J. A. Bayona, the director of Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, is set to direct Spanish-language disaster movie, Society of the Snow for Netflix. It is based on the same events that inspired the 1993 Hollywood thriller movie Alive, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke.
The real-life events that the film is based on happened in 1972, when a plane carrying a rugby team from Uruguay crash-landed in the Andes. There were initially around 30 survivors and they had to resort to extreme measures in order to endure for two months in the mountains before being rescued.
J. A. Bayona is no stranger to disaster movies based on true events, having directed The Impossible in 2012, starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Tom Holland as a family affected by the Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand in 2004. Although the real-life family the story is based on were Spanish, the characters are British in the movie. Society of the Snow, based on La sociedad de la nieve by Pablo Vierci, will be J. A. Bayona’s first Spanish-language film for 14 years.
“It was during the documentation process for The Impossible that I discovered Society of the Snow, Pablo Vierci’s fascinating chronicle about the tragedy of the Andes,” Bayona says in a statement to Deadline. “More than ten years later, my fascination for the novel remains intact and I am happy to face the challenge that lies ahead: To tell one of the most remembered events of the 20th century, with all the complexity that implies a story that gives so much relevance to the survivors as well as to those who never returned from the mountains.”
He concludes; “I also face it in Spanish, a language that I excitedly return to after 14 years without filming in my own language, and with a team of young Uruguayan and Argentine actors, whom I’m totally thrilled with.”
The cast will include Enzo Vogrincic Roldán, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Tomas Wolf, Diego Ariel Vegezzi, Esteban Kukuriczka, Francisco Romero, Rafael Federman, Felipe González Otaño, Agustín Della Corte, Valentino Alonso, Simón Hempe, Fernando Contigiani García, Benjamín Segura, Jerónimo Bosia.