“The Rescue:” When Your Documentary Ends Up as a Thriller

NAB

The world held its breath in 2018 as a team of divers attempted to save 12 young soccer players trapped miles underground in a water-filled cave. The heroic rescue effort succeeded against all the odds, becoming an immediate target for an onscreen retelling.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/the-rescue-when-your-documentary-ends-up-as-a-thriller/

First out is The Rescue, a documentary from the makers of the Oscar-winning free climbing documentary Free Solo, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and her husband and co-filmmaker Jimmy Chin.

“It had every challenge in terms of nonfiction possible — there’s no footage, everything’s dark, no one’s cooperating, it’s across the world, and it’s a pandemic,” Vasarhelyi told IndieWire.

As if that weren’t enough, there was a complex rights issue to untangle. The somewhat unseemly fight for the storytelling rights of the actual people involved began almost as soon as the boys were all safe.

According to the The New York Times, Vasarhelyi and Chin were initially attached to direct for Universal, which planned a dramatized version based on the soccer players’ stories. But rights to those stories disappeared after the Thai government got involved. Netflix scooped the stories up and is currently shooting its own miniseries in Thailand.

This meant that they were barred from interviewing any of the boys or their families on camera.

Instead, Vasarhelyi and Chin built their film from international news feeds and local Thai footage, much of it tricky to source.

National Geographic, which financed The Rescue, held the rights to the British amateur divers who had played a leading role in the rescue.

Through the divers, they learned that the Thai Navy SEALs who were on the site for the two-and-a-half-week rescue effort had used GoPros, but that no one had seen the footage.

“It triggered this two year quest to collaborate with the Thai Navy SEALs to try to get access to their footage and also to include their point of view in the story, because they clearly played a very important role,” Vasarhelyi told NPR. “When I got my second vaccine, I got on a plane to Thailand, and we approached the SEALs again and again, and they finally said, yes. And what we were anticipating [was] maybe 90 minutes, maybe a few usable shots. [But] they had 87 hours of footage and it was extraordinary.”

What they couldn’t find, the filmmakers recreated with the aid of the British divers in a tank at Pinewood Studios.

“That’s the whole thing about nonfiction, you’re trying your best to allow audiences to experience what actually transpired. It was very strange not knowing that until we were at Pinewood, where the real divers were saying ‘This is actually what happened,’ and ‘No, it’s not like this, it’s like this,’ “ Vasarhelyi told IndieWire. “The reenactments allowed us this opportunity to actually experience it emotionally.”

As it happens, the British divers, John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, signed a separate deal to make a feature film of the event. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton, Thirteen Lives is due to release in April 2022.

Aside from the drama of the rescue — which included use of anesthetic to drug the boys so they would not panic when breathing underwater — headlines were also made by the attempted involvement of Elon Musk. There are murky waters here, but it seems he offered to help by sending a mini submarine to navigate the depths, only to have the idea publicly rejected by a British man helping the rescue effort.

That affront to his ego provoked Musk into implying in a tweet that the man (Vernon Unsworth) was a “pedo” — a slur that Unsworth subsequently sued the billionaire for.

How the Tesla co-founder managed to wriggle out of that lawsuit by claiming it was a joke and not defamatory is surely worthy of another story.