BLAZE OF GLORY
Full of human drama and astonishing spectacle, Only The Brave tells the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the fearless fire crew that put their lives on the line to battle a wildfire in 2013. Total Film steps into the inferno of the New Mexico
The New Mexico desert, to the south of Santa Fe. It’s a blazing hot day and things are about to get a whole lot hotter as Total Film traipses over scrubland towards four acres of, as production designer Kevin Kavanaugh puts it, “imported forest”. Juniper pines, boulders, bushes… everything was brought in over a 16-week period to create the biggest outdoor set Kavanaugh has ever constructed – and he worked on The Dark Knight Rises.
Dotted among the pines are 14 fire trees, each one made of metal, standing 22ft high, and plumbed with propane fuel. Look closely at the forest floor and you’ll see cables snaking among the gnarled roots and scattered leaves; climb to the top of a 50ft dirt slope littered with scree and you’ll look down on several tanks. “It’s like lighting a gas stove,” grins Kavanaugh, and suddenly one of the mock-pines bursts into flame. He turns it up, then down, then off.
While Total Film has been oohing and aahing at the foot of this giant Bunsen burner, 20 actors, led by Josh Brolin, Miles Teller and Taylor Kitsch, have filed into the faux-forest. They are kitted sweltering head to sweating toe in heavy-duty fire uniforms, and hoist 40lb backpacks, axes, shovels, chainsaws. “Action!” The forest turns into a wall of flame. The guys hack at the ground as they try to clear away the foliage, creating a long blank line in the forest to rob the fire of fuel and halt its path of destruction before it sweeps down to engulf a town. Yells suddenly ring out and the men dive hither and thither as a 10-tonne boulder hurtles down the slope. It hits a fire service truck containing 100 gallons of fuel. BOOM! The flames shoot 80ft high to char the merciless white sky.
Only the boulder isn’t real – yet. In a film that favours practical effects, it will be added in post-production. Everything else plays out exactly as written: the men dive, the rigged truck explodes, the flames leap.
“I love being out here, man,” grins a sweat-drenched, blackened Brolin when he wanders over. He’s ill, coughing and sniffing, but he’s not about to moan about battling the almost 40-degree heat in an outfit that makes his make-up as Thanos and Cable seem lightweight, while suffering from man-flu. He is, in fact, in full alpha-male mode… “The last movie I did I was 40lb heavier. I panicked because I knew I’d be around a bunch of guys who were between 25 and 35. I had to train hard to get down the weight. Because of my ego, I wanted to be one step ahead of those guys, always. When you’re 48, to do that is not easy. So I was working out and working out and working out… Finally it started to happen, and by the time I got here I was in better shape than 95 per cent of the guys.”
As much as ego, it’s professionalism, for Brolin needs to convince as a leader of men’s men in order to play Eric Marsh, the captain of an elite crew of firemen from Prescott, Arizona, who battled a wildfire in Yarnell, on 30 June, 2013. It was one of many such blazes that these men had fought – such was their experience and aptitude, they were the only municipal fire crew in America to be awarded elite Hotshot status – but the events of this particular day would dominate the national news and etch these heroes’ names in American history.
This is a superhero movie, they just don’t wear capes and masks,” says producer Mike Menchel, who watched the events unfurl live on CNN. Knowing there was a human story that “people would want to know about”, he flew to Prescott to talk to the wary families and convince them that any film he made would not be exploitative. Then he called power-producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who, it transpired, was already lining up his own recreation of events having read Sean Flynn’s long-form article, ‘No Exit: The True Story Of The Granite Mountain Hotshots,’ in American GQ. Rather than butt heads or race rival productions, di Bonaventura and Menchel opted to work together.
“You’re asking people to go outside their comfort zone,” di Bonaventura says, admitting it’s tough to raise a budget for a large-scale drama that “despite the scale, is able to keep that six-foot human at the centre”. Unusually frank for a Hollywood suit, he also confesses to not at first being sold on Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, the pipelined Top Gun: Maverick) to direct: “I wasn’t sure he had the heart for a movie like this,” he shrugs, though a series of meetings changed his mind, as Kosinski stressed the importance of grounded storytelling and practical action.
“My approach is to get as much in-camera as possible, try to shoot real fire, and shoot on location,” Kosinski says. “There’s very little stage work and almost no blue screen in this movie.”
So rare is a script like this in today’s Hollywood – an adventure epic built on character beats, its spectacle freighted with genuine peril and emotion – that a raft of quality actors rushed to sign. The supporting cast boasts such luminaries as Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Connelly and Andie MacDowell, while the heavyweight roles went to the aforementioned Brolin and, playing newbie Hotshot Brendan ‘Donut’ McDonough, Miles Teller.
“You’d have to be numb to not feel anything when you hear a story like this,” says the Whiplash star. He runs a hand through his dyed-blond hair. “These are real people you’re portraying. It’s the first time this profession – Hotshots – has been put on screen, and I’m very proud of it.”
So did he fly to Prescott to meet Brendan? “I flew down about two weeks before we started filming,” he nods. “I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t trying to steal mannerisms from him or be overly actorly. I just wanted to hang out at the spots these guys hung out at.” Teller squints at the white sun. “This incident happened three years ago. It’s very fresh, and Brendan was only 21 years old – still a kid. There’s still a lot of grieving, a lot of healing.”
When McDonough first signed up for the Granite Mountain Hotshots, he was a heroin addict. He found a saviour in Marsh. “The story is driven by Eric and Brendan,” explains Brolin. “You have two guys who are on opposite ends of the spectrum but really very similar. Eric is sober and Brendan is a drug addict. The town sees Brendan as a loser. But Miles sees himself in Brendan. He wants to give him a break. The chief, who Jeff plays, once gave Eric a chance and taught him to be a proper leader. Now Eric wants to give Brendan a chance.”
A chance, but not a free ticket – Brendan had to undergo Hotshot training, brutal at the best of times, while withdrawing from heroin. And while a bunch of Hollywood actors could never replicate such physical and mental torment, they did go to boot camp, put through their paces by ex-Hotshot Pat McCarty. Well, McCarty and Brolin, whose alpha-male tendencies again surged to the fore…
“We did Shelter Deployments [where the guys have 30 seconds to hit the dirt and huddle under their fireproof blankets],” coughs Brolin.
“When we were hiking up mountains, 100 degrees, on our fifth mile with a 40lb pack and 25lb saws, in these awful boots, with blisters all over our feet, I would say at, 10,400 feet, “Deploy, deploy, deploy!”
Kitsch, playing Chris MacKenzie, a 10-year veteran Hotshot, stresses that the life of these guys is a mix of bravery, bromance and brewskis… and busting balls. “Mack is a Southern Cal guy, kind of the jokester of the crew – as you can tell with this moustache,” he says, seeming to have finally found a character worthy of the talent he showcased in NBC’s Friday Night Lights before boarding bloated blockbusters John Carter and Battleship. “He has a sleeve of tattoos, he’s a snowboarder… just a cool cat, y’know? Loved chasing women. They called him the gatekeeper of the crew, and the guys coming in had to go through Mack to get into the group. He would put them through hell. He may come across as an asshole but it is life and death and he’d seen friends pass before. If you let in that weak link, it’s not gonna end well.” Presumably Brendan, with his history, gets it worse than most? “Sure, but that relationship goes 180. They become best friends, roommates.”
Everyone involved in Only The Brave cares for it deeply. Producers, director, department heads… all consider it their best work to date, while Teller insists that playing Brendan has been as challenging and rewarding as playing Whiplash’s bullied-’n’-bloodied jazz drummer Andrew: “Whiplash was very physical and intense, but Brendan was at the Hotshot boot camp going through withdrawals, his dad wasn’t around, he was directionless. What’s interesting is his transformation. It’s not like he became the best Hotshot, but he went from being so down and messed-up to being one of the guys.”
The highest praise, though, comes from Brolin, who names it as one of the three best movies in his 32-year career. “I’m very emotional about this story, about these guys,” he says. “It’s a special movie. There’s The Goonies, No Country For Old Men and this. I’ve done movies where it’s, ‘What the fuck is happening? This is gonna suck.’ But this movie feels like it’s on the right psychic, spiritual and emotional track. It’s really something.”