YOU DIE, AND YOU DON’T notice that you’re dying.”
Nando Parrado remembers very little of the plane crash that changed his life on 13 October 1972, but he does remember that. As the airplane — Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 — that was carrying him, his mother, his sister, his teammates in the Old Christians Club rugby union team, and several other passengers and crew members, suddenly found itself struggling for speed and altitude in the Argentinian section of the Andes, Parrado found himself confronting his mortality. “It’s so fast,” he says. “From the moment I realised that there was something wrong to the moment it crashed, it was maybe two seconds, three seconds. It’s incredible how many things you can record on your mind in the last tenth of a second of your life. There was this huge metallic sound, and instantly, everything went black. I died.”
Of course, Parrado didn’t die. He should have — he had a fractured skull and lay in a coma for four days before awaking to find that the crash had killed his mother and his two best friends, and his sister was dying. But 51 years later, he is telling Empire the incredible story of how he, and 15 other passengers — his team-mates, his brothers — not only survived the disaster that day, and later the incredibly inhospitable frozen wasteland that greeted them, the avalanches that loomed out of nowhere to smother unsuspecting survivors, and the aching hunger that threatened to kill them all until they made a choice that helped them keep alive. They somehow found the will and the strength to find a way out after 72 days, long after the world had given up on them. Theirs is a story that has entered into legend. It is a story J.A. Bayona has been waiting over a decade to tell. It is a story that is, quite frankly, impossible.
WHEN BAYONA FIRST read Pablo Vierci’s book, La Sociedad De La Nieve (Society Of The Snow), which tells the story of the crash and its aftermath via testimonials from the 16 survivors, all of whom knew Vierci as kids, something occurred to him. “In the first or second chapter, there was this long paragraph where you can read the word ‘impossible’ seven times,” the director tells Empire.
From that, Bayona took two things. First, a name for the movie he was then working on — another tale of survival against all the odds, this time focused on a family’s attempts to stay alive after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. “I thought, ‘This is a perfect title,’” he says of the film that became The Impossible. “I found myself reading sections of the book to the actors, to Naomi Watts and Tom Holland.”
The other was a desire to turn Vierci’s book into a movie, although it proved a difficult nut to crack, partially due to the scale of Bayona’s vision, partially due to his desire to shoot it in Spanish. “It took us ten years to find the financing,” he says. “Finally Netflix were able to let us shoot the film the way we wanted to shoot it: grand-scale, Spanish-speaking, with unknown actors.”