Antonio Escribano Zafra, a doctor specializing in endocrinology, nutrition and physical education and sports medicine, is also 'the snow doctor'. It's another non-diploma degree you can add to his resume. His nutritional and dietary work with the actors of The Snow Society gave key realism to Juan Antonio Bayona's film, which this Sunday will fight to add two Oscars to its numerous awards.
Escribano and his son, Antonio Escribano Ocón, also a doctor and specialist in internal medicine, designed a leonine plan that the dedicated actors of the film followed to the letter, who like an accordion gained five kilos of muscle and later lost 30 weight. with the aim of resembling as much as possible the victims of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes in 1972.
Both applied with absolute care all the power of science to bring to fruition an unprecedented undertaking in the history of cinema. Such bodily changes have never been undertaken in such a large group of actors. There are individual precedents such as Christian Bale, who lost more than 28 kilos to film 'The Machinist', or Antonio de la Torre, who gained 33 for 'Gordos'. But no one ever dared to have so many actors at the same time.
How they did it? What were the keys to achieving such a resounding success without harming the health of those involved? Antonio Escribano Sr. spoke with EFE to explain all the secrets and 'tricks' of an exemplary performance with a spectacular result praised in both film and medical circles.
The cod liver oil, the flavorings that gave joy to tasteless foods, the design of tailored diets for each of the actors, the meticulous analyzes of each of those involved, the transfer of all the medical machinery to the area of the filming, perfect advance planning or coordination between doctors and management were some of the keys to achieving realism in the actors worthy of applause.
The medical adventure that Escribano faced began in June 2021, when he began remotely the first biological studies of the actors, almost all of them Uruguayan and Argentine. They all submitted to the doctor's scrutiny, who made estimates of how many kilos each one could lose based on the first data.
They compared them to real characters. They analyzed the photos of the survivors: their ribs, the thinness of their faces, the loss of muscle mass... Everything. They didn't leave any details. Bayona wanted raw realism and the first task that Escribano gave the actors was to increase their musculature to resemble the burly rugby players who boarded the plane in 1972.
"It had to be done intelligently and progressively without harming their health. That was from August to September. In October they came to Spain and as soon as they landed they traveled to Córdoba."
At Escribano's clinic they did the same stress tests that elite athletes do. In detail: analysis, oxygen set, exhaustion tests. Not even Juan Antonio Bayona was spared. A good part of the filming was going to take place with temperatures of -10 degrees at 2,500 meters high in the Sierra Nevada and everyone had to undergo the studies of Escribano, who at the end of the five months of work accumulated 3.5 Gb of data in your computer.
Afterwards, the actors continued with their physical preparation in Barcelona, where they worked to increase their muscle mass. Some like Matías Recalt, due to their metabolism, had difficulties expanding it. In general, they all gained between 4 and 6 kilos before the start of filming in January 2022. "It was done seriously, providing vitamins and nutrients, they could not gain weight by eating buns," Escribano clarifies.
With the start of filming, diets to lose weight began. In the end, not everyone would lose the same kilos. The actors who played the last 16 survivors gave in the most. And Bayona had to shoot almost linearly. She couldn't record the ending scenes first and then the beginning scenes to edit them. Everything had to be in order, according to the progressive weight loss of the actors.
"You couldn't shoot the end of the film first, it's clear. The director adapted to the diet. Everything was coordinated. We had very regular meetings to design the filming 'planning'. We received everything, every scene and hour that corresponded to such a day of the catastrophe. Sometimes we had to go back and we knew that in four days an actor had to shoot something that corresponded to a late day. And we had to increase a little weight."
With a prior biochemical nutritional score prepared for all the actors, the beginning of the diet was an ordeal for each of them, who had to live with the hotel's general buffet. They watched the churros, toasts or sweets pass by. And they had to settle for a diet that was so restrictive that Dr. Escribano had to dismantle the machines in his clinic and set up one in the hotel itself because the demands were going to be so tremendous that it required almost daily supervision.
The weight loss was so hard that the supervisors had to invent recipes to fool the stomach: "We made gelatin with flavorings. You can make a gelatin that tastes like chocolate but without chocolate. Or a soup without meat but with a meat flavor. To achieve zero or very few calories but with that trick so that they had the feeling of a certain satiety.
But the diet wasn't just about losing weight. Escribano had to tune up a lot, because when there is a lack of food the brain can stop functioning at one hundred percent. And if that happens to an actor, he may lose the ability to memorize the script or to act and express emotions.
Escribano explains that food has two components: energetic and caloric and biochemical. For the first, he ordered a diet with a not very high amount of protein with a very low proportion of carbohydrates and fats to lose weight and muscle mass. And, for the second, a lot of fine-tuning had to be done so as not to undermine the actors' abilities.
"When we eat, we eat molecules. They have energy and values for the formation of enzymes and neurotransmitters for the general functioning of the organism. That cannot fail. If it fails, people lose weight but have no interpretive capacity. If you make them lose 25 kilos without eat, they remain mentally disoriented.
For this reason, Escribano had to provide adequate nutritional support with group D vitamins (B12, B1, B6, folic acid), vitamin G at considerable levels (to avoid infections), minerals in their doses (calcium, magnesium, copper, iodine , manganese, iron, selenium and molybdenum) and vitamin A and D, the latter essential for the performance of the brain.
Every day, all the actors were met with a plate with their ration of pills and a vitamin preparation. And one of those key pills was cod liver oil, rich in vitamins A and D and which until not long ago seemed like a grandmother's remedy.
"The cod liver oil is still in force. We started giving it on the first day of filming. Every day they had their ration with the sucked vitamin C pill and the cod liver pill. The cod liver oil thing is known little and the vitamins they have, A and D, are important for brain function and for maintaining muscle structure.
However, the medical team could not feed the actors pills and preparations, because, he explains, if you give too many vitamins and minerals for a long time, you cause an overdose. The actors did not receive the full dose of pills and supplements, only a portion. The rest was completed with food. And all, with absolute control in which Covid was also involved.
"We each had to do three PCR tests a week. Also body composition tests and blood tests. Some every week and others every month. We did dozens each."
But what was the most difficult part of the actors' bodies to lose weight? Without a doubt, Escribano answers, the face. "The biggest difficulty was losing weight on the face. When you lose weight, there are people who lose facial features and others who don't. Makeup can help, but if you don't lose it from the cheeks to the side the nose... We achieved it and with Numa, at the end of the film, before dying, you can see that her face is sunken, which was very difficult."
And it wasn't just the actors who had to lose weight. One of the survivors who made a cameo in the film had to diet to look like his father. Bayona wanted every last detail of realism and Carlitos Páez lost 20 kilos.
"Nando appears at the beginning at the airport and Canessa at the end with the doctors. But Carlitos appears more. He plays his own father picking up his son. In 1972, his father was thinner than he is now. For four months I had him with a very harsh regime. It has remained a phenomenon," says Escribano.
That of Carlitos Páez was just one of the examples of the extreme realism that Bayona wanted to achieve in "The Snow Society." With the help of Escribano and his team, he achieved his goal. And, if in the end it wins the Oscar for best international film, part of that award, as the doctor jokes, will also go to the professionals who managed to lose healthy weight for some actors who stoically endured one of the most restrictive diets in history. of cinema.
