Ron Howard On Getting His Feature Take Of Tham Luang Cave Rescue ‘Thirteen Lives’ Across The Finish Line & Whether Event Dramas Are Extinct – Crew Call Podcast
deadline.comThere was a great rush by Hollywood for the rights to the young soccer players, their coach and the divers involved in the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand.
Ron Howard’s feature take, Thirteen Lives, made it to the finish line first at MGM, and the 2x Oscar winning filmmaker tells us how that came to be on today’s Crew Call.
It helped that the pic’s producer P.J. van Sandwijk was also behind the documentary about the same subject, The Rescue, made by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
Howard was struck by the script by 2x Oscar nominee William Nicholson which provided surprising twists and turns not known by many. “My documentary experience in recent years was going to serve me well, and it did,” says Howard about his approach to the feature version of the widely covered media story, “I didn’t want it to feel like it was staged, but captured.” Another challenge for Howard entailed making a movie that was largely in Thai, that completely embraced their culture. “I wanted Thai audiences; if they didn’t know who directed it, I’d want them to think a Thai (filmmaker) directed it,” adds the A Beautiful Mind Oscar winning director and producer. “It was a big story and so worthy of being told from various different vantage points and modes; if I could be one of them, I wanted to,” adds Howard.
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