When Paul Greengrass first learned about the fires consuming Los Angeles this past January, he was almost finished editing The Lost Bus—a film about
When Paul Greengrass first learned about the fires consuming Los Angeles this past January, he was almost finished editing The Lost Bus—a film about the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive blaze in California history. Every day, he had been looking at images of fire sweeping through a California town, leaving devastation in its wake. Now here it was again, happening in real life.
“It was distressing,” Greengrass says. His editor, William Goldenberg, had to rush home when his family was evacuated; a few members of his crew lost their homes as the flames tore through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. “We were looking at what we’d created, and then seeing what was going on, and they were the same images, really.”
The Camp Fire in Northern California raged for two weeks, burning more than 150,000 acres, displacing more than 50,000 people, and causing 85 fatalities. Greengrass captures that devastating disaster’s early hours with a ticking-clock drama centered on a school bus driver (Matthew McConaughey) and an elementary school teacher (America Ferrera) who are racing to rescue a vehicle filled with children from the encroaching fire. As the novel trailer—exclusively debuting with Vanity Fair—reveals, the film centers on a deeply personal, true story while also capturing the epic nature of the fire, as well as the rescuers battling it as it ripped through the miniature town of Paradise.
The Lost Bus will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before Apple TV+ releases it in select theaters September 19 and on streaming October 3. It would be an emotional moviegoing experience no matter what, led by a past Oscar winner and a recent Oscar nominee. But much of the Hollywood community is still reeling from the most recent fires, making this story—and its underlying messages—all the more powerful. Greengrass and his team could never have anticipated its resonance. “I never want films to be bleak,” Greengrass says. “I’ve made films about difficult subjects, but I always want them to be life-affirming and drive towards hope. Because otherwise, what’s the point?”
Jamie Lee Curtis was at her home in Idaho when she stumbled upon a Washington Post story by Lizzie Johnson, sharing a chapter of her book about the 2018 Camp Fire that centered on a bus driver. “I was alone in a cabin in the woods, and I remember saying out loud to myself, ‘Well, that’s the movie,’” Curtis says. Then, the next day, she was listening to NPR while driving to her sister’s house, and Johnson joined the show to once again talk about the story of the bus driver that was in her book. Curtis immediately pulled over on the side of the road and emailed Jason Blum, the prolific movie producer who runs Blumhouse Productions. “I want to buy it, and I believe it’s going to be the most important thing you and I ever do together,” Curtis, who has a first-look deal with Blumhouse, wrote to him in the email. Blumhouse was open to it, and soon enough, Curtis had tracked down Johnson’s agent and they acquired the rights.
Johnson’s book is much more wide-ranging than the film, capturing personal stories of the Camp Fire while taking a wider look at the causes and lasting effects of that destruction. But Curtis thought the movie would be possible if they focused on this one specific story. “Because it felt contained on a bus in the middle of this inferno that perhaps we could tell it on a smaller scale,” she says. Greengrass, who cowrote the script with Mare of Easttown writer Brad Ingelsby, felt that his film should focus on a particular true story of heroism, but also wanted to make sure they captured the enormity of the fire and its impact. “He said, ‘the only way you can tell this is you have to have the perspective, and you can’t get the perspective from inside,” Curtis says. “ And he’s totally right.”
So they centered the film on Kevin McKay, played by McConaughey—a local bus driver who’s struggling with his own family life when he learns that 22 children need to be evacuated from their school. “What I like about Matthew particularly is he’s a leading man, a movie star, and a character actor all in one,” Greengrass says. “And he has a particular understanding of those kinds of communities, blue-collar communities.”
Greengrass, who is also known for directing several of the Jason Bourne films, compares making The Lost Bus to his 2013 best-picture nominee, Captain Phillips. At first glance, the two projects couldn’t be more different: The latter is about a mariner (Tom Hanks) who is taken hostage by Somali pirates. But both movies operate real-life incidents to tell a story about bravery, resilience, and hope. Both also take place in very contained locations, which Greengrass sees as an advantage rather than a limitation. “That kind of compression can help your drama. It can make it much more intense,” he says.
As the fire forces them to take stock of their lives and choices, both main characters in The Lost Bus grapple with regret—remorse that they didn’t take action in their personal lives sooner. For Greengrass, those feelings speak to a bigger issue: climate change, which humanity ignored until it was possibly too tardy to fix. “All those stories intersect, but you never have to say it,” he says.
Recreating fire in a world so vulnerable to the element’s destruction wasn’t an effortless task. “You aren’t allowed to put the environment at the risk of creating a fire,” Greengrass says. “So that required us to have very controlled gas burning, which is highly, highly specific.”
He and his team used both practical fires and visual effects to recreate the giant inferno that consumed the Northern California towns, and filmed in New Mexico, with many scenes taking place at an abandoned college campus in Santa Fe.
At first, Greengrass planned to film many of the bus scenes on a soundstage. He’d discovered in his research that once a giant fire’s smoke covers the sky, it creates a surreal and ominous half-light. Replicating that outdoors seemed complex. “The only time really that you can get that light is at what they call the ‘magic hour,’ when day turns to night. You get a very narrow window of 40 minutes or so,” he says.
But about halfway through prep, he changed course. Greengrass decided to have McConaughey and Ferrera rehearse for several hours during the day, then film during that single hour. “We got essentially three takes: One that was a little bit light, one that was just right, and one that was a little bit dark, but you could make them work.” It was a gamble that paid off, recreating the sense of urgency that the characters would be feeling. “It gave them a kind of rawness and a freedom and immediacy,” he says. “You suddenly felt like you were in a theatrical experience—a stage play where you could only perform it once, and that was it.”
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