Ron Howard was as stunned as anyone when the international rescue effort to save 12 Thai soccer players trapped in a cave underground flooded with water in 2018 left Ron Howard as perplexed as everyone else.
That’s also why Howard and his crew became obsessed with not only telling their story but doing so with a maximum level of truth and honesty about what actually transpired over the course of that long summer month.
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Speaking at the Deadline’s The Contenders Film: Los Angeles panel Saturday, supervising sound editor Rachel Tate talked about the granular level of detail they pursued while producing the film.
“As a viewer, you can go into those scenes, close your eyes, and the voices that you hear passing by, they’re from the countries that actually were there,”He stated. “They’re saying the lines that were actually said at that time, and even a Thai crowd was recorded about 45 minutes from the real cave. So we just needed to get these details right because it’s a Thai story. It’s their story. They’re very proud of it, and we have no duty being wrong about these details.”
The drive for authenticity carried over to every aspect of the production, until the actors themselves — who were meant to be body-doubled by real trained divers for the underwater scenes — insisted on doing their own diving.
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“I didn’t think they should do it for safety reasons and production-wise where there was no way to make it fit,”Howard said: “but they were so insistent upon it. nd once we determined that they were competent enough that they can safely do it…they would just show up and you know, every hour that they weren’t in front of the cameras doing dialogue, they were there doing the diving and it made all the difference in the world.”
Howard also spoke out about how cast and crew learned Thai culture and developed a love for Thai spiritual practices. This was reflected in the filming.
“One of the divers who said ‘I’m not a particularly religious person’ — at the end when he walked out, he said, ‘I had to take a moment and bow my head to the shrine of the princess because how else could this have happened?”
The panel video will be available Monday.