Ron Howard is no stranger to film challenges, having built his career creating films that are set in blazing hells (“Backdraft”) and doomed whaling ships (“In the Heart of the Sea”) and literally in outer space ( “Apollo 13”). ). Telling such stories as accurately as possible requires extensive and demanding production requirements, and Howard’s most recent film, “Thirteen Lives,” is no exception.
The biographical drama is inspired by the events of the Tham Luang cave rescue, in which 12 junior soccer players, ages 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old assistant coach were trapped several miles in a partially flooded cave system. , and the world. effort required to save them.
But from the beginning, filming “Thirteen Lives” was special. “I never had less complaints about making a difficult movie than I did about this movie,” Howard said during a virtual screening of the film as part of TheWrap’s 2022-2023 Awards Season Screening Series.
And the explanation probably comes from the source material itself.
“The world was in a pretty bleak place with COVID and it seemed to me that here was a story about a lot of people doing something for nothing,” said “Thirteen Lives” screenwriter William Nicholson. “No one charged. 5,000 people descended into that cave to try to save those children for nothing. And they actually took them out. And I thought: ‘My God, we need to know that human beings are like that.’
“The way that Bill did this, this is a story for this moment,” Howard said. “Everyone felt that way. It was the spirit of it. And it’s one of the reasons I like to talk about it.”
Even more than the community spirit exhibited by real life events, the rescue had its own narrative that made it a compelling story to tell.
“The amazing thing is that these two divers, the two key British divers, went out, found the children, and this is the midpoint of the story,” Nicholson said. “And you think, unbelievable, they have done it. But what’s so fantastic is that that was the moment they knew they were screwed, because they had found the kids, they were all cheering, and they knew the kids were going to die. Now when I saw that, I thought, ‘That’s a drama.’”
For Howard, delving into Nicholson’s script was an exercise in learning how much he didn’t know about the events themselves, from the impending threat of monsoon season and how close a storm hit after the rescue concluded, to the use of anesthesia to transport the children safely out of the cave.
“I didn’t know about the type of risks, and I even knew once, to acknowledge, that there were many ways that people who voluntarily put themselves at risk physically and emotionally,” Howard said. . “None of them thought this was going to be a happy, triumphant ending. They really didn’t. They felt that it was going to be a heartache at the end of all this. But yet, once they were there, they just felt they needed to commit to the effort and see.”
“Even if you can take out one person, one child, that’s where it was remarkable. He was full of surprises. And I think it was that spirit of volunteering that I found most moving.”
See the full interview here or at the top of this file.