The question that consumed J.A. Bayona in the making of Society of the Snow came down to the act itself: Why make a film revisiting a horrific, widely publicized real-life tragedy? The director of the Oscar-nominated The Impossible and billion-dollar-grossing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom embraced his ambivalence, examining the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes—wherein more than two dozen passengers struggled to survive deep in the mountains over 72 days—with a moral and spiritual rigor. “I knew that there was something there that was still not told, but I had to find out what,” Bayona tells Vanity Fair. “The whole film is this journey where we go back to the past, trying to close a chapter.”

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Bayona works off Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book of the same name, itself a work that benefited from some hindsight. But Bayona’s interpretation is visceral. His film begins in Uruguay, with a particular focus on the carefree rugby players who’d soon need to band together to survive, before moving on to an awe-inspiring recreation of the flight disaster. Drawing from the book and conversations with the survivors, Bayona then depicts life in the mountains, working with DP Pedro Luque over an extensive shoot in the Sierra Nevada region—covering the vastness of their isolation, the brutality of what they must do to keep living, the hopelessness that creeps in.

It’s a major technical and emotional feat, one already generating awards attention; Society is on the Oscar short lists for best international feature (as Spain’s submission), original score, makeup and hairstyling, and visual effects. With the film now streaming on Netflix, Bayona and Luque join Vanity Fair to break down their intensive cinematic effort here, from beginning to end.

The Calm

The film opens with generous portraits of many of the characters we’ll later follow in the mountains, as they lead relatively calm and fulfilling lives. Our main narrator is Numa (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), a young man from a conservative, religious family. He’s introduced in what’s a typical moment for him, a signal of the transformation to come.

J.A. Bayona: The whole film is a journey to a place where Numa can make this self-discovery of who he really is. He needs to understand what is his shadow, what is his real nature. And somehow, by doing so, he needs to pray with that culture. To me, it was important to reflect the context he’s coming from. This is a real church in Montevideo; this is actually one of the churches that probably Numa went to many times in his life with his family. It’s very close to where he used to live. We are shooting in the same locations where the story happened. We really wanted to be very close to the reality.

Pedro Luque: Uruguay is a place that’s very green. It has four seasons. It gets cold and it gets hot, but it’s a pretty uneventful place. The highest altitude that you can get in Uruguay is 1,400 feet. It’s a nice place to live—nothing to do with the harshness of the Andes Mountains where they end up finding themselves. At the beginning of the movie, we set up this comfortable life that these people have—how warm it is, how happy they are, how loved and cared for, and how much of a support they have in their whole lives. This image, in a way, finds Numa in a warm environment. It’s cozy.

Bayona: It’s the spirit of being young. This is the frame that you can find in a movie like The Deer Hunter, for example. Movies from the ’70s, wide-screen. There’s a sense of the set, the location, enhancing the characters and what they are going through. There’s something very interesting with this scene, actually—I didn’t want to feel solemn, especially referring to religion. So there is this thing going on where a character feels kind of funny, passes a note to Numa. It’s a setup for something that will happen later on. We didn’t want to feel too heavy. There’s this element of comedy, which is totally the opposite of the scene that you will see later on when Numa passes a note to his friends in the mountain—which is not comedy at all.

The Storm

After the visceral plane crash sequence, hope still abounds among the survivors as they wait to be found. After 10 days, though, they hear on the radio that the rescue mission has ended, with no headway being made. This shot captures the desperate, agonized reaction to the news that they’re officially, indefinitely stranded.

Luque: We took a lot of care in making sure that our actors were going to go through a really harsh shoot. Not because we wanted to torture them; we wanted to get as close as we could to the real experience. So this was shot in Spain. It’s a valley that we found in the Sierra Nevada, about 9,000 feet high. It’s all real snow, it’s a real valley—but the background isn’t; about a mile away are the real Andes Mountains. It’s the real place where the plane crashed. We shot all those backgrounds. We went three times to the Andes Mountains, spent 20 days doing photos, videos, wide shots, and helicopter shots on the real mountains. The very survivors of this thing are amazed at how realistic it looks—as if they were there again. They were shocked because that wall that you see in the back of this very first frame is the west wall where they have to climb. It sits at 15,000 feet. It’s a very tall wall, and it probably takes you two and a half days to get to the top of that wall. This is a very particular scene because it’s a very expressive one. This is where the actors are losing it.

Bayona: We planned to shoot the story almost like a documentary. We prepared the actors; we gave them all the information; we rehearsed the script for almost two months; we went through all the scenes. They read the book; they got in contact with the survivors or the families of the victims. And they spent 72 days in the mountains. We shot for 140 days. We took the time to go through all the important moments. We were ready with our cameras as if we were shooting a documentary to capture that. Each actor is doing what his character was doing and feeling and going through in that moment. We gave them the freedom to do that, following them with the cameras.

But there is a very wide lens that gives you a very specific tone, out of reality. We definitely wanted to try to get into their minds. You cannot limit the adaptation of a true story to the facts; you need to give an interpretation, and you need to give an aesthetic that will somehow take you into their minds. The Society of the Snow book, which the film is based upon, takes a philosophical, spiritual approach to what happened—so you really need to achieve that with a camera. In this moment, they felt trapped, they felt abandoned, they felt alone, they felt betrayed. They couldn’t understand. This is the moment where the camera starts to get weird. These weird lenses start to detach from reality, trying to get into minds and the feelings these people went through in that same moment. We did very, very long takes. We had three cameras, and we gave no instructions to the actors.

The Isolation

As the film gets deeper into the experience of isolation and survival, shots like this communicate the sheer scale of the survivors’ distance from the outside world. In this shot, we see Numa retracing steps after the discovery of an injury in the middle of an expedition.

Bayona: This is one of the most symbolic images in the story. It reflects this idea of discovering the emptiness of sense in life. It’s this small figure in front of nothing, of the emptiness. Redoing the path backwards, it’s a way of telling the audience he needs to go back. He needs to learn from scratch again. He needs to find who he really is, his real nature, and be able to accept it and be brave to go through it and to live it in the mountain—to adapt and to survive in that situation.

Luque: This is a real shot from the real place. This was shot in Sierra Nevada. Each of us, no matter what you did, if you were the director or the last PA—each of us had to carry something and we would walk for 25, half hour, 40 minutes up to the [shooting location]. The environment was changing constantly because of the weather, so we had to improvise a little bit some of these shots. This is a beautiful, beautiful place that we found. And the whole crew walked over there. We set up our cameras and we told Enzo, “You’ve got to go over there.”

Bayona: He had a walkie-talkie. He had to walk, like, 45 minutes to get there, do the path, all the footprints. And then we were able to connect with him with a walkie-talkie and give him the direction from the camera position.

Luque: But it’s all real. It’s right there. I remember when we were shooting this, there’s a little zoom back, so the image opens up and it never ends. The vastness and the white and these little variations of blue and white, it never ends. The silhouette of Numa, it’s even smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. There’s a beautiful moment. Something that can only be transmitted with cinema, right? It can’t be told. It can’t be written. This feeling, you only get it by images and music and sound.

The Photograph

In the aftermath of the crash, several now iconic photographs circulated in the media. Bayona and Luque gradually came to the decision to recreate them as accurately as they could—with this one a particularly sensitive indicator of the humanity shared between the men even at their darkest hour.

Bayona: Sometimes by talking about something, you are able to heal yourself. That was the whole idea of this movie. There is a line at the very beginning: “The past is what changes us the most.” It was very important to recreate those images that we saw, the images that they took. Because the moment you see an image, there is an interpretation on the reality. There is something that you can look at and think about what happened to them, what they went through. The whole film has the same pictures they took, which are a recreation of the story. By doing a recreation, you are doing an interpretation. It’s not only about the fact, it’s about something else. That’s something else we had to find out during the shoot.

Luque: These photos were really important. For us, they were a real peek into what it looked like: what happened, what was going on in there. We ended up being super specific on the reproduction of these photos, to the point that it was exactly the same light, exactly the same position, exactly the same things that were on the frame. It was an act of magic. I remember exactly doing this thing and looking at the pictures, looking at the monitors, and being deeply affected by this thing. I don’t know why it had such an impact.

Bayona: You can tell in the faces, in the body of the actors—you can tell the weight of the past. You can see the chemistry between them. It’s so incredible that it was so easy to recreate those pictures with the actors because they were so into the characters. They felt possessed by the characters. You can tell when you see the images, how they feel in that same moment. Most of them were from Uruguay and Argentina and they were in Spain, at the other side of the world—different hemisphere very far away from their families, from their girlfriends. So they only had each other. And it was this psycho-magic thing that suddenly they started to behave exactly the same way the people in the mountain behave. If any of them will wake up one day feeling blue, the other ones will come and will raise him up.

The Rescue

The eventual rescue mission was also depicted through recreation, particularly with the use of archival film reels that played widely around the world. Bayona and Luque got so close to the real thing on this one that survivors believed it was the real thing.

Bayona: Another recreation.

Luque: There is a very famous shot, which is a 60-millimeter shot of the fuselage. It’s a helicopter turning around. Basically, we were doing the same thing—shooting film, 16-millimeter black-and-white, off this thing. It was so exactly the same; that was scary. Pablo, the author of the book, came into the monitor and said, “Wait, when are we going to shoot? You’re still watching the archives.” J. went like, “No, no, this is what’s actually happening right now. It’s coming from that helicopter.”

Bayona: Some of the survivors, when they saw this image, they thought it was real footage and not a shot from the film.

The Prayer

The reality of cannibalism in the film’s middle section isn’t shied away from, but in the effort to find a poetic dimension to his retelling, Bayona used this moment to give that element of the story a kind of shape. Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt) buries a sock with what had been food as he and his fellow survivors are finally rescued, and prays on it.

Luque: There’s a few moments where the lighting is a little bit more punctuated in an obvious way. Like a ray of light coming and hitting you when [a character] dies. I relate these spiritualities to beauty—when nature or the human being transcends this pedestrian, everyday thing. We found this beautiful little creek in Uruguay, and we knew that the sun was going to set around there. And we said, “We need to be here for a little bit. We need to see this water, this flowing life happening in front of us.” By being a beautiful setup, suddenly it has this elevated spiritual quality.

Bayona: I was trying to find symbolic images that would tell the story in a subliminal way. And this is a very important moment in that it’s based upon something that Roberto had told me: He had a sock with food, and he decided to bury that sock and make a prayer. To me, it’s something very symbolic, very spiritual, almost religious; it’s that moment where the meat turns into spirit again. We went there very early in the morning. We waited for the sun to appear, and we synchronized the crane with the moment where the sun was rising. It was a beautiful, beautiful moment.

The Homecoming

The inspiration for this shot, which finds the survivors back home in the hospital, was The Last Supper*—and in this case, it really happened and looked just like this.*

Bayona: Again, they spent 72 days in the mountains. As soon as they got back to civilization, as they got into the hospital, they were separated. So imagine the big shock of being greeted as a hero when they felt miserable—almost like astronauts—and then separated after creating such a strong group. They found themselves alone in different rooms with big beds. What they did is they gathered together again. They came together again at night. This tells you that they’re going to be always there, in the mountain.

Luque: We went through the mountain, we went through coming back, and this was the last day of that first big stage of filming because then the actors gained weight. We waited for a month and a half, and then we shot the beginning of the story.

Bayona: This image resonates with the origin of the story—the book that was written 35 years after the accident. The survivors didn’t recognize themselves in the initial details. They didn’t recognize themselves in this story about heroism, about cannibalism. They wanted to tell the story again. This is exactly what they had to do when they came back to the hospital. They needed to come together, to look at each other. The movie ends up saying, “Please keep telling this tale.” It’s important. Stories are important. They set up something that becomes important in the minds of the people. This is what we do as storytellers. It’s not only about the fact, it’s about the narrative. We told the tale again.

This interview has been edited and condensed.