On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 carrying members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team and their families crashed into the Andes Mountains, a devastating event that left survivors stranded in the elements for more than two months. In the end, 16 survivors were rescued after having to endure starvation, exposure, and worse – including cannibalism.
The story of Flight 571 has been depicted in media before – including in 1993’s “Alive” – but rarely have the events unfolded with such fastidious attention to detail as in “Society of the Snow.” The new film from director J.A. Bayona is Spain’s selection for Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars and includes some of the most harrowing recreations of the doomed flight ever put onscreen.
Creation of the crash, which occurs early in “Society of the Snow,” fell in part to visual effects supervisor Laura Pedro, who worked with Bayona previously on “When a Monster Calls.”
“We decided that we needed to go to the real valley where the crash took place and to have all of the backgrounds rendered realistic, and to photograph everything,” Pedro tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Visual Effects panel when asked where the process for creating the crash began. “We knew that the accident must be the most realistic rendition, as best we can.”
To accomplish that, Pedro says the team built two different fuselages – one that represented the entire airplane which allowed the cast to experience some turbulence before the onscreen crash, and another that was used for the more “extreme” moments.
“All of the actions that appear in the scene were real,” Pedros says. “So that’s our main focus and the most difficult sequence I think for all of us because everything must be planned. For each shot, we need to know all of the crew, and what we are going to need because we need to remove some walls or do some specific breaks for the camera, and the movements of the machines. So everything must be planned because we only have like two weeks to shoot the whole accident. So everyone needs to be super focused.”
Pedro says the team spoke with survivors of the crash to get the details right, including gruesome injuries like broken legs or snapped necks, which are depicted during the sequence.
“Those are things that those people told us,” Pedro says. “So it’s easiest for us to not re-imagine an accident or not be realistic. Because we always wanted this movie to be as realistic as we can. That’s what they lived through 51 years ago. And well, that’s the most important thing for us.”
“Society of the Snow” is on Netflix early next year.
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