A personal Thai viewpoint on the incredible effort to save 13 people from a flooded cave in 2018 is promised in a new series that debuted on Thursday (Sept. 22).
The most recent depiction of the incident on television is Netflix's six-episode Thai drama Thai Cave Rescue, which debuted just one month after Thirteen Lives on Amazon.
Gunn and Miller, who cowrote the six-part series, had exclusive access to the experiences of the lads, even though the tale of the rescue had already been portrayed in documentaries and a feature film.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the duo, who also collaborated on ABC's political thriller Designated Survivor, were unable to travel to Thailand to interview the boys and their families.
As a result, they hired a documentary film crew and communicated with them via Zoom as they put the script together. After that, they spent seven months on location in Thailand as part of the production. They anticipate that the end outcome will be the first representation of these events that puts the impacted families first.
The most recent retelling aims to examine the young players and their family in more detail. Director Nattawut Poonpiriya remarked, 'I think the series covers some things that haven't been depicted properly, including the world of the students and their coach before it happened.'
One of the toughest obstacles, according to the 41-year-old, who is best known for the critically acclaimed Thai heist thriller Bad Genius (2017), was portraying all aspects of the intricate rescue. He had the ability to convey the story because of the series' length—each episode lasted roughly 50 minutes.
'It allowed us to emphasize the personalities and situations they were in and really display the intricacies,' he said.
He emphasized the challenge of faithfully portraying former Thai Navy SEAL Saman Gunan, who passed away during the mission and was later honored as a national hero, with a statue placed outside the cave. The cast of Thai Cave Rescue filmed outside and near the actual cave, as opposed to earlier films that recreated the underground complex.
We shot in their actual homes. Monsoon season was when we shot. It was not simple, but it was done voluntarily. We worked extremely diligently and extensively with all of our Thai partners—Thai casting, our Thai director and production crew, and particularly the boys and the families who experienced it—because authenticity was very essential to us.
Similar to the rescue squad, our team was multinational, with individuals from many backgrounds joining us and cooperating well with their Thai colleagues.
We wanted to make sure that our lifestyle was as similar to theirs as possible. We felt strongly that the show's ethos should accurately reflect what actually occurred. The actual boys' family wanted to make sure the burial scene—a flashback with the coach—we shot was accurate.
They constructed everything with the help of our set decoration team; the food served and the bowls employed were both of their creation. There was such amazing kindness and charity.