![]() ![]() ![]() Every 30 minutes or so during the risky return journey, each boy was to be dosed with ketamine to keep them sedated. Stanton asked Harris to sedate the boys with tranquillisers before they were extracted, one by one, each accompanied by an expert cave diver on their journey of more than five hours through murky waters in constricted tunnels back to safety. So he summoned his Australian friend and colleague Richard “Harry” Harris (played in the film by Joel Edgerton), who is not only a cave diver but also an anaesthetist, to join the rescue operation. He realised that because the boys had no experience of cave diving, they would need to be unconscious as they were carried through kilometres of narrow, twisting and claustrophobic tunnels filled with water. One Thai navy Seal diver had already drowned in the flooded caverns while trying to take oxygen canisters through the narrow tunnels to the trapped group when Stanton had a crazy but brilliant idea. Ron Howard with young cast members on the Thirteen Lives set. They survived for 18 days on an elevated rock 4km from the cave mouth, with hardly any food but sustained by meditation led by the 25-year-old coach, Ekaphol Chantawong, a former monk. The boys, aged from 11 to 16-years-old, had gone into the cave after football practice and got trapped by flood water. Stanton was one of five cavers – “I call myself a caver, not a diver, and definitely not a spelunker, because that’s American” – who rescued 12 boys of the Wild Boars soccer team and their coach from the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand in June 2018. “I’d never really thought who would play me in a film, but he’d be up there.” “When I found out it was Viggo Mortensen, I was very pleased,” says Stanton, eyes glinting. Ian McKellen? Andy Serkis? Probably not Cate Blanchett. He had cast someone who had been in Lord of the Rings to play Stanton in his new movie, Thirteen Lives. One day Rick Stanton, a retired firefighter, got a phone call at his home in Coventry in England.
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