“As soon as I asked the question, I f**king knew I made a mistake.”
As we mentioned a few weeks back, Colin Farrell could be looking at some serious Oscar buzz next year thanks to his role in new true-life drama Thirteen Lives.
The movie was originally due for release in cinemas in April this year, but following the buy-out of MGM by Amazon Prime Video, the release date was pushed back. The other reason for the release date change was that, following early test screenings, the movie received the highest scores from audiences in the entire history of MGM.
Directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon), it tells the story of the divers who volunteered to lead the rescue mission to save the young boys football team that was trapped in a Thai cave following a flash flood in 2018, with Farrell playing John Volanthen, who was joined by Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton).
In the run-up to the movie, JOE sat down with Farrell to discuss the movie and his incredible 2022 so far – The Batman, After Yang, the upcoming The Banshees of Inisherin – and you can watch that interview in full right here:
During our chat with Farrell, in which he confessed his fear for filming so many of his scenes in enclosed spaces underwater – “You didn’t want to be behind me as I crop-dusted my way through those caves!” – we asked about the particular dangers of making a movie like this.
Turns out, Farrell asked the exact same question:
“I asked one of the divers. We had loads of safety divers, by the way. We had extraordinary eyes on us at all times. And we were drilled about the right things to do over and over again, we really had an amazing team.
“But I asked one of the safety divers one day while we were shooting the shit in the water, because we spent like 40 or 50% of the whole film in the water, in between takes, chatting and stuff.
“And I remember asking one of the divers, so out of the all the films you did – and this diver had done 15 or 20 films underwater, doing stunts and stuff – and I said ‘What is the most dangerous film you did?’, and as soon as I asked it, I fucking knew I made a mistake.
“And the diver literally went (mimes looking around the room), ‘This one’. And I said ‘Really?!’ and they went ‘Yeah. There is a part of the tunnel, there are a few parts, where we leave you, we leave looking at you, so that we can pick you up at the next part. If something happens in that moment, we might be in a bit of trouble’.”
“And I was like ‘God!’, because that was week three, and we had like six weeks left, so I was like ‘Fuck!'”
Thankfully, as Colin also confirms in our interview, nobody was injured during the making of the movie, so everything turned out great, but all of that behind-the-scenes tension is absolutely on the screen in the finished product for everyone to see.
Thirteen Lives is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, 5 August.
Clip via Amazon Prime Video UK
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