‘The 33’: A Movie About the Trapped Chilean Miners Antonio Banderas stars in ‘The 33,’ about the Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days By Don Steinberg
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-33-a-movie-about-the-trapped-chilean-miners-1446747372
“I was watching the television and said, ‘Somebody’s gonna make a movie out of this,’” he recalls. Five years later he’s starring in it, playing a miner named Mario Sepulveda. “The 33” opens on Nov. 13.
The mine collapse became a media sensation almost the instant it became a catastrophe. It wasn’t exactly the circus that Billy Wilder depicted in “Ace in the Hole” (1951), in which an opportunistic reporter played by Kirk Douglas turns a poor sap trapped in a cave into a scoop and tourist attraction. But world-wide media flocked to Chile, especially 17 days into the ordeal when rescuers drilled a narrow hole, and miners sent up a handwritten note saying “Estamos bien.” (“We’re OK”). While engineers worked to drill a wider hole to get the miners out, the trapped workers got media offers via the mail they were receiving via a small tube.
“Mario had a film offer while down there. Some of them were getting offers to do gigs, to do interviews with Japanese television or go to Spain for a talk show,” says Héctor Tobar, a Los Angeles journalist who wrote the authorized book, “Deep Dark Down: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free.”
ENLARGE The miners voted to sell their story as a group. They went to a law firm in Santiago, which contacted a New York talent agency, which in turn sold the book and movie rights to a production company serendipitously named Phoenix Pictures (the rescue capsule that brought them out was dubbed “Fénix.”)
Mr. Tobar says he didn’t need to audition to win the book-writing job so much as convince the miners he wasn’t there to exploit them.
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“These guys had been asked questions like ‘Did you have sex underground?,’ ‘Did you consider eating each other?’” he says.
Phoenix Chairman and CEO Mike Medavoy, who as a studio executive steered such films as “Apocalypse Now” and “Raging Bull,” had spent 10 childhood years in Chile and always wanted to make a film set there. But he wasn’t sure how to do “a movie about 33 guys in a hole.” He thought about the way “Apollo 13” handled a real-life rescue, and sent a screenwriter to Chile to interview the miners with the help of Mr. Tobar, a consultant on the film. Another decision: Who should be the director?
ENLARGE Given the circumstances, the choice of Mexican-born Patricia Riggen was odds-defying. “It’s unheard of,” says Mr. Banderas. “A Hispanic woman, a studio movie. I think she may be the only one.”
Mr. Medavoy had been moved by Ms. Riggen’s 2007 drama “La Misma Luna” (”Under the Same Moon”). “I cried about that little kid trying to find his mother,” he says. Ms. Riggen, 45, won the “33” job by presenting a vision of the movie that didn’t spend all its time in a claustrophobic mine.
“I figured out there were three worlds,” she explains. The focus is the miners’ ordeal (miners include Mr. Banderas and Lou Diamond Phillips). There also were the loved ones who assembled at the site to spur rescue efforts and attract media attention (Juilette Binoche and well-known Mexican actress Kate del Castillo play the most significant others). And there was the technical rescue effort, with engineers and heavy equipment and inevitable hits and misses. Rodrigo Santoro plays the Chilean mining minister and Gabriel Byrne a drilling engineer. The movie shifts among the three narratives (not unlike “Apollo 13”).
“She actually had a pretty good take on the movie,” Mr. Medavoy says. “Which is to say her concept coincided with mine.”
One touch she brought to the film was a fantasy sequence where the starving miners, confronting mortality, enact a shared dream feasting on delicacies served by their loved ones. That sequence, Ms. Riggen says, was based on real fantasies the miners conjured up to cope with the hunger and isolation.
Mr. Medavoy decided to have the Chileans speak in English, allowing Warner Bros. to open the film on 2,500 U.S. screens. Ms. Riggen is thrilled a film with a predominantly Latino cast is getting such wide distribution, though she has been apologizing for not having the miners speak Spanish.
“All the time every single interview talks about that,” she says. “But when there’s a movie about Russians, or Arabia, the Roman Empire—how many movies in history have been made in English and they’re wonderful movies?”
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