Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Frederick Wiseman
The legendary Frederick Wiseman spoke to E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (co-directors of Free Solo, 2018) about their Oscar shortlisted feature documentary The Rescue (National Geographic), which details the audacious 2018 mission to free 12 boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand.
Click here to see the whole conversation between Vasarhelyi, Chin and Wiseman. The intro follows…
“I’m very glad to be here to discuss the film,” kicked off Wiseman. “But I want you to discuss the film. One of the things that fascinated me in watching it was the difference between the documentary sequences – the so-called documentary sequences – and the staged sequences. Could you talk a little bit how you approached that? Because sometimes I don’t think I could tell.”
Vasarhelyi responded: “If you can’t tell… it is quite an achievement on our part. I think that a lot of opportunities in non-fiction come from the obstacles. And with this film we had a terrific story that we felt was important. We had one major obstacle: there was only about 20 seconds of known footage from inside the cave. Even if we had been there on the ground, we wouldn’t have had access inside that cave. Only 10 people witnessed that and those were the divers. So we took as a moment to do these re-enactments, I like to call them demonstrations.
Wiseman: Why? It sounds like a euphemism…demonstrations…
Chin: We really wanted the divers to demonstrate what they did. Coming from my background… as documentary filmmakers we are obsessed with authenticity and accuracy. And so we wanted to convince the actual divers to come back with the actual equipment and show us exactly what they were doing in any given moment. We did have the moments that we needed in the story – that we wanted to illustrate – the timeline and the structure of the film was pretty much in place. We knew what pieces we needed, and we were able to get them to come in. You can’t really teach cave divers how to act. We knew we could have not had them act, we really just wanted to demonstrate exactly what they were doing at any given moment that we were trying to capture. And so, all those moments that you see in the film are pretty accurate to the moments that we were trying to portray.
Vasarhelyi: And as filmmakers there were things we didn’t anticipate. Like… it was only when you see the divers bind these children’s hands behind their back, bind their feet together and push their head in the water… the gravity of what these divers were willing to take on. This really hit us. To answer your question, it was very fortuitous in a way, because we were able to find some found footage from the Thai Navy Seals. So all the most critical moments: when the child is anesthetized initially, when the oxygen meter goes off, when they find the children, that’s all real. So our re-enactments really provided the tissue between the joints. To show the people the physicality of it…
Click here to see the rest of the conversation between Vasharelyi, Chin and Wiseman.
