2023-09-10 22:53:57
When filming finished The impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona was already clear that the story of the survivors of the tragedy in the Andes, where a rugby team crashed in 1972 and endured under the snow feeding on the bodies of their dead teammates, deserved to be told again. It had already been material for a success like They live! (Frank Marshall, 1993), but Bayona thought that she could contribute something new. A less Hollywood image, without stars, without focusing on curiosity and, above all, spoken in Spanish, the language of those young people.
‘The Snow Society’, ‘Close Your Eyes’ and ‘20,000 Species of Bees’ will fight to represent Spain at the Oscars
Further
Bayona bought the rights to The Snow Society, the book written by Paolo Vierci, a friend of the victims who returned from that hell and the one that came closest to the real experience they lived. The director turned the idea of making that film into something like an obsession, and since then he has sought almost impossible financing for a film shot in Spanish (it is estimated at more than 60 million euros). It has been Netflix who has allowed it the conditions of a titanic production. An extreme -and very long- filming in the snow whose result is one of the most spectacular films in Spanish cinema, with scenes -especially the accident and the avalanche- that take time to fade from memory.
Bayona’s obsession was not just cinematic. He was clear that he could not fail the survivors. He met with them. He interviewed them again and again. To them, to their families. He listened to them, took note and made it a rule to be faithful to his story. The result has already achieved something almost impossible for Spanish cinema, closing the Venice Festival; but he has also achieved something that is even more important to him, bringing everyone who suffered that accident to an agreement.
Some of them even have a role in The Snow Society. This is the case of Carlos ‘Carlitos’ Páez, to whom Bayona gives a meta-cinematic and emotional moment. In real life it was Páez’s father who read the list of survivors on the radio. In it was that of his son. In the film, he is the one who plays his father and reads his own name. From Venice he remembers that when the director offered him this scene he told him that he had to think about it. “Before accepting I had to talk to my psychologist; and Jota – as everyone calls Bayona – told me, ‘Carlitos, this is very healing.’ Him, manipulating me! ”He says between laughs. His psychologist agreed with Bayona, and the scene could be done.
For Carlitos Páez that moment was as exciting as it was confusing. He had to lose weight, dye his hair black, and act for the first time. “I don’t remember well, I think he has been erased from my head because I was a participant in that story. I didn’t know if he was my father, he was my son… I was completely confused, ”he explains. His father was “the only family member who held out the hope of finding someone alive and he had to say the list.”
When the avalanche came, the most insulted was God. But of course, I don’t insult someone who doesn’t exist.
Carlos Páez — Survivor of the Los Andes tragedy
It is Páez who confirms that Bayona has achieved the impossible, getting them to agree on the film. “No one has achieved it, the group of 16 survivors all agree. That’s impossible, we never agreed on anything. There are 26 books, three movies… but Jota did it. And not only that, but he managed to get the relatives of those who died to agree. The other day at the screening in Montevideo – Bayona wanted them to be the first to see the final cut of the film – it was one of the most emotional things I have ever experienced,” he says.
50 years later, the survivors are still in touch. “My children are friends with everyone else’s children. Every December 22, the day they rescued us, we all get together; and on October 13, which was the day of the accident, there is a mass. We are always in contact. With some more and with some less. We are not, as they said at that time, 16 apostles preaching the faith, that is absurd. We are 16 normal people; and you are more friends with some and less with others,” he says.
Faith is one of the topics discussed in The Snow Society. Can you stay in a situation where you see your companions die and where you have to feed on their body? Those kids, from a religious school, went “through all possible states.” “When the avalanche came, the most insulted was God. After the horrible accident, after we had made the decision to feed on our dead companions, after an avalanche came, it was like God turned his back on us. But of course, I don’t insult someone who doesn’t exist. That was what I answered. God was as if present, but there is a phrase of mine that I say in the mountain range, and that is that only by praying does not come out,” says Carlitos Páez, who rejects that expression of ‘The miracle of the Andes’ that they gave them. “It would have been a miracle if all 45 of us had turned up alive. That would have been a miracle.”
When he saw the realism with which Bayona has captured scenes such as the accident or the avalanche, he only had one expression: “You’re a son of a bitch!” “One tends in life to minimize stories. I tell this story, I give lectures talking about it and I am not going to change it, but one tends to minimize it and Jota brings reality to you. And this is reality.” A reality that I did not have They live!, the Frank Marshall film that became a hit in the 90s but, as Páez explains with great respect, “it was very Hollywood.” “Everyone had very white teeth, there was a boy from the movie, while here it is very choral…” he points out about the comparison between both films.
The film ends when they find the survivors, although another began there, that of readapting to the world after having lived through that. For Carlos Páez it meant a radical change: “I was spoiled, spoiled. I was of no use. They brought me breakfast in bed, I had a babysitter when I was 18… and you get to live this story and see the capacity of human beings to evolve, transform and move forward. “This story is an incredible story of the common human being and that is the appeal.”
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