More than just the intense physical training, McDonough says the actors’ emotional investment in the characters stood out. As the movie explains, they often fight fire with fire. When the wildfire runs into the counter-flame, the two snuff each other out. With incredible speed and efficiency, they dig a line of trenches ahead of the approaching blaze, and then set their own counter-fires with torches. Hotshots are tasked with controlling towering, fast moving infernos with little more than chainsaws, shovels and drip torches. Only the Brave offers a crash course in the dangerous vocation. It wasn’t, ‘Hey how come we have to hike this long?’ It was, ‘Hey how can I improve my stride so I can hike faster and longer?’ They showed up to put out.” “When they came onboard they knew what they were willing to do and it shined through everyday. “They put a lot of effort into it,” McDonough said. I think we got their approval and I think that meant a lot to everybody.” “I think they trusted us when they saw how dedicated we were and how much we were willing to lend ourselves and how lazy we weren’t. “The fact that we trained with actual Granite Mountain Hotshots I think was a major major thing,” Brolin says. To prepare for the role, Josh Brolin, who played team leader Eric Marsh, and the rest of the cast went through firefighter bootcamp. They all have their eyes on this film and it’s tough for us to go home and explain what the film is like, and it’s tough for us to go home and explain the job, but now people are going to have a little bit of an insight into what it’s like.” “There are so many people it’s representing - not just the people portrayed in the film but all wildland firefighters, all their family members and anyone that’s ever known one. Pat McCarty, a Prescott firefighter who also served as technical advisor, says everyone on set felt that sense of duty. Telling the story right was essential to the filmmakers, who based the movie on an emotional article written by Sean Flynn for GQ. “When I see some of their family members I hope they think ‘My son was like that.’ ‘My husband carried himself in that way, he talked about love and compassion and helping others like that,'” he says. McDonough, who was the newest member of the group at the time of the tragedy, has been recovering from PTSD and depression since losing the men he calls “brothers.” He has found healing by working with nonprofits helping members of the fire service, and says he strives to carry on the values he saw in his teammates. “I think the most important thing, and they nailed it, was the camaraderie.” “I’m really blown away by such an amazing job they did,” says McDonough, now 25, who served as an advisor to the filmmakers and cast. The shelters were ultimately useless that day against direct contact with the massive inferno. When members of the Blue Ridge team finally found the bodies, they saw that some of the Granite Mountain team had deployed fire shelters designed to protect wildland firefighters from small flames as a last resort. Members of another hotshot team, the Blue Ridge Hotshots, tried to save the trapped Granite Mountain crew, but were pushed back by the fire’s immense heat. The wildfire was ignited by lightning on June 28, 2013, and it quickly spread over 8,300 acres through a combination of strong winds, high temperatures and dry conditions caused by drought. Only the Bravetells the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a highly trained team of wildland firefighters that lost 19 of its 20 members when they became entrapped in the Yarnell Hill blaze in Arizona on June 30, 2013. To become hotshots, Eric has to lobby the local fire chief (Jeff Bridges) - a good old boy in a Stetson, who fronts a country and western band down the local bar.As Northern California prepares to recover from a devastating series of wildfires, the heroic and poignant true story behind one of the worst firefighter tragedies in U.S. The term "hotshots" refers to professional firefighters who deploy across the US, but when the film begins, his boys are only regular municipal firies, assigned to their small town. Josh Brolin plays their leader Eric Marsh, a veteran with one eye always glued to the horizon and a square jaw that could cut glass. It's as earnest as a mid-career John Cougar Mellencamp record, with a corny love of campfires and wilderness, big dusty cars, open roads and hard graft - even if everyone's too pretty and the sunglasses fit too well.ĭirected by Joseph Kocinski (Tron Legacy) and co-written by Black Hawk Down screenwriter Ken Nolan, it's based on the true story of a crew known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots who fought a devastating fire in Arizona at Yarnell Hill in 2013. Director Joseph Kosinski cites a 2013 GQ article as foundational inspiration for the film.
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