JA Bayona on making viewers feel visceral terror: ‘The audience has to feel they are inside the plane’
In one of this year’s most visceral film experiences, Society Of The Snow brings a gut-churning true survival story to the screen. Director JA Bayona says he’s pulling no punches in retelling the horror of this 1972 Andes plane crash and its nightmarish aftermath
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When Spanish director JA Bayona was researching 2012’s The Impossible, his staggering telling of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated parts of Thailand and beyond, he came across Pablo Vierci’s book Society Of The Snow. Published in 2009, it remains the definitive account of what happened in October 1972 when a plane from Uruguay carrying 45 souls (many from the Montevideo-based Old Christians rugby union club) crash-landed in the Andes. With rescuers abandoning all hope of finding survivors, those who weren’t killed on impact were left to battle hostile surroundings, with little food and plummeting temperatures.
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While the events have previously been portrayed in the 1993 film Alive, Bayona became determined to adapt the story himself in Spanish, an ambition that’s taken over a decade to realise, and one he’s achieved with remarkable verisimilitude. ‘I wanted to be as close as possible to reality,’ he says. ‘The audience has to feel they are inside the plane. You can understand what they went through only if you understand and feel the context that is the loneliness up there, the cold, the lack of food and being so hungry.’
As anyone aware of the story will know, those who survived (a torturous 72 days) did so by eating the flesh of those who died. Bayona doesn’t soft-soak the horror. ‘The families were very grateful for the fact that we never tried to sweeten up things,’ he says. ‘We showed the real life, what they went through, so each one of the audience can make their own idea about what happened.’
Casting Argentinean, Mexican and Uruguayan actors to aid authenticity (including Enzo Vogrincic, the charismatic newcomer who plays the film’s narrator Numa Turcatti), Bayona shot at a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Granada, Spain. But he also travelled to the Andes to film the very spot where the plane crashed. ‘We had to be there to understand what it was to do the film,’ says Bayona. ‘And it was very, very impressive.’
From the devastating plane crash, as seats buckle and legs snap, to the horrifying avalanche that later hits survivors, Society Of The Snow is one of the most visceral films you’ll see all year. Even tiny moments, like watching one person’s urine turn black due to malnutrition, sends shivers down the spine. ‘To me, cinema should feel like an experience,’ says Bayona. ‘It’s not only about what you tell . . . it’s how you tell the story.’
Society Of The Snow is in cinemas from Friday 15 December and on Netflix from Thursday 4 January.