The Snow Society: survivors Uncomfortable with story
The Snow Society: survivors uncomfortable with story – The director of ‘The Orphanage’ and ‘The Impossible’ reinvents itself in its catalog of cinematic exploits with ‘The Snow Society’ and embraces culture to rescue memory and redefine the stories of the past.
By Megan Sauer
One hopes that, in the middle of the media storm, after seeing him in the mud and mud of a tsunami, moving us with monsters and terrifying us with children wrapped in masks at the end of the hallway.
J. A. Bayona will dispatch a day of interviews with the lightness of someone who believes he is at the top, especially when he has a ‘red phone’ in direct connection with Steven Spielberg and the Jurassic dinosaurs of him.
And there he is, overflowing with humility, honesty and modesty while he comes up (head held high) when listening to his past musical video clips of ‘Camela, national monument of street parties and town festivals.
He has spent six months between the Andes and Sierra Nevada filming the great Spanish production of the year with Netflix: ‘The Snow Society’, a film that according to Manu Yáñez’s criticism for Fotogramas is “a sensory ode to the survival instinct.”
And there he is, sharing and reliving with the intact enthusiasm of the beginning the moments of a filming that is now the history of our cinema, as was the one in the City of Light in Alicante during the filming of ‘The Impossible’ (2012).
‘The Snow Society’ marks a new milestone in the filmography of the director of ‘The Orphanage’ (2007) and ‘A Monster Comes to See Me’ (2016) by redefining THE HISTORY of survival stories: that of the plane accident.
he Uruguayan rugby team suffered in 1972 when it crashed into the Andes mountain range, an episode that we already saw in other feature films such as ‘Viven’ 39; (Frank Marshall, 1993) and to which J. A. Bayona wanted to give a new dimension: that of justice and rescued memory.
The technical challenge of filming in the snow was tremendous. The first thing we did was go to the Andes, to the place where the plane crashed, at the same time of year.
You have to go with special equipment and you have three days of preparation to match. In 25 minutes we arrived with a helicopter from the gasoline refueling place and you had to adapt to the altitude because otherwise, when you got there, you would get a headache that you had to stop and you couldn’t move.
It’s three days until you get used to the altitude. I remember the first night I looked at the clock thinking it was already dawn and only an hour and a half had passed.
Your head really plays tricks on you. The first time I slept there I had a very bad time and you wake up in the morning and look at the water bottle and it’s an ice cube.
That’s how cold it was inside the tent. You are there protected with your sleeping bag and you are not really cold but the part of your face freezes.
Did you get to film any scenes in that part of the Andes?
Scenes could be filmed, yes. We even took some of the actors to film there, but they were always very specific things. It was a very inaccessible place and it was not a completely safe place.
And then, Sierra Nevada…
We reproduced part of those conditions of the Andes in the filming of Sierra Nevada, where we placed a plane at about 2,000, 2,500 meters high, which is a place where you can really feel the height. Some members of the team occasionally had to go down because they weren’t feeling well and it was a place we had to get to first via a cable car.
We reached the highest point of the ski resort and there we took special snow plow vehicles that had been adapted with cabins where we packed the equipment like a sardine can for a 45-minute trip in the middle of nowhere, with an incline very pronounced.
Gloria, the script of ‘The Snow Society’, who is very afraid of these things, had a terrible time. Everything was white until we got to the set. It was truly an adventure.
What was the reaction of the actors in that situation?
All of this, which was very difficult and made their work more complicated, was what stimulated the actors’ interpretation, which helped them really understand the conditions that those who lived in the mountains went through.
What was the most complex when adapting Pablo Vierci’s book on which the film is based?
The biggest challenge was that, when you read Pablo Vierci’s book, the feeling you get is gigantic. At the production level, which also because it is a plane crash set in the Andes, is already a gigantic challenge, but the story you read in the book is gigantic on a human and philosophical level.
How to tell that in two hours of film? How do you get into the head of a character in a movie and tell that great thing that Vierci’s book conveys? In a book it’s easy. In cinema everything is dialogue and action.
Furthermore, there were twenty-odd characters without wanting to highlight one too much over the other because that was one of the bases of the story: working on the group, that there were no major roles, that everyone in some way was a fundamental part of the group. On a narrative level, it was a very big challenge.
In ‘The Impossible’ You already adapted the real experience of MarÃa Belón and her family when they survived the tragic tsunami of 2004. How has the contact been on this occasion with the real survivors of the 1972 plane crash that we see in ‘The Society of the snow?
We did work with the survivors almost as if we were going to film a documentary. We did 50 hours of interviews filmed, but then many more without filming.
We also met with the family members, we even met with Pablo Vierci, who was also the psychologist who treated them at the time and is a personal friend of theirs. The approach was very interesting.
There is a phrase at the beginning of the film that says “you have to return to the past knowing that the past is what changes the most.” and really the memory they had was different depending on who you talked to.
The challenge was to try to find out what really happened, because memory is something very capricious and varied a lot from one person to another. The survivors had different memories of the same moment.
We met with 15 of them and you saw that there were people who remembered things that had nothing to do with what the others remembered. And that was very interesting, how the story is also established in each person’s personal memory.
How did you resolve this disparity of memories and stories?
What we did there was use the actors. We went hand in hand with him. They are the ones who had to communicate the fear, the cold, the hunger, the loneliness…
And they had to live that to be able to communicate it. I told the crew leaders that everything should be done based on the actors.
We had to have total freedom to film the actors non-stop, sometimes even without them realizing it, because we wanted to give them the possibility, apart from telling the story, to explore it, to try things on the set, to have the freedom to make mistakes and see what gestures could give them more truth.
There were no color schemes in the visual effects so that they would not be distracted, that there were no very large makeup prostheses so that they had freedom when moving…
The actors lived a journey very intense and we built a very strong bond with them.
The film is very physical, but as you have previously commented, it also embraces a philosophical meaning, what does ‘The Snow Society’ beyond what we see on screen?
The entire film is a new record. It is telling something that we had already been told before and reflecting on why it is told and why it is told.
Why we need it to be told again. There is something very interesting about memory: it is a film that retells the story to change the story.
The survivors did not feel comfortable with the story that had been standardized.
And that is where we punctuate the film and the story with photographs. It is a way of saying what people will think when they see this story again, but this story that changes the story and does so by telling it from a different place.
It is an exercise in rescuing memory. Stories are important, how they are told… Stories are important, culture is important. When the story is established and told from another place, the meaning changes.
And it is a very different meaning. The impact the film has had on the survivors is very different. And telling it from this place has served a lot to give peace to the people who lived it.
Cinema and culture, in general, is what creates the sense of the times. The sign of the times does not exist, we create it by expressing it.
Did you have the sense that the survivors wanted justice to be done?
When I meet with the survivors they need another film to be made. Overall, there were 15 of them and they all had very different opinions. But there was a need to retell the story.
And there we began to scratch and we got to the essence of that need, which was to give a voice to those who never had the opportunity to tell it. By doing this, in some way, a kind of peace has been created, not only among themselves, but also towards others, towards the world in which they live.
The film has given them peace.
When filming ‘The Impossible’, we did a ritual where we lit some lanterns and asked permission to make the film.
And in that ritual I read some phrases by Roberto Canessa from ‘The Snow Society’ and they are some phrases that already carry the seed of this film and with which he asked the dead to accept, in peace, that they had lived the life that others did not have the opportunity to live.
And there, already in that fantasy, in the dialogue between the living and the dead, is the film we made later.
Once you get in touch with the survivors and immerse yourself in an episode as devastating as the one narrated by ‘The Snow Society’, did you set some kind of emotional limit when approaching the stories and personal dramas of the victims and survivors?
Before making the film, already during casting, the actors became friends. At first there were almost 30 of them, all very young, living in a bubble because it was during the pandemic, locked in a hotel where they forged a very strong relationship with each other.
You always try to help the actors, in some way, so that they can experience emotions analogous to those of the character. The fact of living a trip where they were away from home for so long, more than six months riding in the cold, with hunger, was very incredible.
The day you were filming the death of one of them, when filming the film in chronological order, meant that that actor left the set and was no longer seen. And there was some loss… real loss.
It was very nice when you were with the camera and captured it. Now when I see those scenes and see the actors’ faces, I know that beyond the interpretation there really is some truth, of saying goodbye to your partner. And being so close to them and experiencing that journey together, you understood what they suffered.
For me, the main tool I had was empathy. If I empathize, if I come to love these characters, I will be able to understand what they did, because in the end it is a question of options. And they only had one.
