‘The Rescue’ Filmmakers Used the Divers From the Thai Cave

Making a documentary chronicling the occasions of the notorious Thai cave rescue mission was no simple feat for filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, particularly as a result of they hadn’t been on the bottom to seize what was transpiring after 12 youngsters have been caught in a flooding collapse 2018.

Instead of simply utilizing footage from different information shops who had been there, the “Free Solo” filmmakers determined to have the precise divers from that fateful retrieval reenact their mission, and the filmmakers negotiated with Thai Navy SEALs to launch footage they’d filmed.

“It’s footage from news cameras — we’re piecing together a CNN shot and a local Thai news shot and together, they make a scene — but we decided to do reenactments with the actual divers, reenacting the events,” Vasarhelyi advised TheWrap’s Editor in Chief Sharon Waxman in a video interview through the Toronto International Film Festival.

“And then we had heard this rumor – the divers told us they remember cameras and GoPros but no one had seen the footage,” she added. “It was all the time this holy grail — we thought the Thai Navy SEALs had footage, and for 2 years we negotiated with these Thai Navy SEALs, however once more, it’s one thing that couldn’t occur over Zoom. When we received vaccinated, we went to Thailand, we thought it will be 90 minutes of stuff but it surely turned out to be 87 hours of footage.

“In Thai, so we had to translate it all first,” co-director Jimmy Chin added.

“The Rescue” chronicles the search and rescue mission of a Thai soccer crew from a collapse Thailand in 2018, when 12 members of the crew plus their 25-year-old assistant coach have been caught after coming into the cave. Shortly afterward, heavy rainfall flooded the cave system, blocking their method out, and the rescue mission changed into an enormous operation involving worldwide rescue groups.

Nine days after coming into, two British divers named John Volanthen and Richard Stanton discovered the group 2.5 miles from the cave mouth. The boys have been rescued one after the other — one Thai NAVY Seal died through the rescue on July 6, and in December 2019, one other Thai Navy SEAL died of blood an infection.

Watch the total video above.