Going underground: inside Ron Howard’s explosive movie about the Thai cave rescue

Nophand ‘Aon’ Boonyai as the water engineer Thanet Natisri, diverting flows away from the flooded caves in Thirteen Lives.Anyone hoping for a story in which heroic Brits and Aussies save the day while the locals cheer from the sidelines is in for a shock. Howard’s film meticulously shows that the rescue effortinvolved more than 10,000 people, mostly Thai, but with volunteers flying in from around the world to offer their skills.

A key moment in the film comes when Natisri tells farmers that, if they are to slow down the water flow that risks drowning the boys, their fields must be flooded with diverted rainwater that will destroy their crops. A spokeswoman agrees and the fields are promptly flooded for the greater good. The film also finds space for the spirituality of locals. There’s a scene showing the devotion of some to a Buddhist priest who visits during the rescue. And another in which local people pay homage to an animistic shrine at the cave’s mouth. That shrine is devoted to the so-called Reclining Princess who animates the mountain landscape. Legend has it that a beautiful princess took her own life after her stable-boy lover was killed by her father’s men.

. It’s clear why he was drawn to the story, though: before he made A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon, there was Backdraft and Apollo 13 – classics in the disaster movie canon. Howard has never, in fact, set foot in Thailand. “Because of Covid we couldn’t film in Thailand, but I’m sure we couldn’t have shot in those caves anyway.” Set designers built five mock ups of the caves in Queensland, Australia. Howard tells me little holes were drilled into the model cave walls so that cameras could film underwater sequences. These were digitally filled in during post-production.

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