‘Thirteen Lives’ True Story: How Ron Howard Recreated the Thai Soccer Team Cave Rescue (2024)

Thirteen Lives, which was released on Amazon Prime on Friday, is the second feature film in less than a year to tell the true story of the soccer team that was trapped in, and then rescued from, a cave in Thailand. But you can’t blame director Ron Howard for taking on the tale so soon after the documentary, The Rescue, because it really is an incredible story.

Thirteen Lives offers a dramatization of these real-life events, which took place over the span of two weeks in June and July in 2018. Actors Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, and Tom Bateman star in the lead roles, as the British divers who were part of the international diver rescue team that eventually got all of the trapped victims out alive.

It’s a thrilling tale that will have you on the edge of your seat, especially knowing that all of this happened in real life. But also… did it? Hollywood has been known to stretch the truth, so read on to find out what we know about how accurate Thirteen Lives is to the true story of the Tham Luang Nang Non cave rescue.

Is 13 Lives based on a true story?

Yes. Thirteen Lives is based on the true story of a rescue mission in 2018, in which 12 members of a boys soccer team, ages 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old coach, were retrieved after being trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand. Thirteen Lives mostly focuses not on the soccer team, but on the British divers who helped save them, including Richard Stanton (played by Viggo Mortensen), John Volanthen (played by Colin Farrell), and Richard Harris (played by Joel Edgerton).

What is the true story of the Thai soccer team cave rescue?

You may remember hearing about the story on the news, or via the critically-acclaimed National Geographic documentary about the event, The Rescue, about the Thai boys’ soccer team that was trapped in a cave for over two weeks, after heavy rainfall flooded the cave exit and pushed them deep into the depths of cave. They were rescued by a team of international divers, led by five Thai military SEALs divers, four British and two Australian divers. While all 12 boys and their soccer coach made it out of the cave alive, one of the divers died of asphyxiation during an attempted rescue. One year after the operation, another rescue diver died of a blood infection sustained during the rescue, bringing the death toll of the operation up to two. The rescue effort reached an unprecedented international scale, with over 10,000 people involved in the effort.

How accurate is Thirteen Lives to the true story?

Because Netflix currently owns the rights to the story of the soccer team’s experience, most the Amazon movie is focused on the actual rescue effort. (The Rescue documentary ran into a similar ordeal.) Though Thirteen Lives filmed in Australia, not in Thailand, director Ron Howard and his team worked hard to recreate the caves, using footage from the news and a PBS segment.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Howard explained that he poured over schematics of the actual caves in order to recreate them on a set. “[The colors] are so vivid in particular to Thailand, and counterbalanced by the grayness and the darkness of the rain and the weather patterns that were moving in constantly,” Howard said. “Once Molly began to understand what the obstacles were in those caves—whether it was because it was so tight, of the stalactites, or of the current—she began to design the sets with her team and look at my storyboards.”

That said, they did not create an exact replica of the cave. For example, the movie design created a clear-cut path for news to travel through “chambers,” which was not the way the real cave was laid out. In the same interview with Vanity Fair, production designer Molly Hughes said, “I liked the idea of literally seeing the news travel. I designed the relationship of the edge cave entrance to the camp, so that you could always be looking down on this expanse of camp from the top of the stairs.” The movie team also consulted real-life divers involved in the rescue to see if the proposed details in the movie could plausibly have happened, even if it wasn’t exactly how it went down IRL.

The movie also focuses on a restaurant owner named Thanet Natisri (played by Nophand Boonyai in the movie), who led efforts to divert water diversion in the mountains near the cave, to help the divers better access the cave. Hughes told Vanity Fair how, with the help of the real Thanet Natisri, they recreated the landscape in a way that felt true to the actual story, while also still doable for a Hollywood movie. “We were able to talk to the real Thanet, and he had so many charts and graphs and spent a lot of time with us,” Hughes said. “We simplified [the dam] for the camera; it was a much more complex effort on his part than what we grabbed, down to the basics: How to tell this story of the sinkholes and the sandbagging and diverting the water as simply as we could.”

In other words, while some details were changed in the name of both a Hollywood narrative and practicality, Thirteen Lives is an incredible true story that did, in fact, happen. No wonder there are so many movies about it already!