Prime Video's 'Thirteen Lives': How Ron Howard Made His Thai -stlrising.com

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Prime Video's 'Thirteen Lives': How Ron Howard Made His Thai

'Thirteen Lives': Ron Howard to direct movie that chronicles the cave rescue directed by Marion ...
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By David Canfield

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Ron Howard knows his way around a rescue mission. In his new film Thirteen Lives (now streaming on Prime Video), just as in his 1995 classic Apollo 13, potential disaster once again lurks in an environment where the usual laws of breathing and gravity do not apply. But instead of launching into space, this time heâs diving underwater.

The breathlessly tense Thirteen Lives dramatizes the real-life Tham Luang cave-rescue mission from the summer of 2018, when a dozen Thai soccer players, aged between 11 and 16, and their coach were trapped in a flooded, terrifyingly elaborate cave system. An international rescue effort of more than 10,000 people resulted in every one of them being delivered to safety after over two weeks of careful, tricky planningâthough not without lives lost along the way.

Previously adapted into the acclaimed documentary The Rescue as well as a nonfiction PBS series, the true story now gets the full Hollywood treatment, with Howardâs cinematic mastery of tension fitting neatly with his penchant for telling stories of great heroism and sacrifice. In this version, the drama within the caves unfolds at a hair-raising clip as British divers John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) and Richard âRickâ Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) map out the extremely risky, but necessary, way of saving the boys and coach. Then, equal time is dedicated to life just outside the cave, as the efforts of localsâfrom family members to government officials to spirited volunteersâprove vital in the missionâs success.

All in all, the filmâs crew creates a convincing, pulse-pounding, incredibly detailed recreation of a remarkable global event. We went in-depth with Howard and more key players on how they did itâand why.

Howard and his first A.D. William M. Connorâs initial plan to stage the Thirteen Lives production in Thailandâand shoot at the site of the actual cavesâfizzled after the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. The filmmaker had already tapped crucial craftspeople in production designer Molly Hughes, prior collaborator on Hillbilly Elegy as well as art director on several Harry Potter installments, and celebrated Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria) by the time reality had settled in: Theyâd need to make the film remotely, building much of the cave from scratch.

In working with Mukdeeprom and location scouts, Howard settled on Queensland, Australia. âThe topography really serviced northern Thailand,â Howard says. Overall, Mukdeeprom was a key and close early collaborator for the director, who needed to ensure both the film and those behind it could authentically tell this culturally sensitive, pivotal story. âIt is a true event, and more than that, it is a famous eventâwhen the event happened, I followed it very closely and was really moved by it. I started to think about how to turn the event into a movie back then,â Mukdeeprom says. âWhen Ron sent me a script, I was so excited because the script is what I thought it should be. Actually, I was offered to participate in another film about this event, but the script/idea didnât speak to me [in the same way]!â

The film is structured evenly between the intense action within the caves and the quieter human drama outside of them, where thousands of volunteers and media from around the world gathered, supported one another, and waited nervously for news. The contrast between the two environments was key to Howard from the outset, particularly since the latter part of the story would center Thai characters like Thanet Natisri (played by Nophand Boonyai), a restaurant owner who spearheads a water diversion effort in the nearby mountains to render the caves more navigable.

The film closely tracks that particular story line, and Hughes replicated the real manmade dam in a vivid Queensland location up in the mountains. âWe were able to talk to the real Thanet, and he had so many charts and graphs and spent a lot of time with us,â Hughes says of how she approached designing that dam system. âWe simplified it for the camera; it was a much more complex effort on his part than what we grabbed, down to the basics: How to tell this story of the sinkholes and the sandbagging and diverting the water as simply as we could.â

The campsite outside the caves, where families, volunteers, and media gathered, offered constant cinematic discovery for the crew. Hughes says, âIâve never worked on a project where there were so many photographs of things to look at and to go, âOkay, what do we like here? What do we want to incorporate into our set?ââ Aided by a Thai design crew including art director Lek Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat, she infused the set with elements like Buddhist monksâ bracelets that she saw in research materials. She pushed to import specific props and structures, like tents and vehicles, rather than reconstruct them. âThe Thai actors, when they arrived, couldnât believe it,â Howard recalls of them seeing the detailed set. âThey were nice about it, but they said, âWe had no idea you foreigners would actually get it so right!ââ

This is the part of the film that tracks ordinary, everyday behavior and emotions. Howardâs team trained Thai actors to recreate various tasks: working machinery and pumps, spooling and unspooling hoses, refilling tanks, making food, driving heavy equipment, praying. They rehearsed and rehearsed, based on what they saw in news footage and in the PBS documentary. âI felt like it was going into the background, but much of it was so good that I moved it into the foreground and integrated it with the dialogue scenes,â Howard says. âIt allowed for a kind of energy, an authenticity that was really alive.â

âAt the beginning I felt very much under pressure,â Mukdeeprom says of tackling the cave scenes. âThen, when I had to deal with everything that came to me, I forgot the pressureâjust focus on what needs to be done!â Hughes echoes the sentiment: âThere was something about the way we approached it, that it never felt on a large scale. Itâs only in watching it afterward, we looked at each other: âI canât believe we did that. We pulled that off.ââ

The production approached the caves step by step. There was the palette: Looking at the PBS documentary footage particularly, Hughes and Mukdeeprom collaborated to emphasize colors âthat are so vivid in particular to Thailand, and counterbalanced by the grayness and the darkness of the rain and the weather patterns that were moving in constantly,â says Howard. They then received the schematics of the actual caves, which Howard and Hughes pored over in great detail. âOnce Molly began to understand what the obstacles were in those cavesâwhether it was because it was so tight, of the stalactites, or of the currentâshe began to design the sets with her team and look at my storyboards,â says Howard.

âI could ask Rick or John at any moment, âDo you think this would really happen?ââ Hughes tells me of her access to the real divers. âThey would say yes or no.â

Hughes and her team built four 100-feet-long tanks in an Australian warehouse, backed by a high-tech pump filtration system. They then built tunnels on the ground before lifting them into the tanks and filling the tanks, with about eight different scenarios to match the development of the rescue missionâfor example, âa really long flat area that you had to crawl through and you couldnât get through, unless your tanks were on your side and on your back,â says Hughes.

Then, the lack of visibility underwater gave the crew great freedom in imagining what it could look like: âSayombhu and his team found ways to light that in a very naturalistic way, so that it does not have that look of artificial illumination in there beyond the headlamps of the divers,â Howard explains. Mukdeeprom adds that he created several tests of underwater photography âuntil I found a sweet spot to convey what weâd see.â

As Howard captured the set from multiple angles, he had video monitors hooked up to the dive units constantly. âItâs hard to make caves look realâsome of it has to do with how itâs lit, but it has to do with those textures,â Howard says of Hughesâs designs. âAnd yet they have to be durable because we were shooting in each of these sets for weeks, not days, and they had to hold up.â Hold up they did, and Howard credits Hughesâs experience on the elaborate Harry Potter sets, working under Stuart Craig, for how they pulled it off.

This isnât to say they were going for an exact replica. Hughes gives me one example of how narrative informed the design: The film highlights the way news arrives from inside the cave to the outside camp, often by tracking characters in succession, from one checkpoint (or âchamber,â as theyâre called in the film) to the next, in a clearer fashion than it was in real life. Hughes designed the transition between the two areas to be one where itâd end on characters at the top of the stairs, looking down at those theyâll provide updates toâwhether encouraging or tragic. â I liked the idea of literally seeing the news travel,â Hughes says. âI designed the relationship of the edge cave entrance to the camp, so that you could always be looking down on this expanse of camp from the top of the stairs.â

The design and cinematography ended up being so thorough that the digital aspect of recreating the rescue mission wound up fairly minimal. âFar less than I expected,â Howard says. âMolly was able to accomplish so much.â

The tension of the cave scenes is derived primarily from what followed after all this planning and filmingâthe postproduction process.

In his initial conversations with Howard, supervising sound editor Oliver Tarneyâa five-time Oscar nominee known for ticking-clock thrillers like Captain Phillips and 1917ârealized heâd need to emphasize the contrasts of the soundscape outside and inside the caves. âThat sort of almost frenetic energy [outside] that you would have, it would need to be very, very different to that isolation in a hostile environment that the cave divers and boys were experiencing,â he says.

The everyday chaos of the action at camp, then, sounds more familiar to the average earâunderwater, itâs anything but. âSound is traveling four or five times faster in water than it does in air, and we also donât really use our eardrumsâmaking it much harder to discern where the source of a sound is in relation to the person listening,â Tarney explains. âWe use that to great effect in the water scenes of the film. We deliberately made everything very diffuse, very divergent, so that it was difficult to ascertain where the source of a sound was to each diver. Youâd hear it as an audience member, like the divers would, so that one of your senses was being compromised.â

Itâs not dissimilar from how Howard describes the visuals of the underwater scenes: âYouâre driving through on a high mountain pass,â constantly hitting cloud systems. Itâs disorienting, unclearâand immersive.

Sound is a key element of the filmâs most heart-racing sequence, in which the divers realize they must sedate the boys to safely transport them outside the cave. We see that the boys are not conscious but hear that they are still alive. Diver John Volanthen actually did a recording session with the sound crew near the end of the process, in an underwater cave area, with hydrophones placed underwater and microphones on the top (to mimic what youâd actually hear). âUsing the cadence of the breathing, whether itâs rapid or very metered, was definitely a tool that we used a lot,â Tarney says. âYou have to keep the audience in touch with that and hear that very metered breathing of the boys as theyâre going throughâso that we are hearing what the divers are hearing, which is that the boys are still alive.â

Finally, thereâs the matter of putting the whole movie together. Editor James Wilcox, who cut Howardâs Genius pilot as well as Hillbilly Elegy, had a mountain to climb: At the start of the process, there were 382 hours of footage to sift through. âHonestly, there were days where I felt like, I donât know how Iâm going to be able to look at all of this,â he says.

Wilcox started by considering the film broadly: feelings of peril and hope, the catharsis at the end, the spiritual elements that stretch throughout. âOne of the things Ron kept talking about was the âanatomy of a miracle,ââ Wilcox recalls. âI thought that is a brilliant way for us to take a broad approach into what this movie can be.â This meant focusing closely on Thai culture and spiritualityâgiving that âmiracleâ notion some tangible, appropriate contextâand prioritizing subjectivity when wading through hundreds of takes of a given set piece.

Wilcox points out that the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film are entirely in Thai, as we get to know the team. âIâm thinking to myself, How am I going to get this translation right? How am I going to get the cultural aspects of this language right? How am I going to get the dialect correct?â Wilcox says. âNot only are these boys from Thailand, but theyâre from northern Thailand and some of them are near the Myanmar border. That dialogue is very different from [that of] the people who reside in Bangkok.â So heâd put together cuts after assembling batches of footage, then have a translator brought into the editing suite, and leave her to watch the scenes in a room next door. Out of that, heâd adjust pacing, honor pauses, and bring the characters to complete life: âItâs all starting to feel like, Yes, I connect with the mother. Yes. I understand the frustration with the Thai divers not being able to get to their boys. Yes. I understand the governor and the politics involved with his position.â

That intimate approach characterized Wilcoxâs cuts inside the caves too. He points to Rick and Johnâs very first time underwater as an example of very intentional editing. âI thought it was vitally important for the audience to experience this otherworldly type of rescue attempt as not like the Planet Earth seriesâitâs gritty, itâs grimy, itâs muddy, itâs lots of cave diving and stalactites and youâre going to get scraped up and scratched up along the way,â he says. âYou canât really see; the visibility is terrible. But in making a subjective choice, I chose to see what those POVs were seeing at the time the divers went in. So we all experienced it at the same time.â

The editing puts you right there, in other words, with the divers and the boysâjust like the production design, the cinematography, the sound, and so many other elements do. âItâs one of those movies where a lot of very talented people gave everything they had and everything their departments had to offer,â Howard says. âTheyâre supreme achievements.â

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