Inside “Society of the Snow”'s true story about plane crash survivors in the Andes

Director J.A. Bayona and star Enzo Vogrincic tell EW about the emotional conversations with survivors and families of the victims.

J.A. Bayona didn't know he was going to make a movie about the 1972 crash of a Uruguayan plane in the Andes mountains when he read a book about it, Pablo Vierci's Society of the Snow, in 2009. At the time, he was doing research for The Impossible, his movie about another disaster, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

But, as the filmmaker behind Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tells EW, he "couldn't stop thinking about it."

"The book is about the testimony of the 16 survivors, written 36 years after the tragedy," Bayona explains. "It's less about the action and more about the reflection of what happened... a philosophical book, trying to find a meaning to what happened, which gave me a lot of information that I needed for The Impossible. I remember reading excerpts of the book to Tom Holland and Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor because it gave me a lot of ideas for the inner life of the characters going through that situation."

The day they wrapped production on The Impossible, Bayona and his team secured the movie rights to the book. Various budgetary and filming location complications delayed production of the film, but 13 years later, audiences are at last able to experience the harrowing tale of its survivors and how they endured the crash, injuries, an avalanche, and more for some 72 days.

The passengers of the plane were all members of a rugby team, along with family members and friends, who were en route to Santiago, Chile from Montevideo for a match. Among them is Numa Turcatti, played by Uruguayan actor Enzo Vogrincic. Numa is a friend of one of the players — and he narrates the movie. Vogrincic, though, admits to not knowing much about what he was even auditioning for when he went to the casting call, much less how central Numa was to Bayona's movie.

"It was just a generalized monologue that gave you no idea [about the story]," Vogrincic tells EW via translator over Zoom from his home in Uruguay. "After about six months, I found out that I was going to be [in the movie]. And it wasn't until the very end that I found out how important this character was to the heart of the story."

Vogrincic and his castmates were able to meet with crash survivors, as well as family of victims. While his time spent with Numa's siblings and friends, in Numa's home, gave great insight into the person he was portraying, it was a different interaction that proved crucial to his understanding of Numa.

"Once we met all the survivors and we told them who each one of us represented, something quite impacting happened," Vogrincic explains. "Whenever my co-actors would introduce themselves, they would say, 'I'm Felipe [González Otaño], I represent Carlitos [Páez],' and they would crack a joke or something. But when I said that I represented Numa, it was a very still moment and they just embraced me. And in that silence and in those details, I found what Numa was leaving behind with the other people, things that could not be spoken about. Those details helped me a lot."

Numa and his fellow survivors are not only dealing with the elements but also limited food supply. Starvation becomes a very real concern — especially after the military calls off its search operation after eight days, which the survivors hear about via transistor radio. Huddled in what remains of the plane's fuselage, they have a difficult but honest conversation about whether they should eat the bodies of those who've died. In other movies or TV shows centered around survival stories, there's often a more savage, barbaric approach; but here, they debate matters of religion and potential legal complications, and whether it is disrespectful to the dead — their friends and families.

"It's a story that is based on humanism, on an extreme generosity," Bayona, who also directed 2016's A Monster Calls and some episodes of the Lord of the Rings series, says of his research and conversations with the survivors. "It's extraordinary the way they deal with that, very calmly talking from their point of view, never forcing anyone to do anything that they didn't want to."

While everyone else, some reluctantly, engages in cannibalism, Numa refuses, eventually struggling with malnutrition and what that means for his own mortality.

"How do you die peacefully? Who teaches you how to die?" Bayona says of the questions the movie asks. "To me, it's more about emotional survival. It's not only physical survival. It's to understand that there's something bigger than yourself."

Society of the Snow opens on Dec. 22 in select theaters before streaming Jan. 4 on Netflix.

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