to prominence in public. If you were going to cover someone who was trying to change things financially then it had to be him.
BBC Four: The Florida story is less high profile I guess…
KH: Gary Goode, the entomologist in Florida, is not such a global figure, but the story itself is very important. It's about the biggest outbreak since the 1940s when malaria was eradicated there. And it's about the fact that malarial mosquitoes are in the West. It's also about changes in society whereby there are large areas of rich countries that are now becoming poor and communities are moving across borders from malarial areas to non-malarial areas. As the woman from the Florida Health Department says, "Malaria is back in the United States". So it's a very important story for Western audiences to understand.
The other element of the Florida story is malaria control. If you have a $2m mosquito control budget you can stem an outbreak and stop it turning into an epidemic even if you can't eradicate it. This is not the case in Africa.
BBC Four: Both films begin with an incredible piece of archive from the 1940s.
KH: I was really shocked when I saw that. They were so optimistic then. They really thought they'd eradicate malaria in the 1940s. People are glib about it now, but since then it's doubled. That's because of neglect by the West.
BBC Four: Whereas the first film broadens out to show what day to day life is like in an African village, the second film really takes a broad view of the way scientific research is funded.
KH: It's all about money really. Funding is essential to Adrian's research into the malaria vaccine and he has to sell himself. He becomes a salesman, not a scientist. A lot of the responses I got at the Sheffield Documentary Festival were from scientists who had not really seen the scientific process on screen before - not only the funding, but also that you do fail a lot.
BBC Four: I presume that there were fewer problems making the second film.
KH: No, they were just different! The problem was that we were filming a scientist, Adrian Hill, who was failing with his vaccine attempt. It's quite a difficult process to carry on filming someone who's not doing very well, to do justice to someone who's failing. You don't want to give them a hard time and make their life more difficult but you also want to reflect what's happening. You have to ask how long you run the story for before you give up and there was pressure on the film's budget.
BBC Four: Having finished the project, what are your personal views on how we should deal with malaria?
KH: I would like more money and effort to go into it so that people in Africa get free bednets, get the right drugs, use insecticides where they're needed. More importantly, we need to build the right health structures in the countries. More money needs to be going into research. That's got a bit better recently, but all of these things need to be done right now. The research is for the future, but millions of lives could be saved right now by spending a relatively small amount.
BBC Four: Making both films, what particularly became apparent to you?
KH: In general I think the interconnectedness of things - you can't really look at science without looking at the funding and politics behind it. And you can't look at the economics without looking at the science. It's not just a matter of giving money to Africa, because it might not be spent in the right places, or if there's no infrastructure, then the money can't do anything. You have to understand public health and how it relates to science, to politics, to attitudes and beliefs, to mosquitoes, to entomologists.
Interview with Kevin Hull on the first film
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