Efe

Updated Thursday, February 8, 2024-12:01

  • Cinema The Spanish setting of 'The Snow Society': how they recreated the Andes accident in Sierra Nevada

  • Cinema The Snow Society: Bayona against the impunity of cynicism (****)

Juan Antonio Bayona

wanted

The Snow Society

to breathe reality, hence he resorted to scientific advice to ensure that

thirty actors lost up to 30 kilos in a couple of months

, in line with the victims of the accident of Force flight 571 Uruguayan Air Force in Los Andes, in 1972.

The production team also adapted the filming times at the accident site to the climate and meteorological recommendations so that the Valley of Tears, located on a glacier that has shrunk by 60% since 1972, looked as similar as possible to what it was like 50 years ago, with hardly any impact from climate change.

The Córdoba doctors and researchers

Antonio Escribano father (endocrine) and son (internal medicine)

are responsible for 30 actors between 18 and early twenties adapting, chronologically, their body composition and weight to what they experienced of the victims, and

going from from looking like rugby players at the beginning of the film to being emaciated

and almost 30 kilos lighter two months later.

"The challenge was to do this work not with one or two actors as has been done other times in the cinema, but with 30 at a time and achieving such a rapid weight loss process in

extreme recording conditions (at -15 degrees ) will not affect either his health or his abilities

to interpret the characters," explains Antonio Escribano Sr. in an interview with EFE.

The 'biochemical script'

In October 2021, as soon as they arrived in Barcelona to start working on the scripts, the Escribano did all kinds of tests on the actors:

exhaustive body composition study

, which said where their fat or protein levels were, absolute analysis of all parameters, functional tests of oxygen consumption or ventilation, and maximum exhaustion tests.

As a result, they developed 30 biochemical scripts to adapt the real appearance of each actor to the film script and shooting times, in total "a treatise of nearly 7,000 pages."

From October 2021 to the beginning of 2022 (when filming begins), the doctors focus on

individualized nutritional plans

so that the actors gain muscle and weight (between 3 and 8 kilos) so that at the beginning of filming, which took a cadence similar to that of the accident, they look like athletes going to a competition.

While

from February to May 22 the key was to achieve extreme weight losses (between 20 and 30 kilos)

, adapted to the demands of filming, where suddenly an actor had to lose 4 kilos in just 3 days or remain stabilized for 15, without compromising health.

Act without showing hunger

The Escribano improvised a clinic with all their equipment in one of the hotel rooms where the crew stayed for much of the filming,

in a town near Sierra Nevada

, and they worked with the catering cooks to prepare recipes adjusted to the biochemical script.

"The majority of the actors were Argentine, so we looked for dishes that they liked and we made them very low in calories, achieving a 70-calorie Milanese, empanadas with a very soft puff pastry; up to 30 light soup recipes for dinners , or strategies to deceive hunger with chocolate-flavored jellies, low-fat yogurts or calorie-free candies," he details.

The challenge, he insists, "was not only to lose more than 20 kilos in a couple of months or to achieve apparently deteriorated body morphologies for the actors who clean up after the rescue, but to

do it without interfering with the correct functioning of the brain, to memorize and dramatize your papers

".

To do this, they took

nutritional supplements

tailored to each case, "which did not lack coverage of vitamins such as A, B, C and precise amounts of selenium, zinc and iron," reveals the doctor, who confesses that his obsession and that of His goal was that "nothing would happen to the actors."

Climate change

Although most of the exteriors of

The Snow Society

are filmed in Granada, the backgrounds are real, recorded in the valley of tears, in the Andes.

When, helped and advised by mountaineers, part of the team went to record there in October 2021, the same month but 49 years after the catastrophe, they encountered another reality: that of climate change.

"It was a disaster, there was hardly any snow, everything looked brown

," Margarita Huguet, production director of the Goya-nominated film, told EFE.

In addition to the shrinking of the glacier, the valley "has lost 30% of its snow coverage since then, due to the lack of precipitation in winter and because high temperatures cause the snow to melt earlier," the climatologist from the University of Santiago de Chile Raúl Cordero.

After a first failed attempt, Huguet sought advice on meteorology and climate, and based on this

he organized a second filming in the Andes, in August 2022

(peak of the southern winter), in which Bayona and his team do manage to give the spectators a white image similar to that of '72, with the exception that 2 years ago the coverage of snow under their feet was not 4 meters, as then, but just over one.

Both Cordero and Huguet agree that if the accident had occurred last October, it would have been impossible to save lives: the snow cover would have been insufficient for the central part of the plane to slide or to preserve the bodies of the deceased for food. of them without getting sick.