At film festivals, buzz builds quickly, and in Toronto this year, one of the first titles to catch fire was Paul Greengrass’ “The Lost Bus.” The film, which premiered Friday night, dramatizes a true story born of California’s deadliest wildfire. By the next morning, the film was already the talk of the festival — including among the filmmakers themselves, who don’t entirely agree on what kind of film they’ve made.
In 2018, California’s Camp Fire killed at least 85 people and displaced more than 50,000. Out of that devastation came an unlikely story of survival: bus driver Kevin McKay and teacher Mary Ludwig shepherded 22 children to safety as the flames tore through their hometown of Paradise.
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Working with co-writer Brad Ingelsby, Greengrass adapted Lizzie Johnson’s “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” into a tense blend of survival thriller and intimate drama. McKay, played by Matthew McConaughey, is depicted as a man already under strain, estranged from his teenage son and caring for a dying mother, who becomes the only driver able to answer a desperate call for help.
At TIFF this year, almost seven years after the fire, the film plays with unnerving timeliness. California is again recovering from record-breaking fires, and swathes of Europe have just endured their worst fire season in a century. In “The Lost Bus,” a weary fire chief played by “Severance” star Yul Vazquez, all but breaks the fourth wall: “Every year, the fires get bigger, and that’s the truth. We’re being damn fools.”
For producer Jamie Lee Curtis, “The Lost Bus” is about people, not politics. Speaking with IndieWire at the festival, she reacted to the suggestion that the film should be read as a climate-change parable. “This is not a political movie,” she said. “It’s a story of heroism, of resilience really, of truth.”
Greengrass sees it differently. He included only one direct reference to climate change, but believes the message reverberates implicitly. “I’ve made a fair number of films drawn from real events, and you always need a sense of responsibility,” he said. “Not just to the events but to the impact of your film in the world. If you get them right, and you’re lucky, they speak in some unspoken way to a bigger truth.”
That truth arrived uninvited during the film’s post-production. “We were in the last stages of mixing when the Los Angeles fires broke out,” Greengrass said. “And that was obviously shocking and eerie and surreal and dreadful. Our editor, Billy Goldenberg, who cut the film so beautifully, had to race back because he nearly lost his house. Reality broke into the film.”
As with his best-known films, “United 93” and “Captain Phillips,” Greengrass often likes to break reality into his own films, turning real-world crises into white-knuckle cinema. In “The Lost Bus,” Greengrass keeps the emotional thread of the story — McKay’s relationship with his son — as children grow increasingly distressed, an inferno encroaches, and the whole thing reaches an almost “Uncut Gems” level of intensity.
For McConaughey, the role was irresistible because of the father-son relationship at the film’s heart, as well as the relentless compression of agonizing decisions piled onto his character. He singled out an early sequence in which McKay, rushing to save his family, hears a dispatcher call about 22 stranded children. Thinking of his estranged teenage son and terminally ill mother, McKay waits and waits before answering the call.
“That was my favorite scene,” McConaughey said, laughing. “In another film, that choice could carry an entire act. Here it’s 35 seconds later. It’s doing a 180 right after you’ve done a 180.”
If the story itself was perilous, so was the shoot. “The Lost Bus” looks like a film that had a difficult production. When you learn that Greengrass insisted on putting a real school bus of children alongside a real fire, it seems not only difficult but dangerous. Shot on an abandoned campus near Santa Fe, New Mexico, fire was staged through controlled gas burns, augmented with carefully composited effects using footage he shot of real fires. The director calls it “a meticulous process of augmenting reality with what was real.”
As with many of his films, Greengrass uses a blend of people playing themselves alongside actors. Most of the firefighters seen in the film are the same crews who tackled the blazes at Paradise. California Fire chief John Messina plays himself, though in the film, he is “demoted” to deputy, working alongside Vazquez. For Greengrass, this is a technique to generate even greater verisimilitude.
“What happens is, anyone acting feels a great sense of confidence being surrounded by real professionals, because they then know what to say, how to say it, what the call signs are, all that stuff,” the director said. “They don’t feel that they’re pretending in a vacuum. But on the other hand, if you are, say, a group of professional firefighters turning up to reenact what you lived through in a movie, to be surrounded by some actors is an immense source of encouragement because they can teach you how to act. If you’re lucky, the actors stop acting and start to become like real people, and the real people start acting, and they all marry together. Then, you have something that has the smack of authenticity but also is moving your story along.”
Though McConaughey and America Ferrera are the faces of the film, it was set in motion by Curtis. The Oscar-winning actress traces her involvement back to a Washington Post article on Johnson’s book, followed by an NPR interview she heard while driving. Curtis pulled her car over, called producer Jason Blum, and told him, “I want to buy the book ‘Paradise’ and I want to make a film, and I think it’ll be the most important thing either one of us does as filmmakers in our lives.”
“We’re showing the decimation of a town in vivid detail,” said Curtis. “My job as a producer was really to be the bridge between the real-life people, John Messina, Kevin McKay, Mary Ludwig, and the fiction. I had to make Kevin and Mary understand who I was, who Paul was,” she said. “I promised them I would never lie, that I would honor Paradise and its heroes. Even though this would be released as entertainment, at its core, it had to have integrity.”
For Greengrass, integrity meant long days on the bus, rehearsing beside gas fires, and staging late-afternoon shoots timed to magic hour, chasing the “eclipse-like” glow he wanted on screen.
“It became a sort of terrifying adventure for all of us,” Greengrass said. “And in the end, that was the key to it. The sort of collective experience that Matthew and America were able to lead those children through is what gave it its intense reality and its emotional quality, and I think that’s what’s in the film.”
The morning after the premiere, Greengrass told IndieWire he was flying out to Germany later that day to begin production on his next film, a drama set in medieval England about a peasant uprising against the tyrannical rule of Richard II, starring Katherine Waterston and Andrew Garfield. “He’s wonderful,” said Greengrass. “He can do anything.”
“The Lost Bus” opens in select theaters on September 19 and streams on Apple TV+ from October 3.
