Overview

• Festival audiences and early reviewers praised Paul Greengrass’s immersive direction and Matthew McConaughey’s performance, with some awards chatter focused on technical categories.
• The docudrama recounts a bus driver and a teacher guiding 22 children through the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and devastated Paradise, California.
• Greengrass favors a quasi-documentary approach that uses practical fire effects and features real first responders and a dispatcher portraying themselves or adjacent roles.
• McConaughey said he drove the bus through large practical flames during filming and described multiple close calls, noting that child actors were not onboard for the most hazardous shots.
• Casting drew personal ties, including appearances by McConaughey’s son Levi and mother Kay, with Levi winning the role through an audition submitted without his last name, while producer Jamie Lee Curtis helped originate the project after discovering Lizzie Johnson’s reporting; coverage also notes PG&E’s multibillion-dollar payouts and manslaughter plea tied to the fire.