On film FestivalsBuzz builds quickly, and in Toronto this year was one of the first titles to fire Paul Greengrass’ “The lost bus. “The movie, which premiered on Friday night, dramatizes a true story Born of California’s deadliest wildfire. The next morning the movie was already the conversation about the festival – including among the filmmakers themselves, who do not quite agree with the type of film they have made.
In 2018, California’s camp fire killed at least 85 people and moved more than 50,000. Out of that devastation came an unlikely history of survival: Bus driver Kevin McKay and teacher Mary Ludwig rented out 22 children in safety as the flames tore through their hometown paradise.
By working with co -author Brad Ingelsby, Greengrass adapted Lizzie Johnson’s “Paradise: One Town’s struggle to survive an American wildfire” to a tense mix of survival thriller and intimate drama. McKay, played by Matthew McConaugheydepicted as a man who is already under load, alien from his teenage son and takes care of a dying mother, who becomes the only driver who can respond to a desperate conversation about help.
On TIFF This year, almost seven years after the fire, the film plays with nervous news. California is again recovering from record -breaking fires, and Europe’s discover has just endured its worst fire season in a century. In “The lost bus“A tired fire chief played by” Severance “star Yul Vazquez, all except the fourth wall breaks:“ Every year the fires get bigger, and that’s the truth. We’re fucking fools. “
For producer Jamie Lee Curtis, “The Lost Bus” is about people, not politics. When she spoke to IndieWire at the festival, she reacted to the proposal that the film should be read as a climate change. “This is not a political movie,” she said. “It’s a story of heroism, about resilience, of truth.”
Greengrass looks different. He included only a direct reference to climate change, but believes that the message is implicitly reflected. “I’ve made a large number of films from real events, and you always need a sense of responsibility,” he said. “Not just for the events but to the influence of your movie in the world. If you get them right, and you are lucky, they speak in some unspoken way to a greater truth.”
This truth arrived uninvited during the film’s post -production. “We were in the last stages of the mixture when the Los Angeles fires broke out,” Greengrass said. “And it was obviously shocking and eerie and surreal and terrible. Our editor, Billy Goldenberg, who cut the film so beautifully, had to compete back because he almost lost his house. Reality broke into the film.”
As with its most famous films, “United 93” and “Captain Phillips”, Greengrass often likes to break the reality in their own films and turn real crises into white crackers. In “The Lost Bus”, Greengrass holds the emotional thread in history – McKay’s relationship with his son – as children grow more and more worried, an inferno infringement and the whole thing reaches an almost “uncut gemstones” intensity.
For McConaughey, the role was irresistible because of the Father-son relationship in the film’s heart, as well as the relentless compression of annoying decisions stacked on his character. He pointed out an early sequence where McKay, who rushed to save his family, hears a sender calling about 22 stringed children. Thinking of his strange teenage son and the mother, McKay is waiting and waiting before answering the conversation.
“It was my favorite scene,” McConaughey said, laughing. “In another movie, that choice may carry a whole action. Here it is 35 seconds later. It makes an 180 right after you have made an 180.”
If the story itself was dangerous, then the photography was too. “The Lost Bus” looks like a movie that had a difficult production. When you learn that Greengrass insisted on putting a real school bus of children with a real fire, it seems not only difficult but dangerous. Shot on an abandoned campus near Santa Fe, New Mexico, was fire through controlled gas burns, reinforced with carefully composed effects with images that he shot with real fires. The director calls it “a thorough process to increase reality with what was real.”
As with many of his films, Greengrass uses a mix of people who play themselves with actors. Most firefighters seen in the film are the same crews who tackled Blazes at Paradise. California’s fire chief John Messina plays herself, but in the film he is “demoted” as deputy and works with Vazquez. For Greengrass, this is a technique for generating even greater Verisimilitude.
“What happens is that everyone who acts feels a great sense of trust to be surrounded by real professionals, because they then know what to say, how to say it, what conversation signs are, all that,” the director said. “They do not feel that they are pretending in a vacuum. But on the other hand, if you are, says, a group of professional firefighters who turn to reuse what you lived through in a movie, is to be surrounded by some actors is a huge source of encouragement that they can teach you how you are lucky.
Although McConaughey and America Ferrera are faces on the film, it was set in motion by Curtis. The Oscar-winning actress tracks his commitment back to an article in the Washington Post about Johnson’s book, followed by an NPR interview that she heard when he was driving. Curtis pulled over his car, called producer Jason Blum and said to him: “I want to buy the book” Paradise “and I want to make a movie, and I think it will be the most important thing that either one of us does as a filmmaker in our lives.”
“We show decimation of a city in lively detail,” Curtis said. “My job as a producer would really be the bridge between the real people, John Messina, Kevin McKay, Mary Ludwig and Fiction. I had to get Kevin and Mary to understand who I was, who Paul was,” she said. “I promised them that I would never lie, that I would honor Paradise and its heroes. Although this would be released as entertainment, in its core, it must have integrity.”
For Greengrass, integrity meant long days on the bus, repeated next to gas fires and staging of late afternoon shoots at the time of Magic Hour, chasing the “eclipse similar” glow that he wanted on the screen.
“It became a kind of scary adventure for all of us,” Greengrass said. “And in the end it was the key to it. The kind of collective experience that Matthew and America could lead these children through is what gave it its intense reality and its emotional quality, and I think that’s what is in the film.”
The morning after the premiere, Greengrass told Indiewire that he flies out to Germany later that day to start production on his next film, a drama set in Medieval England about a peasant uprising against the tyrannical rule by Richard II, with Katherine Waterston and Andrew Garfield. “He’s wonderful,” Greengrass said. “He can do anything.”
“The Lost Bus” opens in selected theaters on September 19 and streams on Apple TV+ from October 3.
