For Hollywood stars Matthew McConaughey and Jamie Lee Curtis, making an action film about the deadliest wildfire in California history hits close to home.
“The Lost Bus” tells the harrowing true story of a school bus driver who risked his life to save 22 children from the inferno that destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.
The movie’s world premiere Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival comes as Los Angeles rebuilds from yet more deadly blazes in the fire-wracked western US state, images of which shocked the world again in January.
McConaughey, who resided for years in repeatedly fire-hit Malibu, said depicting such topical and real events is an extra “responsibility and honor.”
“This is going to be a huge-action, urgent, epic-scope, fire-is-a-predator film, like it hasn’t been seen on film before. And it’s going to be a deeply personal story.”
Curtis — who helped shepherd the film to the big screen and is a producer — lives in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, which was obliterated by this year’s fire.
Though her house survived, it was severely damaged and she has only just been able to move back home.
“A week ago, we moved in, before I came here,” she told AFP ahead of the premiere.
“It’s a difficult film for people to watch if they’ve lived or live with the threat of fire.”
– ‘Global warming’ –
McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, a reluctant and flawed hero who volunteered to collect stranded schoolchildren even as he feared for his own family in the flames encroaching on his hometown Paradise.
The film is paced like an action thriller, and actors performed most scenes in front of real flames. The roaring fire and sparking power lines add an element of horror, particularly as the specter of death is all too real.
Ultimately, 85 people died in the Camp Fire.
Curtis decided to turn McKay’s story into a film after reading journalist Lizzie Johnson’s book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire.”
She sent the book to fellow producer Jason Blum, telling him “this will be the most important thing either one of us do in the movie business in our life.”
While McConaughey and Curtis — both Oscar winners — insist the film is “not political,” it contains a moment in which a firefighting chief tells journalists that, with fires becoming more frequent and deadly, “we’re being damn fools.”
“The word ‘global warming’ doesn’t enter the movie,” said Curtis. “It’s a movie about a school bus driver and a teacher.”
“But the reality is, it’s happening over and over and over again, and what is the common link? The common link is obvious.”
– ‘Hero or not?’ –
For McConaughey, “there’s some facts that pop through” in the film, which cast several real firefighters and emergency dispatchers from the Camp Fire to play themselves.
“This company, they did end up paying quite a bit of money on this particular fire,” he notes.
Utility company PG&E, whose power lines were blamed for sparking the fire, paid more than $13 billion to victims and pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
The film hits theaters September 19, and premieres on Apple TV+ next month.
It is McConaughey’s first movie in six years — an absence during which he explored politics, even mulling a run for Texas governor that has not yet materialized.
Instead he “got the writer’s bug,” penning a best-selling memoir, and has a new book of poetry due out this month.
“Any time well spent with another vocation, or creating some kind of art or hanging out with my family, you mature as an actor when you come back to the screen,” he said.
He was lured back for “The Lost Bus” by director Paul Greengrass, who has previously dramatized real-life pirate kidnappings (“Captain Phillips”) and terror attacks (“United 93.”)
McConaughey met up with the real-life McKay, and said the whole experience had caused him to ponder “the long-standing definition of what the heck’s a hero or not?”
“I don’t know. But there definitely seems to be a heroic act, to go towards a crisis instead of from it,” he said.
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