Encore: Thai Cave Rescue | On the Set of Thirteen Lives with Rick Stanton | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last four episodes, we revisited our very first series on the daring rescue of a boys' soccer team trapped inside a cave in Thailand. When the series first aired, we brought on Rick Stanton, one of the British cave divers who was called in to help lead the rescue.

We'll play a portion of that conversation in a bit, but first, we're bringing Rick back for an update. Since our last chat, his book Aquanaut, A Life Beneath the Surface, was released worldwide. Rick also flew to Australia to consult on the set of the new film 13 Lives, directed by Ron Howard and inspired by The Rescue. Viggo Mortensen of The Lord of the Rings fame plays Rick in the movie. Our conversation is coming up next.

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Well, Rick, since we last spoke, a lot of exciting things have happened. And you were just getting ready to fly out to the set of 13 Lives in Australia to consult for the film. And I guess I'm curious just how this all happens. Does Ron Howard call you up on the phone one day and say, hey, what you doing? You'd like to think so, but no, that's not how it happened. Look, if you had produced the script for a movie such as this,

13 people stuck in a cave, all get out and the circumstances of their extrication. I think that would have been rejected. It was just too far fetched. But clearly, once the event had happened, there were lots of movie makers knocking on our doors with offers for life rights and things which we didn't even understand. So we sort of navigated through that with some help from friends.

We attached ourselves to two producers, PJ Sandvik and Gabrielle Tanner, who seemed the most credible. And it was speculation. Not all films get made. This was clearly ripe for a Hollywood movie. They then assigned...

script researchers, script writers, produced a script, had their life rights. And then at that point, they went to Hollywood to say, look, we've got a bit of a deal here. We've got the rights of the divers, the script from an Oscar winning script writer, Bill Nicholson. And it's at that point when we were quite well involved, like a year into the whole event that Ron Howard came on board. You know, we've all seen Apollo 13. There's lots of parallels there.

you couldn't get a better director for this sort of genre of film. And so that was exciting. And then later, we had Zoom talks with Ron. Everything he said seemed credible about making the movie. And then one day, I got a phone call from him. We've got an actor who wants to, we'd like to play you. I can't tell you his name. He's in Lord of the Rings. He's age appropriate.

But he will only play you if he has access to you to get to know you and know your character. And what was that like, having somebody play you in a movie? You're coaching someone on how to be you. Was that a challenge? Well, not for me. I'm sure it was for Vigo. It was COVID times.

Vigo was locked down in his house in Europe. So we just started talking on Zoom with video. And we just hit it off on the first time, spent hours and hours talking online.

He wasn't just learning how to talk like me, but it's obvious now that he was picking up mannerisms and all sorts to get to play me with authenticity. Well, the only Vigo I know is Aragorn with the sword in the search for the rings. So I'm sure he was a great guy, especially since he was so interested in learning really all about you. But let me ask you one more thing, Rick.

You've done so many challenging things in your life after all this and all the cave rescuing in general. It's just a very difficult thing, full of challenges. Filmmaking, I'm assuming, also has some challenges. Can you talk to us about that? Well, clearly, I've never been involved in any filmmaking in my life and I knew nothing about it. But it was absolutely fascinating to be there on set, see how it's done.

playing quite a pivotal role. Technical advisor was my title, but just...

showing the principal actors, Colin and Vigo, how to dive like us. Our diving's very esoteric, our equipment's unusual, just getting them familiar with that. But these are guys that are used to taking direction, so you just had to dress them and make them appear like us and say, follow us, look what we're doing and copy it, and that is their craft.

So they were perfect at that. And they looked as if they had...

amassed 40 years of cave diving experience. And Colin, of course, is Colin Farrell, who plays your real life dive partner, John Volanthen in the movie. Yes. I guess I, there's a, in my head, there's kind of a comparison to maybe a sushi chef and a cave diver, where if they're good, you know, because every, every movement is calculated. It's almost, almost an art form, it seems, but you were able to coach these Hollywood actors into this very difficult activity. And you're saying it,

It worked. It absolutely worked. And I was actually possibly going to be a stunt double to play myself, which sounds ridiculous. And every day I went into makeup to look like Rick Stanton. I'd walk out the makeup trailer saying, do I look like me yet? But there was no need because clearly I cannot act like

And Viggo and Colin took to the role so greatly that they just wanted for continuity, they wanted to do all the diving scenes themselves

And that brought in a much better film because then the cameras could hone in on their faces to show it was them. Yeah, and it's an intense activity. It'd be very hard to act and kind of show the strenuous nature of cave diving when you've never done it before. So it's very cool to hear they did it themselves. And why have me doing it? If I had been a quality actor like that, maybe I would have been a principal character in Lord of the Rings. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Which one would you choose to be? Well, it'd have to be an Aragorn, wouldn't it? Exactly. So you said it was your first time on a movie set and you said it was fascinating, but what was the most fascinating thing you saw on the set? I mean, there were so many things that only I'm a technical person, just the technical side of it, the huge sunshade, which was like 20 meters by 15 meters to cast shadows, the rain, the direction of

you know, 250 extras all doing the same thing. Take after take after take. And I guess, look, this is a feel-good movie of a feel-good event being directed by

you know, one of the top Hollywood directors, the crew who were working on it on the Gold Coast in Australia, they were all saying, and I have no comparison, that the vibe on the set from the director down to the lowest person, how, what a fantastic energy and enthusiasm that everyone had for this movie. Hmm.

I think you only get that when people love the job and people love the project. I think everyone was totally on board with it. And I've got to tell you, when I arrived on set or started meeting people, I

so many of them had like for their background information had listened to the Wondery podcast and gleaned their information of the rescue from that. Well, that's pretty flattering, got to say. And of course, a completely different, this is in Australia, so a completely different continent. So I was quite amazed. A lot of people might think that Hollywood's

sometimes, you know, adds a bit of frosting on top or they might not do the things that they show that they're doing. But from what I understand and from what you've been saying, you were shooting in actual caves to recreate these dives? No, the caves were actually sets. They made caves. They made caves. The scope of what they were doing was incredible. We had this massive industrial warehouse

They basically knocked up four pools, swimming pools, 20 by 15 meters, flooded them, built the sets, and then lowered them into these pools. The scale of it was enormous. That wasn't the answer I expected, actually. Look, a cave is an uncontrolled environment. You can't control the visibility, the currents, anything.

They're awkward to get in and out of because by their nature, they are tunnels. But here we have sets where you could have access holes for cameras. Sometimes they were open along the sides so you could have cameras tracking the divers. And eventually the divers became so adept that they were filming themselves. The idea of them recreating a cave system on land is...

It's just kind of mind-blowing for me because there's such complicated things, right, with stalactites and stalagmites and just shifting passageways. When you saw it all come together, did it look familiar to you? This might be a strange answer, but most caves to me, it was just a tube.

winding tube full of stalagmites. They all look the same, but it was incredibly realistic, incredibly realistic. And what the main difference, of course, was that when we were doing this for real, we couldn't see. So I have never seen the cave because I was underwater and I couldn't see a foot in

in front of me, maybe two on a good day. So I've never seen the cave and lots of people have been in since and would have seen far more than me when they've walked through in the dry. So it's so funny. I couldn't tell you what the cave looks like. I can tell you what it feels like. Yeah, because of the silt washout, the visibility would have been terrible. So of course, seeing it all right there laid in front of you would have been a bit unfamiliar because you're in soup. Filming a soup and

clanky noises of people progressing through a soup is not a movie. No, it's not. That is one of the main differences between the movie and reality for obvious reasons. And when you saw that final result on screen, did it look like real caves? Oh yeah, nobody would know the difference. The diving shots are, no one would know they're not real caves. It'd be impossible to tell the difference.

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When you were watching the final product, was there a particular moment that really stuck with you? Like, wow, they really got that? Got it right? Well, the diving, because Jason Mallinson and myself were there, the diving scenes are

really good recreations of what happened. But for me, it's the scenes outside the cave, the cave camp, you know, where everybody was, the chaos, it captures that. It captures the atmosphere of that perfectly. You've got, you know, the chaos, the drama, the tension, you know, the parents there every day, never left.

and the concern on their faces, it absolutely captured that just like the real event.

And obviously this is a huge Hollywood film. And how important was it for Ron and the screenwriter, William Nicholson, to get the story right? Did they ask for your input on the story? Oh, yes. Even before Bill Nicholson came on board, we were talking to script researchers so they had our story. They spoke to everyone so they had a broad understanding from many people's perspective. And from that, they chose the storyline and then

I met with Bill Nicholson, he came to our house and John's house and to like get to know us and get to see how we lived and, you know, just spend some time to get to know our characters so he could be more authentic in our characters. You know, they take aspects of our characters and sort of condense them or the ones, the elements they want and then magnify those. So it's a sort of caricature of our personality.

And when you were speaking to Vigo, what kind of questions did he have for you? We put any dialogue where Vigo was involved, he would ask, how would I say that? So we put it completely in my voice.

But we just chatted, to be honest. We just chatted away about anything, politics. I don't know, anything. We just spoke for hours and hours. But it was clear that he wasn't just listening to my voice. He was just assimilating my character as we were chatting. That was clear from having watched his performance. He was picking up on things that I didn't know I did.

And when your friends and family saw Vigo play you on screen, what did they have to say? So they said they picked up on things that I do that I'm not aware of myself. I roll my eyes. How the hell do you teach yourself to roll your eyes like somebody else? That's amazing. Yeah.

The thing is, when you make things like podcasts or movies, you put so much time in, it goes out, and you kind of just think about the next project. So for you, this movie has been released, right? It's now out in theaters and Amazon Prime, and who knows how many people have seen it. I'm sure it's plenty.

When you saw it playing and you saw Vigo in front of you playing you on screen, you're there, dark movie theater. What do you feel? It's been so many years since The Rescue. How does it make you feel when you watch the movie? I clearly get asked that quite a lot. I see the movie as a celebration of the event, which from our point of view was a...

an amazing thing that where we, I'm very proud of my involvement and what we achieved. So it's a celebration of the whole event, which is, you know, a massive feel good factor. For you, someone who's done a lot of cave rescues and could feel almost like

You know, just you're there, you're doing your job. When we spoke first, you felt very humble about everything. But now look at all of this. And this a lot of this was you. Well, that's true. As I was walking around the set, you know, there were people, carpenters, set designers, actors, cooks, makeup people, everyone leading up to the actors and the directors.

none of them would have been there if it hadn't been for the event. I mean, I was only a small part of it, but I was a critical part of the event. But I kept thinking none of this would have been possible without

unless we had been successful so again it celebrates the success of the actual rescue last time i think it was a desk and a small microphone now you've got a screen behind you a whole team here things have changed yes i mean people ask me has my life have has my life changed since then or have i changed look my how i interact with the world has changed there's

all sorts of opportunities which I've taken, like working on a movie, like writing a book, working on the documentary. There's so many things which I've embraced and enjoyed.

Well, Rick, since we last spoke, your book Aquanaut came out, and I'd love if you could tell us more about it. So the main thing I'll say about the book is, if you were watching the Thailand rescue, you might wonder what on earth a 57-year-old man was doing in Thailand, having been sent there from England to take part in the rescue. And my book

is part describing the rescue, but part giving the back history, why we were called to go there, how we had the experience to affect a positive outcome to the rescue, and the interactions I had with the people to create the team that was part of the rescue. So it's like the backstory, the how, the where,

the when and what we do. A lot of the important details that sometimes get a little lost in big Hollywood movies, right? I'm condensing 40 years of cave diving experience, which led to me being able to go to Thailand and be successful. But that's the backstory and that's in the book woven into the account of the rescue. Well, you have stories that very few other people can tell, my friend. So I'm excited to read it.

Obviously, the story, since it happened, has grown and continued to reach people all over the world. And there's been books and documentaries and now this massive movie.

I'm curious, what do you think is the root, the key here that made this story so compelling to the entire world? I liken it to reality TV. Nobody knew the outcome. Everyone was fascinated. Look, climbers, cavers often get into trouble. And when they do, people go, oh, you know, that's what you expect if you do a hobby like that.

of their own volition but here we had 13 young men they had just gone into the cave for an adventure and they were in trouble and i think humans as a race are fascinated by the plight of other humans when they're in some sort of desperate situation caused by nature and this was

clearly such an event. And the outcome was completely uncertain. And many people put themselves in the position of the parents of the children or couldn't work out how they would get out, what the fate. Every day they were tuning in. We were very aware that the whole world was watching, but what we weren't aware of was how emotionally involved

everybody was who was watching. And that was probably a good thing because that would have given us more pressure, although we're very good at blinkering ourselves and not to look at the periphery and the pressure.

Clearly, everyone was hugely emotionally involved and tuning in every day. I think it's the ultimate reality TV is what I say. Well, I think something we've learned, both you and I and the listeners of this podcast, is a good survival story. It's a bit different, doesn't it? It touches you deep down in your soul. And of course, we wouldn't be talking if it hadn't been a success. So, yeah, the press were there, but the press...

If it was a foregone conclusion that everyone would live and it was a certainty, I don't think there would have been so much press involvement there at the time because it was a non-story. It was because of that uncertainty that it became global news. Well, from the very beginning, when I first heard this story before the podcast, before anything, it seemed like a Hollywood movie, how things turned out. And here we are all these years later, and it is.

Rick, I want to say thank you so much for jumping on a call with us again today. And I honestly just love speaking to you. So it's my pleasure. Thank you very much. After the break, we'll be back with my 2021 conversation with Rick Stanton. We'll go inside the rescue mission that captivated the world.

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I've got a ton of questions for you, but I want to start off with actually an audio clip. And it's the moment where you and John came into the chamber. How many of you? 13. Yeah.

So, Rick, that's your diving partner John's voice we're hearing in the clip. And then you chime in and say, they're all alive. That's correct. He was so focused on filming and pointing the camera that he actually wasn't counting. I was in the background counting them down.

We had no idea that they could all be alive. And I got to 13. He asked us those questions simultaneously and they answered. So, yes, an incredible moment. I imagine, especially after going through miles of cave for hours. So when you popped up and you saw the children, what did you first feel? What did you first think?

Well, it was a little bit slower than that in real time. We dived about a mile to that point. We were literally running out of our guideline, our thread that was to lead us back to safety. And we were having a discussion about that. Whilst we were having that discussion, we heard a voice and a voice shouted down to us.

We still weren't sure what we were going to encounter. They were quite a long way above us and around a few corners. And then we were all set up. I was looking, John was filming, and it was almost as if it was choreographed. And they all came around the corner, all walking, all looking,

relatively healthy considering they'd been in there for nine days and had no food within that time. So you said the guideline was almost out. And when the guideline's almost out, that means you can't continue. So it's a bit of a miracle that they're actually there because you almost had to turn around. We would have had to turn around and we would have gone back the next day, clearly. But for that day, literally, it was 15 feet of line left when we met them. So we were right at the very end of that line.

There's a lot of fortuitous events that have gone all the way through this rescue. I had to keep on reminding myself that this was real and not fiction because it seemed unbelievable. And at that point, you obviously didn't pick them up and take them back from there. There was a big process involving that. So when you had to turn around after finding them, how hard was it to leave the children there? In a way, when we arrived, we may as well have come from another planet. We'd dived there with all the equipment.

There was absolutely no chance that we could have taken them out. So in that respect, it wasn't hard to leave them because there was no chance that we could have rescued them. They were safe. We knew we'd be going back with food. We didn't even have a plan to rescue them. So we just knew that leaving them was actually the best thing and we needed to get out and

start the process of informing the others and coming up with a plan to bring them out. And that's at that point. So you had to turn around and come up with a plan. What was that long swim back like underwater? What were you thinking about? Well, even before swimming out, when we'd got out of sight of the boys and we were putting our equipment on,

There was an unusual silence between me and John, and we were both presumably thinking the same thing. OK, look, we found them, but what on earth are we going to do now? This is way beyond anything that has ever happened in the history of cave-in and cave-escue, and there was no concept of how to get them out. So I think we were both...

lost in our thought of how to achieve that. Well, I've got a lot of questions about that. But first, I'm wondering, in all your experience of these rescues, how different or more difficult was the Thai cave rescue overall? Well, I would say that it was a huge factor of difficulty above anything we'd done before.

The most number of people that we've ever had to rescue was six. Thailand had 13. So you had over twice as many people. The distances involved in Thailand were much greater, just under a mile to bring them out underwater. The fact that they were not experienced cavers...

caving has or spelunking has a bad press and if things go wrong your man on the street is likely to say well they got what they deserve what you know what do you think would happen if you went in a cave and I think that's slightly different in the terms of Thailand because they would sort of

innocent children. So that was all seen differently. So pretty much everything in Thailand was of a magnitude greater than had ever been experienced in the world. Yeah, so much went wrong and then so much went right, it seems. It did. And I've got to say, the boys themselves played a passive role in their own survival. Nine days without food. We've all seen the video. They all walked down. There was nothing wrong with them.

They were stoic. They were handed what was going to happen to them to get out. They took it in their stride and just accepted it. There was a lot of things that played into their favor. And I think the other thing to say, they were football teams. They were a very tight-knit group. They were a tight-knit group before they went in, whilst they were in, and then afterwards. And then when you did reach the boys, obviously a new plan needed to happen, a plan to get them out. What was that like? What were the discussions like there?

This didn't just happen miraculously overnight. It took two or three days to evolve the plan to extricate the boys. But I think our greatest ally and advocate there were the American Air Force guys from the Special Tactics Squadron who'd been based in Japan. Their second in command, Master Sergeant Derek Anderson,

would listen to our plans and then sort of feed them to the Thais to give them more gravitas and more importance. Because I don't think the Thais really, two middle-aged men in civilian clothes, they found it hard to take us seriously. But when our plan was being conveyed by the Americans who were there to help,

not to do the rescue, but to oversee what was going on, what was credible and feedback information. Say, look, you should do this. This is the best concept that we can see that's going to work. And so they really were a huge support to us. And thankfully, we talk a lot about how everything went right, which is incredible. Let's talk about a few things that could have gone wrong. So what were some of the things that were avoided, thankfully avoided?

So the boys were put into full face masks, which keeps the mask very securely on their face. You can't dislodge it like a normal scuba mask. But there is no redundancy on that. If something had failed in the gas they were breathing, there was no redundancy for that. So we just had to rely on that technology working.

but that was tempered against the fact that it was going to be very hard to dislodge that mask. I think that was the crucial thing. If you'd have dislodged the mask and then had been surrounded by water, they'd have ingested it and the results of that would be obvious. The other thing is, of course, panic is the biggest killer. From our experience with dealing with the pump rescue workers and from various practices we've undertaken back here in the UK,

we knew that we had to mitigate against panic. And eventually it became accepted that the boys were going to be sedated. And that was a crucial moment. That was the only sensible way that they were going to come out. Yeah, panic kills in these situations. And even with the plan and the full face masks and the sedation, there was a number that was thrown around as far as the percent chance that it would actually succeed. What was that number?

I mean, I heard Dr Richard Harris say that it was going to be impossible when he expected lots of deaths. The Air Force guy thought 50%. We wouldn't give a number because it was untried and untested. All we knew was it seemed hugely unlikely that we'd have 13 consecutive successes. There were so many things that could go wrong that that didn't seem likely. So there was

we were going to have to accept some collateral damage, but we wouldn't put a number on it. So it all hinged on the fact that nobody knew what would happen to people sedated underwater and that had never been accomplished before. So there was an element of unknown there. But clearly we weren't going to just process people one after the other to their death. That was not going to happen. If there'd have been a few incidents early on,

we would have had to go back and rethink the whole process. I mean, people talk about only 50% going to come out. We wouldn't have accepted that and would have stopped the process way before then. And what were you personally most worried about for the rescue? Had there been a death, I think it would have been tragic for the person that was carrying that boy out. I issued instructions to all the four people carrying the boys, myself being one of them, that

If something were to happen, you just had to keep swimming with that boy and get them out. And that would have been tragic for any of the people involved. And thankfully, it didn't come to that.

And when you think back to one of those dives, is there any particular moment that you remember most? Well, I think it has to be the first day when everything was untried and tested. I was the last of the four to carry the boy. I had seen some of the procedure, but suddenly all our planning on paper and all our planning

dispassionate talks all suddenly evolves to I'm swimming here with a living child and I have 100% responsibility for them and that's when it hits home what you know what is actually going on and

And then to compound that for the worst, the first one I carried wasn't breathing very well, was hardly breathing. And I called back to Dr. Richard Harris and he was quite dismissive at the time. He knew there was something wrong, but he didn't want to scare me. And he said, just keep going. And when we got through the first dive, there was clearly something wrong and he needed some quite serious intervention.

Let's talk about that for a quick second. The estimations weren't good, like 50%. We heard 80%, all these percentages of fatality. And then you go in there, you have a boy, the boy's not doing well. How do you keep it together? Well, by this point, I mean, Harry was essentially right. I just had to keep going until a point where we could get him through the first dive and then re-evaluate things. I understood there was nothing I could do about it at that time underwater. We just had to...

Just had to hope. I mean, you need to understand that the underwater route was so complex and you couldn't see that I was more task loaded with navigation and avoiding awkward bits. I didn't have enough energy to give to the boy at that point. So on the third day, the final boy comes out. What was the mood like there? Very high euphoria moment, of course. And someone had said,

snuck in a large bottle of Jack Daniels and everyone was smiling and happy. We hadn't expected 100% success, as I've said, yet we had achieved it. Under-promised, over-delivered. I would love for you to explain what that moment was like when everyone looked around and said, oh my God, we actually did it. Well, it's almost, I guess, disbelief and relief that that's it, we're done, we don't have to go back.

There was a lot of smiling faces. We're not known for being over-emotional or portraying our emotions, but there was a lot of smiley faces. This is the final episode of our series, Thai Cave Rescue. And thank you to our guest, Rick Stanton. To hear my full interview with Rick from 2021, follow the link in the show notes.

If you'd like to learn more about Rick's journey, we highly recommend his book, Aquanaut, the inside story of the Thai cave rescue, a life beneath the surface. 13 Lives, directed by Ron Howard, is out now on Amazon Prime.

I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Peter Arcuni. Additional production by Davey Gardner and Brian White. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Almos and Emily Frost. Our managing producer is Tonja Thigpen. Our coordinating producer is Matt Gant. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marsha Louis. For Wondery...

Hey, it's Guy Raz here, host of How I Built This, a podcast that gives you a front row seat to how some of the best known companies in the world were built.

In a new weekly series we've launched called Advice Line, I'm joined by some legendary founders and together we talk to entrepreneurs in every industry to help tackle their roadblocks in real time. Everybody buys on feeling, Guy, like everybody. So if you don't give them the feeling that they're looking for, they're not going to buy. A lot of times founders will go outside of themselves to build a story. And

And you can't replicate heart. You know, I think we all have a little bit of imposter syndrome, which isn't the worst thing in the world because it doesn't allow you to get overconfident and think that you're invincible. Check out the advice line by following How I Built This on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.