What drew you to make Of Medicine and Miracles?
Ross Kauffman: In 2011, a short film collective asked me, along with a number of other directors of documentaries, to make a three-minute documentary short. I found an article in the New York Timesabout Dr. Carl June’s groundbreaking work with T cells and I immediately emailed Denise Grady, the journalist who wrote the NYTstory, and through that connection we got in touch with Penn Medicine and June’s office to see if we could get access to make this three-minute film.
We called every couple of weeks and they kept telling us they had to wait on permissions. Finally, after eight months, they said yes. The three-minute film, which is called Fire With Fire, came out in December 2012. It went viral and has since gotten over twenty-five million hits and helped raise literally billions of dollars for cancer research. When doctors told me the film had raised billions, I said, “You mean millions, right?” And they said, “No Ross, we mean billions.” It’s one of the great honors of my life that that film did so much good on a macro level. I’ve had parents who have seen the film thank me for changing the trajectory of their children’s lives.
Given how well that short film did, the opportunity arose to do a feature film. I tossed the idea around for awhile. I didn’t think I was interested but it kept coming back. So finally I said, “All right, let’s take a shot.” We started in 2016.
Robin Honan: We got the first commitment of funding in 2016. Sean Parker of Napster fame and his foundation got involved right after he launched his partner institute for cellular immunotherapy. He was interested because of a much-beloved Hollywood producer Laura Ziskin who died of breast cancer. She had co-founded Stand Up To Cancer before she died.
RK: I felt that the arc of Of Medicine and Miracles would be two stories—the story of this incredible doctor Carl June and the story of the young patient Emily Whitehead and her parents’ journey to find the answer to her cancer—and how they came together to change the course of cancer therapy.
Cancer is such a terrifying diagnosis. Have either of you been personally been affected by cancer in a deep way?
RK: I’ve had close friends who’ve passed away from cancer but no family members.
RH: I lost my mother to breast cancer when I was eight and she was thirty-seven. I also had a very rare form of ovarian cancer as a teenager. Our editor Hypatia Porter, who is really a key creative part of this film, lost her mother and her sister to cancer. Of Medicine and Miracles is actually the third documentary I’ve produced that has cancer at its center. I co-produced a film called Freeheld that won the Oscar in 2008. And I was nominated for an Oscar for a film called Mondays at Racine. So this is a bit of a trilogy for me.
The characters in your film are integral to the power of your film. What was your sense of them when you first met them?
RK: When I was doing Fire With Fire, at a certain point it became clear that we were going to get access to Carl June. At that point I found some video of him. He was not great in front of a camera—he was nervous—and I worried, “Oh my God, this is not going to work.” But I thought, “Do the first telephone interview, see how it goes.” Within the first five minutes he was in tears talking about cancer and his personal connection to it. I think he cried three times on the phone that day. So Robin and I knew that he was a special person. And he also said two words that really struck a chord with me. I was asking him to boil down this very complicated work that he was doing into a simple explanation and he said, “Cure cancer.” That was very powerful for me. I’d never heard somebody actually say they were really trying to do that. So I realized how powerful that would be.
RH: At that point Emily Whitehead was still on her journey and we didn’t know about her yet. We actually asked the doctors for a patient but they didn’t offer her until we were in the edit. That was in August 2012. Now the Whiteheads are like family, but we didn’t meet them until after Fire With Fire came out. We just contacted them and they provided us with material. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia [CHOP] filmed Emily was getting her T cells in April 2012 and that was very important footage.
RK: Tom definitely has this sixth sense. When we started the edit and we decided to turn our attention to Emily, Tom was excited. His whole mission is to get the word out about this treatment. When CHOP asked if they could film that T-cell infusion, Kerry didn’t want to do it and Tom said, “We should do it because it will make history.” That’s Tom and that’s Kerry.
Moving from the short film to the feature-length documentary, what were the biggest challenges of making Of Medicine and Miracles?
RK: An immediate practical challenge was needing to film in hospitals during the COVID pandemic. And from a narrative perspective, one of the biggest challenges was being sure that these two stories—of Carl June and his research and Emily Whitehead and her illness—could support a film: the weaving of the two together. A lot of people said that we needed a present-day narrative, somebody undergoing the actual treatment, to be the spine of the movie while we went in and out of June and the Whiteheads. I wasn’t thrilled with that idea but I thought, “Let’s look into it.” But we didn’t find anyone. I consider that a blessing now because the story of June and the Whiteheads was the story we wanted to tell—we just weren’t sure if we could make it work. I didn’t want Of Medicine and Miracles to be just a talking heads or professionals-in-the-field movie.
RH: I think the reason it’s such a gripping tale is both the time we spent in crafting the overall structure and also the film’s texture. Thankfully June had a lot of archival material. The Whiteheads, too. I can’t imagine if they hadn’t been so free. We were so lucky they had so much. They were pulling out their iPhone to record when their daughter was getting a spinal tap.
RK: There was a real challenge with how we were going to bring the cellular to life and explain the science in a way that didn't overwhelm the audience but made it understandable on a basic level. The time everything took gave us an opportunity to come up with solutions.
The T cell treatment you document is so successful and revolutionary that it seems to hold the promise of transforming cancer treatment. Where are things at now with it as a treatment?
RK: We just filmed Emily’s ten-year cancer-free anniversary. She’s basically considered cured. That’s one of the most exciting things.
RH: After we finished the shoot for Of Medicine and Miracles, Carl June said, “Do you have a little time?” We met with him in his kitchen and he showed up this power point presentation he’d just given in San Francisco. The gist of it was that this treatment is potentially going to be applied in all of medicine: dementia, heart disease, this CAR T cell treatment that he came up with for leukemia is going to have applications for all of medicine. It’s crazy to think that not only is this going to be used for cancers and solid tumors but for heart disease, dementia, diabetes. That was like a holy moment when June was telling us.
Will this become the frontline treatment for cancer?
RH: It’s incredibly expensive. Until they figure out how to bring the price down, I think it will be for emergency use only.
RK: Also chemotherapy is a cash cow for pharmaceutical companies and they won’t make as much from CAR T therapy so it’s not really in big pharmas’ interest to see it work. But the more doctors use CAR T therapy, the more the costs will come down.
RH: It’s a half a million dollars to do what Emily received.
Does the treatment always work?
RH: No. That’s the mystery of the immune system. Each person’s immune system is unique and this is a personalized therapy, and each person is arriving to this last-ditch hope with a different immune system. The pediatric success rate is 85 percent, adult closer to 55 percent. We decided not to include success rates in the film, because they’re really not a great way of telling the story of how profound the treatment is. When you say 50 percent survived, in this instance that 50 percent is people who were about to die.
What were your favorite moments making the film?
RK: When we were filming in Carl’s kitchen and he started opening up his scrapbooks, that was one of the most beautiful moments for me. We have this scientist and he’s looking at this photo of his wife on the day of their wedding and he says, “Look at those beautiful roses.” Also the moment when Kerry tells the story about Emily getting her CAT scan and how Tom got the call from the hospital and Tom tells her, “They cannot find cancer.” That was incredible.
For me, it’s honestly the beauty of the story, of Tom’s sixth sense, that moment where he says, “We’re not turning around, this isn’t the right time.” Those moments where something else is going on. And the tenacity that they have trying to save their daughter’s life, trying to find a cure.
RH: When we shot the kitchen scene with Carl, we had only been editing in earnest for six weeks and we were just starting to understand how much archival footage we were going to need. It was scary. And that day Ross said, “Let’s film it just in case.” Here we are following Carl to the basement and he hadn’t looked at the scrapbook in a long time. That’s my favorite type of filmmaking, capturing that kind of moment. Ross was doing all the sound and the camera and Carl was so comfortable. It was really exciting and energizing when we realized the footage we would get.
When we started working on the film in August 2016, I was really pregnant and soon after my twins were born. It was incredible for me to spend time with these two families—Carl’s family, Emily’s family—as I was starting my own family. They were these parents who had done whatever it took.
RK: Another moment I love is the opening when I ask Carl, “Why is so hard for you to say ‘cure cancer’?” That’s the moment you fall in love with this guy.
What are you hoping audiences will take from the film?
RK: A sense of hope. A sense of possibility. I was introduced to a woman whose daughter had the treatment but passed away. She thanked me for Fire With Fire. I said, “I feel bad you had to watch that.” She said, “No, we watched it every night and it gave us a sense of hope.”
RH: I hope we as a culture can embrace the power of science. Science actually means something and there’s a reason great minds should be encouraged.
RK: After I did the documentary Born Into Brothels, people began emailing me weekly to say it inspired them to go into humanitarian work. I hope this film will inspire young people to go into science. It’s really important to me that people aren’t scared away by a film about cancer. This film has an incredibly happy ending, has a sense of huge possibility. Early on, Carl is smiling. He’s giving us a clue that there’s a happy ending. She survives and it’s amazing, don’t worry.
How many films have you worked on together?
RH: We’ve worked on a lot of short films together. We first paired to go to Nigeria for a foundation film in 2010, a film on micro financing and women. There was a storm, our luggage got lost, our flight got disrupted. We were working on a film on health care in jails for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
RK: A lot of the films we were working on informed Of Medicine and Miracles. We had to put the film down seven or eight times. It was hard but looking back on it, it provided a lot of wonderful things. Being able to film Emily’s ten-year anniversary, for instance. One film we finished during COVID was What Would Sophia Loren Do? That kept us sane because it was so positive and uplifting.
RH: We all have cancer fatigue. The disease is everywhere. But it helps us to understand our mortality. People sometimes say to me, “You’ve done so many films about cancer,” and I say, “Yes, but it’s so great to see progress.” There are so few things in our lifetimes where we can say, “Things are getting better,” and cancer is one of them. When my mother was diagnosed, people wouldn’t say the word “breast” because it was so shameful. There were no walks, there were no pink ribbons. So for me personally, cancer is an incredible way to see progress, even in one person’s lifetime. As smart as cancer is, we are finding ways.