advertisement

'The 33' digs deep to represent miners' agony

WASHINGTON - Just before sitting down to discuss "The 33," a new film dramatizing the events surrounding the 2010 Chilean mining accident in which 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days, filmmaker Patricia Riggen says she had a dream.

"I was back in the mine," she says of the catnap she was able to squeeze in between media interviews in her D.C. hotel room.

Her flashback is understandable.

Although the film was shot in early 2014 in a Colombian salt mine that stood in for the original San Jose copper and gold mine in the middle of the Atacama Desert, the experience was not easily forgotten, according to Riggen, who calls the film set a "really spooky, really scary, dark hellhole." That, at least, is how she describes the portion of the mine in which the harrowing rock collapse that opens the film was re-created.

A second cavern - the "pretty female" counterpart to the "ugly male" one, as Riggen puts it - was less inhospitable. It's there that the film's "refuge" scenes were staged, replicating the cave in which the begrimed, emaciated workers lived until an international team of engineers was able to drill a rescue shaft 2,300 feet down.

Still, after a shoot consisting of 35 14-hour days underground, Riggen says she was only too happy to move the "dangerous, arduous" production topside. On her first day of filming, Riggen was hit on the head by a falling rock, which luckily bounced off her hard hat. A single chemical toilet had to be shared by the entire cast and crew. Several actors were sickened, including star Antonio Banderas, who took a dip in a salt-saturated cistern. (That scene was ultimately cut.)

The film's second location, centering on the rescue attempt, was the Chilean town of Copiaco, where the actual disaster took place. According to Riggen, 80 percent of the extras cast for those scenes were at Camp Hope in 2010, the outpost set up for families of the trapped miners.

"They didn't hesitate to tell me exactly how it happened and what it looked like," Riggen says. BBC reporter Tim Willcox, who anchored that network's live coverage of the event (and who has a cameo as a TV journalist in the film) also told Riggen that the set was uncannily accurate.

Verisimilitude was important to Riggen, a former journalist who oversaw the development of the screenplay, which was written simultaneously with reporter and novelist Héctor Tobar's book "Deep Down Dark," based on interviews with the miners and people involved in their rescue. Tiny details, such as the paper cups in which the miners' daily food rations were meted out - one to two ounces of milk, a spoonful of tuna, a slice of peach and one-quarter of a cookie - were faithfully copied.

When license was taken, Riggen says, it was infrequent. A scene in which the sole Bolivian miner, Carlos Mamani (played by Tenoch Huerta), attacks a trapped co-worker with a knife, for instance, was accurate, except for the knife. In reality, Mamani carried a rock, Riggen says, out of fear that he might be eaten by the Chileans, among whom Bolivians are often scorned.

Other supporting characters are composites, created for the sake of narrative expediency. The character of Alex Vega (Mario Casas), for example, whose wife gives birth while he's underground, and who is the first in the film to be rescued, was cobbled together from elements of two other miners (Ariel Ticona and Florencio Avalos), in addition to Vega.

"I had to come up with a reduced number of characters - 10 below ground and 10 above - out of potentially 80 people who were important to the story," Riggen says. "This was not a movie about one man's journey."

As Mario Sepulveda, the miners' ad hoc leader and spokesman, Banderas heads up an international cast that includes Lou Diamond Phillips, Juliette Binoche, Gabriel Byrne, Rodrigo Santoro and James Brolin.

One significant detail about the film differs from real life: It's in English. Without English dialogue, says Riggen, who was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and who is based in Los Angeles, the film might never have found a studio to distribute it.

"This was originally an independent film," she says. "Studios don't make this kind of movie anymore."

And what kind of movie is that? Disaster movies? Movies about hope and faith?

"Dramas with a large Latino cast," says Riggen, who adds that there has never been another Latino movie opening this big in the United States. The film opens on 2,500 screens this weekend.

Of course, the director would love it if the film is a hit, but box-office success is just the icing on the cake, she says. The film has already found favor with some small audiences, including Pope Francis, who was sent an advance DVD copy and who met with the miners and their families in Rome last month.

A tougher audience was the miners themselves. According to Riggen, when the film was finished, the studio had her introduce a special screening that had been set up for the 33, as the miners have become known, and their families.

"I was on my own - no one came with me - like a brave little chihuahua dog," she says, describing the experience, with understatement, a "big challenge."

"For them, this is not history. In some ways, these men are still living the most horrible event of their lives," she says. "These men are dignified yet pained. They are open wounds."

As the lights went down, Riggen says: "I thought my heart was going to explode. There's Antonio Banderas, looking stunning, dirt and sweat and everything. But these people don't enjoy it. Then the lights came up. They were very quiet. Then their wives started hugging me. Then they started hugging me. No words, just body language."

The silent accolade means more to Riggen than any review. For the 33, she says, who are in some ways still trapped - if only in their heads - "this is not a movie."

Article Comments
Guidelines: Keep it civil and on topic; no profanity, vulgarity, slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. If a comment violates these standards or our terms of service, click the "flag" link in the lower-right corner of the comment box. To find our more, read our FAQ.