Ron Howard’s ‘Thirteen Lives’ Is Incredibly Accurate Except for 1 Element of Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen’s Dive Scenes

Ron Howard has directed countless movies since his days starring on TV’s Happy Days. On more than one occasion, Howard — who won an Academy Award for Best Director for 2001’s A Beautiful Mind — has drawn inspiration from a real-life story.

His latest movie, Amazon Prime Video‘s Thirteen Lives, certainly fits the bill. In fact, Howard’s movie only bent the truth in one big way.

Ron Howard’s ‘Thirteen Lives’ tells the true story of the Tham Luang Nang Non cave rescue

In Thirteen Lives, Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell star as British divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, respectively. In the summer of 2018, the real-life pair successfully found 12 young members of a junior association soccer team and their assistant coach.

They’d become trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non Cave in the Chiang Rai Province of northern Thailand. Monsoonal flooding prevented the young men from escaping the cave. Rescue efforts to extract the group of 13 from the cave system reportedly involved as many as 10,000 people, including divers, rescue workers, law enforcement, and military forces.

Since the story gained worldwide interest, the event was ripe for a film adaptation. Thirteen Lives has delivered with critics, according to its 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

‘Thirteen Lives’ makes one big change to what happened in real life

Howard previously dramatized real-life stories in films such as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Rush. Although he does take creative license in all cases, his depiction of the Tham Luang cave rescue stayed remarkably close to how the events played out in real life. In a recent interview, the real-life Stanton spoke about how close Thirteen Lives was to reality.

“It actually captures all the essence of the rescue as I recall it. … We were primarily there to be technical advisors on the diving scenes… The cave camp scenes, of which there’s also much, are hugely authentic,” Stanton said, according to Yahoo! Finance. However, one aspect of the movie did take liberty with how the event really happened, Stanton revealed:

“The biggest difference between [Thirteen Lives] and the rescue is the fact that when we were underwater, you couldn’t really see anything. And that would be impossible to demonstrate because then the viewers would not see anything. So you see shots of one or two divers in a row, and they’re communicating with each other and looking ahead. Of course, that wasn’t the reality.”

Colin Farrell had panic attacks while filming underwater

For Farrell, Thirteen Lives presented a distinct challenge. The actor is used to going all-in on his role — he underwent intensive prosthetics to star in The Batman, after all. But this role brought a “terrifying” new time on set as the actors filmed underwater. Farrell recently admitted the depth of his experience to Entertainment Tonight:

“It was scary. … They built a really impressive network of caves. It was about four or five different caves that were based on the topography of the caves, the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, and they filled them full of water, and we’d go down and there was no up.

There’s a lot to be said for being able to look up in water and see the surface, so when you can’t and there’s actually a ceiling over your head, and there’s no air at all, it just wreaks havoc on my mind.”

Farrell went on to say he had “panic attacks underwater.” While the actor got a taste for the harrowing real-life cave rescue, perhaps he can take solace in Thirteen Lives’ warm reception by critics.

The movie premiered briefly to select theaters in July 2022 and is currently available to stream exclusively on Amazon Prime Video.