HUMAN NATURE

A staggering true-life survival story, SOCIETY OF THE SNOW tells of the fateful 1972 plane crash when passengers from a Uruguayan flight to Chile were left stranded in the Andes. Total Film meets director J.A. Bayona and his team to talk miracles, mountains and making peace with the past.

A few days before Society of the Snow closed the Venice Film Festival in September, a private screening was held in Uruguay. Tears, hugs, thunderous applause… the response was overwhelming. ‘It’s one of those moments that you realise the power of film, because for the first time, the families of both sides gathered together,’ says director J.A. Bayona. ‘The first time in 50 years.’ By ‘sides’ he means those who survived and those who didn’t. For Society of the Snow tells of the infamous Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crash-landed in the Andes mountains on 13 October 1972.

Of the 45 passengers and crew on board, 33 survived. After 72 horrifying days, during which those left were forced to eat the remains of their dead companions, 16 were rescued.

Taking on the story that became known as the Miracle of the Andes, it’s no surprise, then, that Bayona’s film caused an outpouring of emotion. ‘I got messages from the survivors – for [it was] the first time they understood the importance of their brothers who had lost their lives on the mountain,’ he says. Total Film is sitting with Bayona in Venice’s Excelsior hotel, his room overlooking the tranquil Adriatic Sea, a scene that is far from the nerve-shredding events of Society… He may not have lived with this story as long as those involved, but the Spanish filmmaker, who brought us fictional horrors in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, has dreamt of bringing this to the screen for almost his entire career.

It began when he encountered Pablo Vierci’s 2009 bestselling account, Society of the Snow. ‘When I read the book, I had the feeling the story had not been told yet in all its scope and depth,’ he says. In truth, Bayona is not the first to tell this remarkable tale of heroism and survival; it’s already been chronicled in 1993 Hollywood movie Alive, starring Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton. ‘That film put this story in the collective imagination,’ says the softly spoken Vierci, a friend to many of those on that fateful flight. ‘But when I saw it, when it was launched in Uruguay, my first thought was we need to do something in Spanish.’

When Vierci received an email from Bayona in 2011, the director had just one film to his name, the chilling 2007 tale The Orphanage. But the author was struck by Bayona’s sincerity, quoting words of the survivors: ‘When a man is deprived of everything, that is the moment when the upmost generosity comes up.’ Vierci was immediately impressed. ‘I felt that Bayona was the man and the survivors felt the same.’ Better still, Bayona was preparing his second feature, The Impossible, another real-life disaster movie that followed the fate of one family caught up in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that devastated coastal areas of Thailand and beyond.

‘THE SHOCK… THERE ARE NO WORDS TO TELL ABOUT THE SHOCK’

J.A. BAYONA

Anyone who has seen The Impossible, with its astonishing recreation of events, will understand why Bayona won the gig directing the Jurassic World sequel and, recently, the establishing episodes of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings TV series, The Rings of Power. His mastery of visual effects is second to none, something that would be vital to recreate elements of Vierci’s book. ‘To me, that’s the easy part because it’s technical,’ he shrugs. ‘It’s more difficult when you deal with actors and when you deal with nuances of the story,’ he says. ‘[On Society…] I had 20 characters – and I didn’t want to have a [main] protagonist, so how do you do that? And [across] 72 days!’

A chartered plane, Flight 571 was heading for Santiago, Chile, when it crashed, carrying members of the Old Christians rugby union club and their friends and family. One of those friends was Numa Turcatti, who became the film’s narrator. ‘There are two things, if you read the book, [that] you find everybody thought about Numa: absolute dedication to the others and the warmth he would transmit,’ says Vierci. ‘And he was the one who found it more difficult to eat.’ By ‘eat’, of course, he’s referring to the consumption of the human flesh of those that died, either killed on impact, taken by their injuries, or crushed in an avalanche that later hit the shattered fuselage the survivors huddled in for warmth.

Many were devout Catholics and feared eternal damnation if they ate the meat from the bones of another human. But in the end, it was a question of survival. ‘There was no other way. It was the only choice,’ says the solemn-looking Enzo Vogrincic, the Uruguayan newcomer who plays Numa. His co-star Agustín Pardella, the Argentinean who plays the fearless Nando Parrado, nods in agreement. ‘Imagine that you don’t eat for one day, for three days, nine days, 15 days – and you start to see how your body is eating itself. I think everybody would do it. It’s a matter of survival. It’s a sad thing to do. Of course. They had to survive.’

On set, the actors consumed everything from jam and vanilla sundae to bacon, all doubling for human remains. ‘It was pretty tasty!’ grins Pardella. What wasn’t so tasty were the conditions they endured in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Granada, Spain – in particular, for the jaw-dropping avalanche. ‘That for me was the worst part – two weeks inside the airplane and we were all wet and freezing,’ says Vogrincic. ‘A few of us got fever. Even if they changed our clothes, they were always wet… your face covered in snow. And that was a point in the shooting that we had lost already a lot of energy – it was really, really tough.’

Bayona shot chronologically, meaning that the actors gradually had to lose weight to echo the fates of their characters. This immersion was tough but necessary.

‘In a way it fosters and gives more power to your work as an actor,’ says Vogrincic. ‘All the difficulties make you feel your role even deeper. At the same time, it’s a distraction because you are hungry, you are freezing… but all the physical efforts make you stay in your role 100%.’ He pauses, looking wistful. ‘It’s not something that is that common with other roles. A total experience.’

The production also visited the Andes – the actual spot where the crash happened that’s known as the Valley of the Tears. Bayona took to the air to shoot visual-effects plates, seemingly untroubled by the way his helicopter started shaking in the howling wind. ‘It’s a very impressive place,’ he says. ‘The sound is incredible. Being there, not hearing absolutely any kind of noise… and you suddenly start to hear a rumble coming from the mountains and you think it’s an avalanche and it’s the wind. They call it the train – the train is coming! And it’s the wind coming from the top of the mountains!’

On screen, however, nothing quite compares to the visceral, violent plane crash. Filmed in Madrid, at Netflix’s Tres Cantos studios, the virtuoso sequence sees the aircraft’s hull ripped apart and passengers tossed around, limbs buckling and snapping. ‘I never wanted the plane crash to steal the attention,’ says Bayona. ‘I didn’t want it to be a spectacular scene. I wanted to give the feeling: what was it? The shock. To move, in two minutes, from flying peacefully over the Andes, crashing over a snowy mountain… taking into account that a few of them had never seen the snow before. The shock was… There are no words to tell about the shock. There is not a single mountain in Uruguay. And for some of them it was the first time they’d seen a mountain!’

For all the film’s impressive visual qualities, these pale next to the human spirit on show, the sheer will to survive. Even as hysteria sets in, as nightmares begin, as their pee turns black through malnutrition, they pull through. How? In 34 previous crashes in the inhospitable Andes, there had been no survivors. ‘There’s no easy answer,’ says Bayona. ‘People that did a lot did not come back; people that did nothing survived. What is sure is that over the 72 days, they took care of each other and no one was left behind.’ As Pardella puts it, ‘Their previous bond was the main key to survival. They knew each other since they were kids.’

It was more than just camaraderie, though. When the weather cleared, Parrado and teammate Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt) took it upon themselves to leave behind their compatriots and scale the peaks, trekking 38 miles over 10 days to find help.

‘It must have been some superior strength because they had no physical conditions that would’ve allowed them to walk for 10 days after two months. So it must’ve been something more, something more helped them – it’s a question of life and death,’ says the Mexican-born Recalt. Adds Pardella: ‘Nando Parrado says the fear makes you go on… They wake up and they see death; they go to sleep and they see death.’

Finally, on 28 December 1972, the survivors returned home, giving a press conference at Stella Maris College in Montevideo, where they had studied. Bayona includes the scene but didn’t want to end here, when all the world’s press could focus on was the cannibalism. ‘The forgiveness should not come from the outside [world]; it should come from the inside of the group,’ he explains. But for Vierci, that media frenzy is imprinted on his mind for good, seeing his friends, those that made it home.

‘They were destroyed,’ he sighs. ‘It seemed to me they were in another world. They were in a bubble. It was not simple for me and my friends in Uruguay to enter. They had changed society from ours to the snow.’

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW IS IN SELECT CINEMAS IN DECEMBER AND ON NETFLIX FROM 4 JANUARY 2024.