Tom Waller: First in The Cave

by FilmInk Staff

In 2018, a group of kids and their teacher were rescued from a flooded cave in Northern Thailand after a massive international operation was mounted to save them. A major media event, the story of the ‘Wild Boars’ and their ordeal in Tham Luang of the Chiang Rai Province, created a ‘feeding frenzy’ amongst big-brand players, says Tom Waller who has made The Cave, the first dramatic feature about the incident.

Shot in 2019 on a relatively low budget for this kind of real-life action-drama, Waller’s film has beaten to the screen Ron Howard’s blockbuster version (shot in Australia) and a Netflix series about the rescued children.

Waller divides his time between a filmmaking base in Thailand where he operates as a producer and director and his home in Ireland where he spoke to FilmInk about his desire to “tell a story about the unsung heroes of the Thai Cave rescue, the ones you never heard about on the news.”

Even during the crisis, entertainment biz stakeholders began working on plans for films and tv shows, which was a bit spooky?

“Yes! To me it just smacked of vultures circling. The kids had not even made it out of the cave. I was slightly disgusted by the idea that someone might want to make a film without even knowing how it would end. I probably would not have made the film if there was no happy ending. The story was one of triumph and hope. I was only interested in making a film after all of that had played out.”

Waller says he was born in Bangkok, his mother is Thai, father Irish, and educated in the UK.

The story you tell in The Cave involves an Irish connection, tell us about that?

“That came out of a number of things to be honest. There was a bunch of people who just dropped everything to help at the cave site. Those were the stories that interested me. I came across one of the divers who came from Ireland.”

This was Jim Warny?

“Right! He knew one of the divers. Offered his help. Fortuitously, he lives in the next county to where I live in Ireland. I went to see him and over a cup of tea he told me his story.”

He plays ‘himself’ in the movie and he’s very good. You cast a few other real payers, what drove that decision?

“Well, the challenge from the beginning, was ‘how to do a film like this without someone like Tom Hanks in the lead?’ The life rights to all of the kids have been sold [to Netflix]. It limits the scope of the film [in terms of the kind of story one can tell]. I had to centre it around the rescuers and tell the story from outside the cave rather than inside. Then I had to ask, ‘who can play a Belgian – Jim is a Belgian national – and speaks with an Irish accent – and can convincingly be an expert cave diver’, and then I just thought ‘who better to play Jim than Jim?’ I auditioned him on my iphone. I then thought who else can I get?”

Waller cast other real-life players including divers Tan Xiaolong (China), Erik Brown (Canada), Mikko Paasi (Finland). Technically mixing experienced actors with non-performers can be a challenge?

“It was about finding people who didn’t need to act the role but could be the role.”

Like the many roles here of officials, police and military?

“Right. I cast a lot of people who were ex-military and now work in security. They would improve the characters just by having them in the roles, adding dialogue, or changing it [so it had greater verisimilitude].”

The film is very dramatic, but it doesn’t feel very movie-like, it is very immediate, like it’s really happening, and the cameras are there to capture it.

“The cinematographer is actually Australian, Wade Muller. He comes from a news background. I wanted a doco style. The rest of the crew were Thai. They were very experienced. Many had worked on very big international films made in Thailand. They were the reason why we could create very convincing crowd scenes of hundreds of people and make it look like thousands. We had only a week with those big scenes and the entire film took just over thirty days. In real life, there was probably ten thousand people. We couldn’t really show the magnitude of the event with the budget we had. But we do convey that this was an international event in Thailand and unprecedented.”

Did you have access to the real cave?

“Not until the very end. We built a ‘cave set’ over an abandoned pool in Bangkok. It had different material for its construction – below the water line it was made of red resin that played on screen very convincingly. It’s a challenge to get a cast and crew into a real cave because they are filled with creepy-crawlies [laughs]. For the underwater scenes, we went for a more authentic look. Jim himself said it was like diving through Guinness.”

The Cave dramatises disturbing facts about the rescue that remained under the radar at the time. The rescue was rated with a 60% chance of success.

“Right. Most cave rescues involve recovering/rescuing other expert cave divers. These were kids. Most had never had even worn a [breathing] mask. It made rescue very dangerous.”

There were challenges in ‘managing’ this. The strict perimeter around the scene seemed to make sense until you realise that it was limiting help that might make the difference between success and failure. You tell the story of Nopadol Niyomka (who plays himself), a water pump manufacturer, who faced bureaucratic scepticism…

“He was a real hero. He drove 1000s of kms to be there. No one asked him to.”

His pumps were ultimately used to get the water level down and keep the momentum of the rescue moving.

“It was a very stressful situation; the crisis management early in the rescue was not brilliant.”

The film was controversial in Thailand – for criticising ‘officialdom’.

“There was nothing sinister about it [on the government’s part]. We were very honest.”

How has the film played in Thailand?

“We opened there, last year, before the lockdown and more than half a million people saw it and that’s a great result for a small independent Thai film. It’s already played in more countries than any Thai film ever has. Our film was made under the radar. Since I’m a Thai national I did not require the sort of permissions [an outsider would]. The film is very authentic to the Thai experience. One of the things I wanted to put in the film was that in Thailand, the Spirit World was as much a presence as the world of the living; the power of prayer is just as important as the divers going in to get them out. That is maybe something you won’t see in the Hollywood version.”

The Cave is in cinemas August 19. Head to the website to find where it’s playing near you.