PRODUCTION SOCIETY OF THE SNOW
adaptations – but that didn’t diminish Spanish director JA Bayona’s yen to make his own movie about the ‘miracle in the Andes’. Bayona’s fascination with the story began more than a decade ago, when he chanced across Pablo Vierci’s book Society of The Snow during research for his film The Impossible . Delving into the tragedy and its aftermath through intimate interviews with the survivors, the book served as starting point for his new Spanish language film, released on Netflix this month. Bayona – known for horror- tinged disaster flicks – has a talent for grisly scenes and nail-biting suspense, but his goal in Society of the Snow was to explore the life-affirming themes of friendship and faith at the heart of the infamous Andes saga. To that end, he dug beyond the sensationalist headlines, spending more than 100 hours with the crash survivors to lean on their first-hand experiences and portray the events in the most authentic way possible. This sensitive approach to the subject matter was part of what drew in Uruguayan DOP Pedro Luque (responsible for the photography on Don’t Breathe , 2016, The Girl in the Spider’s Web , 2018, and Antebellum , 2020), who says he could barely believe his luck when he got the call from Bayona. “He’s a great director who I already admired – and here he is talking about tackling this Uruguayan story, which is so important to my country. This is the stuff that forms the mythology around my nation”, he states. “It’s an important story for me, but it’s also one of the greatest survival tales in the history of the world. Yes, it’s been told a
FROSTY ATMOSPHERE Creating the look and feel of the Andes – and the harsh environment these survivors found themselves in – required multiple visits to the original crash site
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