After closing the Venice Festival in style, J.A Bayona now brings The Snow Society to the Perlak section of San Sebastián, a Netflix blockbuster about the aerial tragedy in the Andes in 1972 that has been chosen by the Academy of Cinema to represent Spain in the next edition of the Oscars. Unlike ¡Vive! ((Frank Marshall, 1993), the film does not focus only on recreating the accident, but also delves into the psychology of the young survivors who were rescued after 72 days of agony, as well as those who never returned from the mountain.
A project based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci, which collects the testimonies of the 16 young people who returned home alive and in which the Barcelona filmmaker has been involved for ten years, and which marks his return to Spanish sixteen years after The Orfanato (2007), his acclaimed debut film. Bayona feels "very grateful" for the support of his colleagues at the Academy because "for me it was a test to film again at home with my team and also the way we filmed it, it was a film in which I put myself to the test." in many things," he says in conversation with La Vanguardia.
Vierci's book came to him while he was researching for The Impossible, another story of survival on the edge based on true events about María Belón's family, involved in the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. "I thought it was a story I knew. and the scope of Vierci's book is much larger than that of the facts. They live was a book about what happened and was written a year after the accident, while the snow society is about what happened to them. 36 had passed years of the events and collected the weight and residue of the passage of time. Reading The Impossible helped me a lot to understand the family's reflections on a similar situation."
The author of A Monster Comes to See Me found it interesting that the viewer lived the process that the survivors went through. "The actors had almost 140 days to experience what they went through and we had the luxury of having the help of the survivors and the families of the deceased," he continues. Bayona set out to make a chronological journey from the beginning to the end where they went through all the situations that they went through and he was interested above all in finding "the images, the moments where the truth was confused with the story" to create a striking work that brings together spectacle and excitement.
The intense filming has taken place in Sierra Nevada, Montevideo (Uruguay) and in different locations in the Andes, both in Chile and Argentina, including The Valley of Tears, the real location where the tragedy occurred. "Everything was a stimulus for the actors: the cold, the hunger, the loneliness... and it allows you to reach those moments in the filming where those sought-after accidents occur where one no longer knows if what is happening is true or an interpretation." ". The majority of actors are unknown and of Uruguayan nationality. "We did the casting during Covid and a very strong group was already created there," he remembers.
Despite being an ensemble film, the presence and point of view as narrator of Numa Turcatti, played by Enzo Vogrincic, stands out, who died weighing 25 kilos and after 61 days of survival in the mountains. His death was the trigger that made Roberto Canessa decide to leave the next day on the final expedition. "When reading the book, the theme of those who did not return caught my attention all the time between the lines. As something unresolved. And they needed another film to be made, as if by telling this story they would be cured in some way. That's why the voice-over at the beginning of the story invites us to return to the mountain to see what happened. The dead had not found the place they deserved in this story," Bayona confesses.
In popular memory, people associate the tragedy with cannibalism, since in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet, the survivors were forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive. The director avoids the morbid component in a subtle staging. "They blocked what they were doing in their heads. They turned the rugged into routine but for the public it is difficult to see the rugged as anecdotal and achieving that feeling was very difficult. Finally we chose to suggest more than show and also out of a matter of respect for the privacy". And he adds: "When one closes Vierci's book, it is not the theme one is left with."
After participating in the Jurassic World saga and the first two chapters of the Lord of the Rings series, with a "very rigid" production system, Bayona points out that "he needed freedom and that was very noticeable in the first days of filming, trying things, with a lot of rehearsals. Regarding the use of artificial intelligence, he believes that "what is dangerous is not the tool but the use it is made of. In the creative field there are risks, but films really work by whether they have a soul or not, not by the algorithm, and That is something that AI cannot replicate. In Hollywood we have been watching movies written according to a pattern for many years. But when you break the mold and create something truly novel and with soul, the box office explodes. You have to separate data and knowledge a lot, which is the processing of that data and that is where the soul comes in. And that will not be able to be replicated with a machine."
Regarding his successful career since he broke out with the terror of The Orphanage sponsored by Guillermo del Toro, Bayona believes that everything he has done, "the good and the bad, has brought me here and I don't want to question anything."
The Snow Society does not yet have a release date on Netflix, but what is certain is that it will be seen first in movie theaters. "People are returning to the cinema, especially young people. The platforms have a very good way of consuming cinema in the sense that they make films like The Snow Society in Spanish. With the perspective of time, A Monster Comes to see me was a success in Spain, but it would have been greater if it had gone to the platform. Netflix has put the money on the table, it has given us total freedom to make it and it has assured us a release in cinemas. I have filmed it for the cinema screen. And I see that young audiences, who don't know anything about this story, are really enjoying it. In the end, you have to find a way to be able to make each film and make it accessible to the public."
