With Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard revisits Thai cave rescue
The dramatic rescue of 12 youth football players and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018, a captivating operation already revisited in an award-winning documentary, is now getting the big-screen dramatic treatment from Ron Howard.
Thirteen Lives hits theatres in North America on 29 July, and the Oscar-winning Howard – who cast a mix of bankable stars and untested talent in the movie – says making the film was an “exciting challenge”.
He called his latest a “very extreme version of my favourite kinds of films – you know, the kinds of films that prove that remarkable outcomes are not the stuff of fiction, that when people pull together, incredible things can happen.”
Thirteen Lives – which stars Joel Edgerton, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen – retells the story of the spectacular rescue of the 12 boys and their coach who, in June 2018, found themselves trapped in Tham Luang cave for more than two weeks.
Recreating the conditions of the intense incident was both physically and psychologically challenging for the actors. Farrell, who plays British cave diver John Volanthen, said during a screening of the film’s trailer on Monday that it was “terrifying” to film most of the time under water, even under expert supervision.
It didn’t help that Farrell, by his own admission, “can’t really swim”.
“It’s a different world beneath the surface of the water,” the Irish actor said.
“Water’s wet, no matter how much control you have or don’t have.”
The spectacular rescue is already the subject of the 2021 National Geographic documentary