Going from great heights to subterranean
Print Edition
In “The Rescue,” filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who won the 2019 Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for “Free Solo,” trade climbing peaks for watery depths.
The documentary, which premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, retraces the 2018 rescue of the youth soccer team from Thailand’s Tham Luang cave, detailing the daring underwater maneuvers of an international group of elite cave divers. The National Geographic release was a pulse-thumping, nerve-inducing, nonfiction standout at the festival, and the first major big-screen documentary of a real-life event that captivated the world.
“It is ironic that we went from these great heights to subterranean,” said Chin, who as a professional climber and skier has typically done his filming around sheer cliffs.
Compared to Vasarhelyi and Chin’s two previous films — “Meru” and “Free Solo” — “The Rescue” might seem like an easier task. Most filmmaking that doesn’t include dangling off the side of the Shark’s Fin on Meru Peak in the Indian Himalayas, or suspended alongside free-solo rock climber Alex Honnold on the Yosemite granite monolith El Capitan would, naturally, seem like tamer stuff.
Steep challenges
Yet the challenges of “The Rescue” were in many ways steeper. Vasarhelyi and Chin, who are married to one another and have two children, weren’t shooting the event itself for the first time. They had to track down footage — which included countless news broadcasts from outside the cave but few from within — and piece together a compelling and clear view of a rescue that predominantly took place in cloudy, pitch-black water.
While the world watched and rain loomed in the forecast, an international coalition of about 5,000 people worked tirelessly to free the 12 boys and their coach from the flooded caves, an operation that ultimately relied on the singular cave-diving talents of mostly civilian hobbyists.
“I’ve been to the cave. There are certain things about this story that are really challenging. It’s really hard to conjure the enchantment of the cave,” said Vasarhelyi. “The first two minutes I was in there, I was like, ‘This is terrifying. Why would anyone ever do it?’ And then it’s kind of like this siren. It’s cool, it’s fun, it’s mysterious, it’s a little scary.”
To stitch the story together, the filmmakers, working through the pandemic, relied on interviews over Zoom and re-creations carefully shot with the real divers in the United Kingdom. They got much of the footage from inside the cave from the Thai Navy Seals, who were instrumental in the overall operation but lacked the diving skills to pull off the improbable 2.5 hour swims that saved the boys. Those documentary trials, though, aren’t visible in the film, which with underwater footage and 3D graphic maps makes a murky tale remarkably lucid.
The documentary isn’t the only version of the story. On the fictional side, there has already been 2019’s little-seen “The Cave,” which featured diver Jim Warny playing himself. Rights to the boys’ stories were sold to Netflix, which is plotting a miniseries for 2022. Ron Howard is also making a drama titled “Thirteen Lives,” with Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton, to be released next year by MGM.
However, National Geographic owned the rights to the divers’ stories.
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