‘Thirteen Lives’: Read The Screenplay Behind Ron Howard’s Harrowing Tale Of Survival
deadline.comEditors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.
On June 23, 2018, a young Thai soccer team and their coach became trapped in a cave when an early monsoon hit. Director Ron Howard became entranced by the harrowing 18-day ordeal to rescue them, and decided that he needed to tell the story on film. “I honestly felt that this was a movie for this moment,” Howard said during a panel for the Amazon Studios movie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles event. “I thought it was an object lesson on what is possible, that you could cross these cultural barriers and make something really remarkable happen.
If you tried to write this, no one would ever believe it, and yet it happened.” Written by William Nicholson, Thirteen Lives tells the story of the 12 boys and their coach who were exploring the Tham Luang cave when an early monsoon hit and trapped them in a flooded cave system.
As the entire country of Thailand rallies to help out, a group of the world’s best divers are brought in to traverse miles of dangerous cave networks, but they soon discover that finding the boys is only half the battle.
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