David Martí and Montse Ribé have been working together for nearly thirty years as makeup and special effects artists for film. They have collaborated with remarkable directors like Pedro Almodovar (The Skin I Live In), Alejandro Iñárritu (Biutiful), Guillermo del Toro (winning an Oscar for Pan’s Labyrinth), and now, for the third time, with Society of the Snow, J.A. Bayona. Their work together has produced a second Oscar nomination for Best Achievement in Makeup for the true-life telling of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed over the Andes in the height of winter on their way to a match in Chile. Martí and Ribé have done extraordinary work before, but Society of the Snow presented unusual challenges in terms of the conditions, continuity, and their own emotional states while working on the film.
In our conversation, these two longtime partners discuss what it took for them and their team to create the authenticity required to honor those that died in the crash, and, just as importantly, those that survived.
Awards Daily: When you were approaching the process of this progression of making the characters look like hell, there’s a continuity that’s involved. How did you make sure the actors looked correctly affected by the elements throughout?
David Martí: We shot the movie chronologically, so we started shooting on the 2nd of January. We start when the plane just crashed. From that moment, we, the special effects makeup and prosthetics team, had a lot to do because there were a lot of fresh wounds to create after the plane crash. Then we followed with all the swelling eyes and faces. There’s a process of all these after the plane crashes–it becomes color. So when it becomes color, it becomes (makeup designer) Ana Puigcerver’s work. Ana manages the process until we have prosthetics to add, because at the end of the movie, they start to be thinner because they are starving. They wear cheek implants and dentures. Actually when you look at pictures of the real survivors, they are not like at Auschwitz. You know that they are starving, they are thinner. But if you look at the real pictures, there are some of them that just look tan and thin, but not extremely thin. So there was a process of getting the actors on a diet since the first day of shooting and then losing weight progressively. Then we jumped in. It was all a process of presenting makeup at the beginning part of the movie. There’s nothing else, just the wounds and the sores, but actually we did much more than you can see in the movie. There were a lot of hours of film, but (director) J.A. Bayona actually shared his first cut, and people could not take it. When we saw the movie the first time, we were like oh, we miss this and we miss this, and we miss that. So, there’s a lot of things missing from the movie. What you see in the movie is less than what we did. But obviously there has to be a balance between disgusting stuff, realistic stuff, and something that the audience can stand and will not make them leave the movie theater. Because if he put everything we did, people would not be able to stand the movie.
Montse Ribé: If Anna Puigcerver was here, she would talk about what you are asking, the deterioration and all the textures of the skin, the lips, and how they look really cold. Know that when you see the movie, you feel the cold as well. She used a lot of subtle layers of colors to make them look like frost, depending on the stage and depending on the sequence. For example: when they were on a scout, the texture of the skin was really dry and the noses were blue, but for example when they were inside the plane, they were pale and it was another kind of degeneration. She always says that it’s about stages for the actors, but it depends on what they were doing: if they were on the snow or if they were inside the plane. She did great work.
David Martí: Also the eyes for instance, there was a schedule for the lenses, because when they crash, a lot of them have hit the ceiling of the plane or a seat or something. So, besides the prosthetic, they were wearing contact lenses, scleral lenses, which are more than just the iris, it is more like the white of the eye. So there was a lot of blood. And there were also different stages of blood. And then there’s guys like Gustavo, who was one of the ones that goes on an expedition and he gets burned in his eyes. So you can see his corneas have a glaze. We had to study a lot with forensic people to know if you are in the sun and the snow that much, how it will affect your cornea. They gave us a lot of pictures. Pictures that you just see once and that’s enough. We had a lot of information from them that was really helpful to make this believable because that was something else. Usually, when we work in movies, we say it like this: we put a filter to make people understand what they are seeing. Sometimes you see things in the movie that are in reality not real at all, like okay, this is a person? So we did a lot to balance what the people will be able to understand in the process of all these people. There’s a moment that Gustavo has not been eating, and Roberto gives him the food. He chews it, and then he touches his teeth and the teeth are moving, because they are not whole in the skull. All of these kinds of things we really didn’t expect to do in a movie. And then you do it and I always thought this is not going to appear. And then you see it in close-up, and I was like oh my God, but it works.
Awards Daily: You were saying there were probably things that you just hadn’t considered, in terms of what happens to people under these circumstances, like the teeth. Were there other things about what happens to a body in this situation, that you had to apply makeup for?
David Martí: We actually did a little bit of gangrene, but Bayona decided not to show it. Susy, one of the female characters, is Nando’s sister. We have her feet swelling and then getting black and black and black until they get really bad. When we shot it, we just showed a little bit, it was Nando and some of the other passengers just seeing what’s beneath the blanket. Then they show the feet and you can see the process of it. But they cut it, you don’t see it in the movie. You just see her dying and that’s it. When she dies, what Nando (Agustín Pardella-the actor) is holding is a puppet. It’s a dummy that we did of her. So there’s also a lot of dummies, which is not something that the academics consider as makeup. But they are actually like real actors with real makeup. But they are not considered, and we made more than twenty of them. Because, each one of them that dies, they have to carry the body, they have to bury it. It is something that J.A. does so well, which is not showing what we do. Which can sound strange, but it’s true. In The Impossible, or in this movie, we have done a lot of dead bodies. You have a pile of dead bodies over there, but you maybe saw it once in the background, but it gives you the feeling of the loss. The important thing with Bayona and this movie, or The Impossible, is that the people that are on set and the actors have to know that they are there. You have to be living and working with those dead bodies–silicone bodies–and make the audience feel that they are surrounded by that. They were there all the time. And every day, there were more and more, but you don’t see it in the movie. You just see a glance. It is one of the things that Bayona does, you are surrounded with this real stuff, practical stuff and then if it is in the shot or not just depends on the frame. A lot of times it’s not on the frame, but you know that it is there.
Montse Ribé: Yeah. I can feel it.
Awards Daily: For the actors who are playing around that space, it gives them an awareness, even if it isn’t seen on film. So in a way, what isn’t shown is just as important because it helps the actors with their performance.
Montse Ribé: Exactly. And I think the actors appreciate that because they feel the reality of what is happening, and as David said before, that there’s things that maybe were too hard for the audience to see. I think finally there’s a good balance in the movie that even if you don’t see it, it’s very respectful. Otherwise, I think it would be too much. The first time we saw the movie we were missing like 60% of what we did. But the second time we saw it, it was like, wow. I mean, this is an amazing movie and it’s how it should be. I think the audience captured what is necessary and you don’t need to see all of it.
Awards Daily: I only imagine shooting chronologically was a real asset for you to create the progression of the deterioration of the health.
Montse Ribé: Yes, but it also was difficult for the whole production because we were shooting on the snow and sometimes the snow didn’t come.
David Martí: And sometimes there’s too much.
Montse Ribé: So, they had to switch the sequence. It was really difficult for Ana and Belén Puigcerver, the hair artist. It was difficult with the beards, because they let them grow, right? But of course, sometimes they had to stop because we were shooting the same sequence, so they had to keep it. And sometimes we had to go backwards, but that was just to finish a sequence. So it was really tricky about the beards, and there were so many actors that to keep all the steps and the chronology of each one was a little bit crazy.
David Martí: J.A. made some choices, like with Matías, the actor that is playing Roberto Canessa. Roberto, at the end of the process, when they were rescued, he grew a beard—not much—but he grew a beard. We got some criticism saying oh, but Roberto Canessa has a beard, but what happened is that Matías, the actor, there’s no way that he grows anything. (Laughs). When Ana and Belén added hair to some others they looked okay, but he has such a baby face that it looks fake, even if it is very well done. So J.A. decided to not go with a beard with Roberto, even though it was not as accurate as he wanted. But it would become a nightmare, to have that look good in those conditions. That’s the other thing: for instance, Gustavo was wearing ears, because his friends call him the ears guy because he has big ears. I mean, they were not huge, but he has bigger ears than the actor Tomas Wolf, who is playing his part. We did ears for him every day. Every day he was wearing those prosthetic ears. And a lot of times Tomas was coming with an ear falling, because you cannot go out there in the mountain to do the touches. That was one of the hard things to play with. For instance, that tube, the plane, which is filled with actors. Iit was a nightmare to do touch-ups because you cannot go into that tube. Also, the floor was not that easy to walk on. And they didn’t want to go for retouches also because when you are entering and exiting the set, it cuts the performing of the actors and J.A. needs that. He needs to go on with the camera, say action and shoot as much as he can without cutting. You can feel that inside the plane, there was so much emotion.. There were a lot of times that we cried on set, which is something that never happens usually. You laugh on set, you are impressed, but crying over the acting was something that happened a lot of times during this shoot.
Awards Daily: The credit listing for the makeup department on this is humongous. And what I’m hearing from both of you is that while you two may be singled out for the nomination for the great work that you did, I keep hearing you refer to other people who have worked on this project with you and added to it.
Montse Ribé: I think it was really like teamwork. Even when there were prosthetics that were our part, it works like a chain. We put on the prosthetics, we make up the prosthetics, and then we pass the actor to Anna and Belén and the team to finish the rest, the texture of the skin and everything. It was almost because there were so many actors that it had to work like this. Anna had a huge team, because there were a lot of actors to do. Once we were on the mountains, we couldn’t have a lot of the team up there, because it was very difficult to bring people there. We collaborated and tried to help each other with whatever happened because it was difficult to make the touch-ups and we felt that we needed more people and we couldn’t have it.
David Martí: In the morning, like five-thirty or six, you have all these people working on one level of the mountain where we were set up at these makeup stations. Then everybody was rushing all the work on all the people at the same time to put them in those cable cars. There were a number of people that couldn’t go there because there’s already too many actors. As Montse said, we cannot have a lot of people out there. If not, we would have had a huge team to be very quick when we needed to touch up. It was a special way of working because at the end, what they need is to have the actors up there, at that time, and we cannot fail because these cable cars have a timetable. A lot of times out there, the security people in the mountains were like it’s better that you don’t go up today because the weather is very bad–there’s a lot of mist, or there’s a lot of wind, or there’s a lot of snow. That’s one of the things that you can feel in the movie. Just a few times J.A. wanted to go up and the security people said no, you cannot go up. Then we had to go and shoot on the stage that was in another level in the mountain and everything was more controlled. Even if it is not cold enough, they have machines that make it cold inside the set, which was horrible for the actors. They had a hard time. We were completely covered and we were cold, but we were covered. They were very brave. One of the things that makes this movie special is the team collaboration, not only the technical department or artistic department–it’s all of them. The actors collaborated with us. The actors were really happy to wear makeup, to wear prosthetics. I remember some of them, they were very cute because they were like oh, you’re not putting cheeks on me? Can I have dentures?
They were super, super sweet. I never worked with actors that were so close together. They’re from Ottawa and from Argentina, but they didn’t know each other before. They got all these people together and it was like a team. There’s something that J.A. said yesterday: one of them had a problem, he wanted to just leave the shooting because it was too much for him and all the other ones went around him and helped him and cheered him up, to keep going. That was amazing. I don’t remember the name of everybody, because I remember the name of the characters, but one of them was a little bit overweight and he never had acted, but J.A. wanted this guy in the movie. They brought him and he was always super happy. He was always smiling. One day we were talking and he said that one of the best things in the world is that they chose him to be part of the movie. And on top of that he will be paid and he will be on a big screen with all these actors, and he also will lose weight. (Laughs). For him it was amazing, because I will lose weight on a diet that is controlled by a dietician and everything, and then I will be in a film with my best look. It was really cute.
Awards Daily: In a movie like this, you want to be as true to the actual event and the physical part of that is really important. I don’t want to say anything bad about the previous version of this film Alive from 1993, because it’s a solid adventure film, and it does the trick. But, there’s a huge difference between looking at the actors in your film at the end of it than there is in that film.
Montse Ribé: There was really a huge amount of research from production with Bayona, from Anna, from us. We looked at a lot of pictures. We spoke with the real survivors. Anna was surrounded by pictures of the real characters before the accident and after the accident, and when they were rescued. So in each step they have real reference points and J.A. wanted to be super accurate. We wanted it to be very accurate because we felt the responsibility to explain and talk about this story, as realistically as possible, to honor the people that died there and the people that survived. There are a lot of survivors that are still alive, so we knew that they were going to see the movie. We wanted them to feel recognized in their feelings and how they survived. It was very important that when they saw the movie, it was as close as possible to the reality. We had to talk with a lot of doctors, and we had so many questions. What happens when you have this injury? And what happens when you are so high up with this level of cold? For Anna it was the same. It is not like okay, you are there, you are cold, so you have this look all the time. Every time it was different. In the avalanche, even if they were cold, they were inside so the skin was different. When they were on the expeditions, it was different. So, Anna had to research each state, what happened and how they looked.
David Martí: We were lucky that some of the survivors, some of the people that were there during the seventy-two days, were taking pictures. So those pictures were a huge reference for us. J.A. was completely insane, looking at the survivors’ pictures and then trying to copy everything. It was really amazing the way that he wanted to have everything there to be very loyal to the real story.
Awards Daily: Alive told the same story in 1993. The question that people often ask themselves when a version of a story has already been told is why might we need another version of this? They might say this has already been done before. Do we need to do this again? But this film has been so well received. You must be very proud of the result.
Montse Ribé: We knew that we had to do this movie. I saw Alive and I remember that I liked it a lot when I saw it years ago. But I thought, we need to do another movie. And knowing J.A., he’s going to do a good movie. I don’t want to say anything bad about the other movie, but I felt like it was missing something deep. I did miss the emotions.
David Martí: That happened after reading the script. The thing is that the book that J.A.’s movie is based on has a completely different point of view than Frank Marshall had in 1993. At that time, the book didn’t exist so the information that was around was different. Pablo Viersi, the writer of the book Society of the Snow, was a childhood friend of the survivors. He did all the interviews with them and took a long time to write the book and make it accurate and respectful to what these people went through. It happens that J.A. read it when he was preparing The Impossible. He was looking for another survival experience and he found this book by Vierci. He was like okay, this is what we need to do on The Impossible. And then he was like okay, this is my next movie, because I want to do Society of the Snow too. He waited 10 years to do it, because he wanted to have all the information. He went in 2018 to interview the survivors that are still alive. He did so much research that it makes for a very different movie than the Frank Marshall version. It’s not that it’s good or bad, it’s just different.
Montse Ribé: After reading the script, when we saw all the details and all the emotions there, it was like okay, this is a completely different movie. We knew that it was going to be really deep and powerful, a completely different approach from Alive. J.A. said I want to do something super real. I want people to be there with them on the mountains, with them, suffering.
David Martí: One of the things that amazed me in the movie was the moment when Numa Turcatti, played by Enzo (Vogrincic), dies. When he dies and his voice-over continues the story…goosebumps. That moment is like, oh my God. The story is told by a guy that is already dead. It’s such another point of view in the story. When you read the script and you read all those emotions in that big script, I have to tell you a thing, and it’s not a secret, but when I read the script, I was like I don’t want to do this movie. I don’t want to watch this movie. I’m one of those people that suffers a lot when I see stories like this. We did it because J.A. as a director is one of the best friends we have. He has always been so loyal to us and obviously us to him. It was like okay, we have to do it even if I don’t want to do it. But then when we were into it, and then you meet the actors, and then you shoot a sequence where you are like okay, I’m crying on set. What is this? And then you finally see the movie, and not only the movie, which is such an experience, it’s all the reactions of the people. We haven’t met anybody that says ah, it’s a blah movie. We know people from all kinds of fields and they can dislike The Impossible or A Monster Calls (other collaborations between Marti and Ribé), but this one, everybody likes it. One of the best things in the world that we have seen with this movie is young people going to cinemas. Going to the theaters.
Montse Ribé: Not once, but twice or three times. It’s amazing how people react and also young people know that it’s like another experience. I think it’s a unique movie.
David Martí: The other day I was talking to Gustavo Zerbino, one of the survivors, who is here with us for the Oscars promotion. He was showing me a cell phone and he said you know, young people are watching movies here. But when they watched this movie on the cell phone, they needed to go to the theater. One of the things that happens to young people in modern life is that they cannot just pay attention to one thing.
They have to look at a lot of things on their phones. But when they saw the movie, they just paid attention to the movie. They felt like there was something inside of them that for them was completely unknown, and when they watched the movie they were completely blown up.
Montse Ribé: Yesterday I was talking to a daughter of Gustavo, Lupe, she was telling me thank you so much for doing this movie. Thank you for all the team being a part because she was completely happy that finally someone showed the story like it was.
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