More than three decades before Netflix’s Society of the Snow, which revisits the true story of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, Alive made an indelible impact. Frank Marshall directed the 1993 movie that was produced by his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, and focuses on the Uruguay rugby team’s chartered flight that crashed en route to a game in Chile.
Based on the 1974 nonfiction book by Piers Paul Read, the film starred Ethan Hawke as Nando Parrado, one of 16 survivors (out of 45 on board) rescued two months after the accident. Parrado served as technical adviser for Alive and talked with castmembers about the ordeal, which involved passengers resorting to cannibalism to survive. The film depicted the harrowing crash using VFX tricks from Industrial Light & Magic. “We are trying to create a realistic plane crash and not throw you out of the movie by having something that looks like it doesn’t have any weight or for which the perspective is wrong,” Marshall told THR at the time. Vincent Spano, who played the team captain, recalls having to bulk up to embody an athlete before quickly shifting to a restrictive diet. Pivotal scenes were shot on a glacier in British Columbia, where Spano remembers “being weighed every morning,” with breakfast consisting of a piece of toast and small jam square. Buena Vista released Alive on Jan. 15, 1993, and it earned $36 million ($78 million today). J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, which is Spain’s Oscar submission for best international feature, adapts Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book with a cast of mostly unknown Uruguayan and Argentine actors.
Spano found watching the new film to be an emotional experience that brought back memories. He says of Alive: “The story was told in a beautiful and touching way, and it just shines a light on hope in any situation.”
This story first appeared in the Jan. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.