EXCLUSIVE:Spains J.A.
Tragedy struck when the pilot began his descent too early, crashing into the Andes and killing 12 immediately.
The survivors clung to the belief that help was coming, but none did.
J.A. Bayona on the set of Society of the Snow. Credit: Quim Vives/Netflix
Around us, there are sections of an old-school 70s airplane cabin.
all in various states of distress.
The director looks at his actors and remarks how healthy they look now.
We have a very long credit sequence like, 13 minutes and nobody stood up.
DEADLINE:When did you first hear about the story of Flight 571?
BAYONA:I read Pablo Viercis book while I was researching forThe Impossible.
I thought, Wow, thats a quite good title for my film.
That was more than 10 years ago.
I just fell in love with the story.
It was very inspiring forThe Impossible.
We bought the rights forSociety of the Snowon the last day of the shoot ofThe Impossible.
It took ten years to find the financing to do it in Spanish.
DEADLINE:Why did you want to make it into a movie?
BAYONA:I think Im attracted to these very extreme stories.
They might feel dark, but, in the end, they are very optimistic about life.
I think that to get to enhance life, sometimes it’s crucial that you face death.
He makes you go through this experience; he puts you in front of death to highlight life.
Thats something that you’ve got the option to find in common withThe Impossible.
Its a very different story, though, and its a very different context.The Impossiblehappened in 72 hours.
This happened in 72 days, and the geography is totally different.
you better reinvent life.
it’s crucial that you reinvent your beliefs.
you should probably reinvent your link, your bond, with other people.
DEADLINE:There have been two iterations of this film previously.
The first was Survive!
(1976), which has not exactly aged well.
Have you seen that movie, and what are your thoughts on it?
I found a version on the internet that was not good.
Its a very different tale from our story.
It was an exploitation movie made soon after the disaster.
It was very different from our approach.
DEADLINE:Then, of course, there was the Frank Marshalls Alive (1993).
How is your film different to those previous versions?
Not only the survivors, but also those who died in the Andes.
DEADLINE:What was the first thing you did when you decided you were going to make it?
Obviously, its a very sensitive story.
BAYONA:Yeah, it took us a whole process to get the rights.
We had to talk to all the survivors.
We had very good meetings.
They really, really loved the perspective that we had for this story.
For example, we are using, for the first time, the real names of the deceased.
Those names are averyimportant part of the story.
We go through all the names of the people who died.
DEADLINE:What were the survivors thoughts?
What kind of guarantee did they want from you?
BAYONA:It was questions tothem.
Because Id seen the other films, and the other documentaries, I knew so much about the story.
I was less interested in the story itself as I was in small details and gestures.
And in that way, it was a very, very interesting experience to me.
DEADLINE:What do you mean by that?
BAYONA:After shootingJurassic WorldandLord of the Rings, I shot this movie in a totally different way.
I was very open to improvisation.
I sat down with the actors for two months, and I was improvising with them.
We end up shooting hundreds of hours of material.
It was a very productive and exciting process.
DEADLINE:How did you cast the movie?
BAYONA:Well, first of all, we wanted to shoot it in Spanish.
Thats why it took us so much time with the film.
I wanted to have a cast that was the same age.
They were very, very young.
People dont remember that, but they were like between 18 and 25.
Also, I wanted to have local actors.
We went to Uruguay, but its such a small country that we also went for actors in Argentina.
That would break the tone of the whole thing.
DEADLINE:How did you prepare them?
First, I sat down with the actors in Barcelona for two months.
Some of the cast spent days with them, asking questions, getting all the information.
As I told you, I was looking for a more organic experience.
It was more about finding meaningful images that would tell the story.
DEADLINE:Did you encourage them to bond at the beginning?
The rugby team obviously has a rapport.
Was that part of the casting process, to find people who worked together as a team?
They spent some days getting lessons in rugby.
I think thats one of the things that I feel proud of about this film.
It was shot [more or less] chronologically.
When you get to the end, you really can see the strong bond between them.
You really can see that a space is created around them.
It was very special and unique in that sense.
DEADLINE:Which scenes did you shoot first?
BAYONA:We started from the first day they spent in the mountains.
From there, we shot all chronologically until the very end.
We took a huge effort during production to shoot on location as much as possible.
Of course, we had many challenges.
We had to overcome all those challenges through innovation and careful planning.
For example, we shot at…
I dont know, like 3,500 meters?
I dont know what that is in terms of feet.
How much is that?
DEADLINE:Nearly 12,000…
BAYONA:We had to move the main fuselage [to] that height.
When you shoot in the mountains, thats the only way.
Its the mountain that rules the shooting plan.
Then we had a third fuselage in a soundstage that was in the mountains too.
We had to build a whole soundstage in the mountains to shoot the interiors of the plane.
DEADLINE:How dangerous was the location?
How careful did you have to be?
BAYONA:We went through a lot of security.
Of course, when you shoot in the mountains, you have to.
Some days we had to leave the set because the wind was too strong.
Some days there was so much snow that we had to leave.
There were some avalanches, but I always had a sense of security.
We were with professional mountaineers, climbers, who were always taking care of us.
We had some situations there that made me understand what the real situation in those locations would be like.
DEADLINE:Did the mountaineers think you were crazy?
They said, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The day after I asked that, we had an avalanche in that same place.
We were not there then, but somebody told me afterwards.
DEADLINE:How were you able to capture the sense of danger they faced?
The avalanche scene in particular feels so real.
BAYONA:Well, you get the feeling that we were there because wewerethere.
I remember shooting that scene, the avalanche.
It was pretty cold.
They were inside the plane, in a platform buried under one meter of snow.
They were cold, it was dark.
We had to create an atmosphere on set so that the actors were able to go through the experience.
you could see that in the performances.
DEADLINE:Cold breath is famously hard to fake on a movie set.
Actually, we had a situation there.
We had to use different tricks.
They were smoking, for example, sometimes, and sometimes its digital breath.
When you work in the mountains, its totally out of control.
It doesnt matter how much research you do; the mountains behave in a very unpredictable way.
you oughta be prepared for that, and you oughta adapt all the time.
In that sense, this was a shoot that felt totally different from my other films.
I had storyboards, but I never looked at them.
I wanted to feel more visceral.
For example, every time I designed a shot, it felt fake to me.
You dont have the space to place a crane.
Is everything exactly as it happened?
Instead of me driving the concepts, I sent the artist to the survivors.
Thats why I decided to send the artist to the survivors.
He was following instructions straight from the survivors.
BAYONA:It was pretty challenging to portray the geography, because the mountain tricks you all the time.
The distances, the heights, they feel very different when you are there.
Meanwhile, the mountaineer is telling me, But that place over there is four hours away!
The mountain tricks you all the time, and the mountain also tricks the camera.
That was one of the biggest challenges: How do you sell the distances and the heights?
At the same time, these characters, they dont know that theyre in the heart of the Andes.
What decisions did you come to about that?
They were totally abandoned, with no hope.
At the end, they had to do so to make it survive.
We were very careful to protect the privacy of the deceased.
Its totally impossible to watch the movie from the same perspective [as the characters].
It took themdaysof starvation, and sleeping at temperatures under zero, to get to that stage.
You cannot do that in two hours.
I was more interested in the symbolic nature of thegestureof the act.
At the heart ofSociety of the Snow, there is a spirit of collaboration and camaraderie that spontaneously appears.
The greater the adversity is, the more solid is the group.
I thought that was very, very symbolic, and very interesting, and very emotional, actually.
DEADLINE:What did you mean by that?
That felt, to me, very transcendent in a spiritual way, not in a religious way.
BAYONA:Well, thats the kind of thought that you might have after 72 days.
To me, the value is the question itself.
Its not the answer.
The question is the value of the story.
Its not about the answer, its about the questions.
Each of you has a question that needs to be resolved by yourself.
DEADLINE:Have you had a chance to show it to the survivors yet?
They saw the movie all together in Montevideo, about a month before the movie was finished.
They were very nervous because they didnt have the chance to read the script.
We didnt want them to read the script, but, ultimately, they loved the film.
They loved the realism, and they felt that the story was told in a very authentic way.
Actually, all of them loved the film.
Which is very difficult to find something where everyone agrees.
He was the one who convinced them to do the film with us.
He was very happy.
DEADLINE:What would you like viewers to take away from this film?
Its not the kind of movie that ends and everybody wants to applaud.
This is basically why we watch films.
We want to know more about ourselves.
We want to discover things about ourselves that we didnt know before the movie started.
