J.A. BAYONA’S HAUNTING, evocative and beautiful Society Of The Snow is the very definition of a passion project. The Spanish director has been trying to adapt Pablo Vierci’s retelling of the legendary true story of the members of an amateur Uruguayan rugby team who managed to survive against all the odds after their plane crashed into the Andes from the moment he read it, while prepping his second movie, The Impossible. That he’s now finally done it marks the end of a ten-year odyssey that has seen him plot his path from his Spanish-language debut, the horror The Orphanage, to a series of English-language movies and TV shows —A Monster Calls, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power —that combine his facility for the fantastical with his fascination with chronicling the indomitability of the human spirit. Society Of The Snow very much focuses on the latter, and in an expansive interview, Bayona sat down with Empire to talk about intuition and choices…
You first read Pablo Vierci’s book when you were about to shoot The Impossible. But it then took ten years for you to make. What was the chief impediment?
The fact we wanted to shoot in Spanish. If it’s in Spanish, I think you cannot get, for the whole world, more than ten million dollars. It’s impossible to shoot this film with [that] budget. So we spent ten years trying to get the financing from the independent market, and it was impossible because it was in Spanish. We were about to give up, and Netflix gave us the numbers we were looking for [a reported €65 million]. They gave us final cut, they were totally okay with using a cast of unknown actors. We couldn’t say no.