Up until her directing THE 33, the harrowing tale of the 33 Chilean miners were trapped in a gold and copper mine for 69 days, Mexican-born director Patricia Riggen had mostly made smaller-budget, smaller-scale works, such as 2007’s UNDER THE SAME MOON and her modest 2012 indie hit GIRL IN PROGRESS with Eva Mendes and Patricia Arquette.
But THE 33 is another monster entirely, pulling together a top-notch international cast, including Antonio Banderas, Rodrigo Santoro, Juliette Binoche, James Brolin, Lou Diamond Phillips, Oscar Nuñez, Gabriel Byrne, and dozens more playing the miners, their families above ground waiting anxiously for any word, member of the mining company, the Chilean government, the teams from around the world that sent equipment to get the miners out, and the spectators who simply showed up at the mine to be a part of the circus that sprung up at the location.
THE 33 covers a great deal of emotional and spiritual territory as well, acknowledging that both people of faith as well as complete atheists were trapped in that mine, and both groups found ways to incorporate their beliefs into their individual survival skills. It’s an epic cinematic endeavor that you can’t help but get involved with, even if you know the outcome. This film isn’t just about he outcome; it’s about the long and painful journey to that conclusion. And although we only broach the subject, Riggen has already shot her next film, MIRACLES FROM HEAVEN, with Jennifer Garner and John Carroll Lynch, which is set for release next year. Please enjoy my conversation with director Patricia Riggen…
Capone: The obvious first question is how did you get approached to do this project?
Patricia Riggen: I live in Los Angeles, and we’re sent scripts, so it was the normal process of producers looking for a director. I guess my agent thought that this project could appeal to me. I was sent the script. I thought it was so problematic. It had so many problems.
Capone: There are a lot of screenwriters listed.
PR: Yeah, but that was the very first one. They were already on the second draft, and the script still didn’t work at all, and I just thought about it for many days. I said, “How do I make this movie? How do I solve these problems?” It took me three weeks to put together an intelligent pitch of what to do with it. The first thing was, let’s put down that script, and let’s start all over again. I thought, I am going to be brave enough to tell the producer that we just need to start all over And I did, and I guess he loved the way I saw the movie. It was very unlikely in his mind that he would end up giving the movie about miners and caves and drills to a woman, but it just worked out.
Capone: There are a lot of different stories happening. What did you want to emphasize? What did you think it needed to really succeed as as film?
PR: I thought, first is to determine from which point of view I’m going to see this movie, and I thought, of course, the people that suffered the most unique experience of all were the miners, so I have to be down there with them. It has to be from their point of view. It can’t be a movie about a catastrophe and how to get them out. That’s the Hollywood version of the movie. I wanted to be inside the mine with those guys and see what it felt like.
But I also couldn’t stay down there the entire time. That would have resulted in an almost experimental, independent film. That wouldn’t be appealing to my big-time Hollywood producer, so I found my middle ground in which I could tell this story of the miners, also bringing in the technical obstacles that they encountered, which was so great. More importantly, I figured the families have to have a very important role, because I do believe it was their fight to not give up on their family members and push the Chilean government to save them that really resulted in a very exemplary mission. Now they’re saying that maybe because I’m a woman, I was able to capture the emotional side of this story, both from the miners’ point of view and also giving the women and the wives a very important role.
Capone: It could just be that you’re a smart filmmaker, too. It could just be that you know a lot of people know how this ends, so you have to do something to engage us, because the drama of their fate is already decided. But you’ve also got these idiot government representattive and the circus that builds up around the mine, which reminded me of ACE IN THE HOLE.
PR: Exactly, exactly.
Capone: It must have felt like a juggling act at some points, especially when you’re editing it to know what to emphasize and what not to.
PR: That’s a good way to put it. The whole time was a juggling act, from developing the script to when I went in to shoot it—I still had a script that was incomplete and full of problems. I thought to myself, “I just hope I have it in me, because it’s not in the script yet, and let’s go out and shoot it.” I shot it in a more open way, so I could give myself many more options in the editing room to really discover what the spine and the through-line of it was going to be. So there was a large exploration in the editing room. There was a lot of juggling scenes all over the place, recreating the structure, finding the balance between below ground, above ground, and everything else.
Capone: I’ve actually been in an underground mine before, not quite that big, but there are big vehicles down there, multiple layers, offices. Where did you shoot that, and how much of that was real?
PR: [laughs] Here’s the answer: Everything was in a real mine. We did not shoot a single frame of this movie on a sound stage. I made the decision early on that if I was going to build a mine with my budget, I wouldn’t have been able to build two rooms and we’d have to be confined there to tell the whole story. So we thought, let’s go into a real mine and let’s take the challenge of bringing a crew and an international cast and experiencing the dangers of mines, because mines are alive and they tend to collapse. And that is the truth.
We went through a lot of incidents through the shoot, but it really just gave a production value to the movie, and I think that’s why you might say it looked real, because it was real. The day we shot the collapse, the air was unbreathable, because of the vehicles and the fumes. We couldn’t breathe. We could not breathe. People were falling like flies and being taken to the hospital. We just had to continue because we were an independent movie. We couldn’t go over budget. We didn’t have money to go over budget. We just had to go and shoot a lot of stuff everyday. We have few of the effects shots. Most of it is just real.
Capone: How much did you isolate the actors that played miners? Did it work best to keep them separate from everyone else? They don’t have many scenes with the other actors in the movie, but did you say, “You stay there and don’t interact with anybody else.”
PR: [laughs] Okay, so that’s a very interesting question to answer, because I actually shot the movie in two different countries. All the inside of the mine, all the below ground, is shot in Colombia in two real mines. All the above ground with the families and the rescuers is in Chile in the Atacama Desert. So basically the miners were confined in the mine. They couldn’t see anyone. And they just had to suck it up for 30 days, 14-hour days, six-day weeks, and we were down there with no bathrooms and no good air and the tension of being inside. I really just had the miners interact with their families on Day 1 and Day 69. So then I brought them over to Chile to shoot the beginning and the ending of the movie. It was very realistic that they had nothing to do with each other for all those days. No A/C, no nothing.
Capone: Could they actually see each other in those video-conferencing scenes?
PR: So what I did with those scenes, I wanted them to be very beautiful and emotional, and I don’t believe in having a script supervisor read behind the camera and having the poor actor trying to act to a green screen. So what I did is I did a short closed-circuit system, and made a tiny backdrop of a mine in Chile. And the families were in a container—that’s where they always had their video conferences. So beside them, I made a tiny set, just a backdrop, and they would sit there, and when I was shooting, then I turn on those cameras and they basically saw each other for the first time.
I remember Antonio telling me, “I don’t think this scene should be emotional. I don’t think I should cry in it.” And I said, “Yes, yes. Don’t worry. Just sit down please.” He said, “Because I think it has to be this way.” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just sit down please.” He sits down, we turn on the camera, he sees his wife and his daughter, and he starts crying for the entire scene. There was just something really powerful in this story.It worked out really well to have the actors really be able to interact with each other in those scenes. They’re looking at each other, they’re talking to each other. They’re reacting because most of these scenes were improvised. The way that the script was written was like a line like, “Hi, Mom.” That’s not a scene. So I would go in there and shoot real scenes where both sides would improvise, and I would find what moments to put into the movie.
Capone: People are paying additional attention to your film because it’s the last complete score that James Horner did. How did you get him involved with this? You dedicate the film to him at the end. How does that change things for you, having this is his final representation?
PR: James fell in love with the movie. He told me that he didn’t score too many movies anymore. He got very picky, because he didn’t need to, right? He wanted to make it. He told me how much he knew about Indian instruments, about music from this region of the world. So I thought he was perfect. A big Hollywood composer that knew exactly what that region sounds like and had used all those weird instruments in his life. So he brought in a flutist with all the different Indian flutes—dozens of them, and created this beautiful piece. It was a very particular way of composing, in which he didn’t write music and then record it later. As he was writing it, he was recording it. So we were in the room with all of these instruments and musicians. It was very special. Seeing the movie, hearing the movie, for me is painful because I can hear his heart as I see the movie, and it so saddens me that he’s not around to see it.
Capone: It’s a beautiful score. There’s a lot of emphasis in the film on faith and spirituality. That’s very specific to the region. The next film you’ve already shot is also very much seeded in that. It’s very much based in that. Talk about that aspect of the film.
PR: One of the decisions I made in the beginning is to try and stay as truthful, as faithful as possible to the real characters and the real event. I can tell you 90-95 percent of this movie is real. It really happened. Faith was a big element of their survival. Their faith in God—and they’re all from different denominations, or none at all—helped them stick together and stay alive. It really was an element that was important to have, because not having it would have been like hiding it. But it was there. They used to pray together and they did write that message on the wall—Mario did before he came out. So I just put in that element. In Latin America, religion is part of our culture, so that’s why it’s there.
Capone: I have to imagine if there were any non believers down there, they became believers as a result of this. Patricia, thank you so much. It was wonderful to meet you. Best of luck with this.
