A decade before filming The Snow Society, director Juan Antonio Bayona had read Pablo Vierci's book and took the text to the filming of another film that he directed and that would be nominated for an Oscar for best actress. “The title of The Impossible, for example, came to me while reading some statements by Roberto Canessa, one of the survivors of the Andes. I remember that I shared extracts from the book with Naomi Watts and Tom Holland during the breaks between takes,” comments the Spanish director in statements sent by Netflix.
With a massive casting in Argentina and Uruguay, rehearsals in Barcelona and with scenes filmed in the Valley of Tears, the place where the Uruguayan Air Force flight crashed in 1972, the film was developed in phases, under the production of Belén Atienza and Sandra Hermida, who have worked with JA Bayona since El orfanato (2007).
“We needed to be able to reach the greatest number of people possible to find the three basic questions that the project required of us: the physical resemblance to the people who lived through the tragedy, the physical-emotional demands that the filming experience was going to demand and that the candidates could be prepared at an acting level for the entire journey of the characters,” says the casting director, María Laura Berch, who has worked with directors such as Diego Lerman, Lucía Puenzo and the Peruvian Claudia Llosa.
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Two thousand people attended the tests. The first stage began at the scene of the tragedy, when a specialized team photographed every hour for four weeks. “When JA came for the first time, in a chat looking at the sky, he told us that he wanted to come personally just to 'ask for permission' to film this story, and we think that sums it up,” say experts Bianca Fidani and Damián Benegas .
Before traveling, they developed an application similar to a video game, so that the director could plan what he would need for the film. They were then able to match what they found with photos, a film camera, drones and helicopters.
The second stage of filming was in the Spanish ski resort of Sierra Nevada, in Granada, which was chosen for its ideal altitude: 3,000 meters. The third stage in locations in Chile and Uruguay. “Filming continued in Madrid with the recreation (at the Netflix studios in Tres Cantos) of the fateful plane crash and culminated with the return of part of the team to the Valley of Tears, in the Andes.”
Netflix announced filming in late 2021; Two years later it managed to be nominated for best foreign language film at the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Awards. The film is the first in Spanish that Bayona has directed after 15 years. “Any director's insecurities are compounded by the disadvantage of not being able to defend yourself in your language,” he explains about productions in English. “I would have liked to film The Snow Society sooner, but financing this film has taken us ten years. I had to film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Rings of Power to earn the right to direct this story as it should be: in its original language, in the places where it happened and with the ambition with which we approached the project. Filming this film was liberating, not only because of the language, but because it allowed me to rediscover myself as a director.”
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