How The Lost Bus Recreates a Heroic Real-Life Rescue During California’s Deadliest Wildfire

Paul Greengrass has always been interested in depicting the real world on-screen. Starting out in the documentary world in his 20s, he sharpened the signature observational aesthetic that came to define his cinema.

“It took me quite some years to find my voice and a successful way to make a marriage [between] recording and recreating reality,” Greengrass says about his approach to fictional stories with the instincts of a documentarian. “I just realized, instead of trying to shoot films like a drama director would, it would be much better if I reached back to where my roots were.”

That filmmaking philosophy resulted in several modern-day drawn-from-the-headlines classics, including titles like Captain Phillips and United 93, and even informed the breathtaking white-knuckle aesthetics of his Bourne franchise films. Now, that truthful quality is all over The Lost Bus, as he reconstructs a miraculous tale of heroism and survival amid the raging 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif. The movie tells the story of bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and school teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), who saved the lives of 22 children as the most catastrophic wildfire in California history rages around them.

“The pieces that I've done in drawing on factual routes tend to operate around two poles,” Greengrass tells TIME ahead of the film’s premiere at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival. “One is what I would call quiet, austere pieces, like Bloody Sunday, United 93, or 22 July, films interested in the granular detail of reality. And then there are others like Captain Phillips—based on true stories, but much more movie experiences. The Lost Bus is down that second road.”

“It’s amazing how much time you spend agonizing about films that you don't make or complete,” Greengrass reflects. “The films that you do make tend to go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do that.’ I was always going to make the Bourne movies, as I loved the first one. When they told me about this bus and kids, I went, ‘I know how to do that.’ It was that instinctive.”

One movie Greengrass immediately thought of as a reference point (other than his own films like Captain Phillips or United 93, also set in contained environments) was John Ford’s 1939 Western Stagecoach­. “Any kind of compression in the story gives you cinematic possibilities,” says Greengrass. “And I'm interested in kinetic cinema, the cinema of motion. If you are in the middle of a dangerous situation, your camera moves with you.”

The story grabbed him thematically too, given the increasing devastation caused by wildfires and other environmental catastrophes. “I'm always interested in what's driving our world today. For example in Captain Phillips, this tiny encounter on the high seas dramatized what globalization meant.” Greengrass viewed the story of The Lost Bus through a similar lens, following a micro, primal cinematic story of survival that was ultimately about what these disasters mean on a macro level. “Lizzie's book is much broader, about the whole story of the fire. And the Kevin story is only a handful of pages in it. And it seemed very appropriate for a movie.”

The urgency of the film only grew when the Los Angeles fires came early in 2025, just as he was finishing the movie. “Our editor Billy Goldenberg had to go home—he nearly lost his house. That was a humbling moment,” remembers Greengrass. “[We] realized that we’ve created these images that are a part of the world we live in. And that we are going to have to learn to deal with these life-threatening events.”

Truth vs. fiction

How do you shape reality on cinematic terms to entertain an audience, without taking advantage of the real people who lived through the events you’re depicting? Achieving this delicate balance was a priority for Greengrass and Ingelsby. “You have to make choices to create an authentic dramatic piece that conveys truth,”  Greengrass says. “Even the selection of this one story is a choice. But you make choices in a documentary too,” he adds. “The question is, does it feel real with a pulse of truthfulness? Or does it feel exploitative or propagandized?”

While the writing duo had to take certain dramatic liberties (including excluding a second teacher, Abbie Davis, who was on the bus but didn’t want to be involved in the movie), The Lost Bus achieves that pulse of truthfulness, thanks to Greengrass’ commitment to authenticity and emotional resonance. To that end, Greengrass made sure both McConaughey and Ferrera spoke to the real heroes underpinning their characters to understand what they went through. “Obviously we didn't contact any of the children because they were minors. But when you make a film, you create a family of stakeholders, and I take carrying those people to the end with care, respect, and consent very seriously.”

Another liberty was taken when choosing a location. The team thought it would be insensitive to shoot in California, so they chose a New Mexico town as a stand-in. “Paradise is a blue collar town, not an affluent Southern California spot—it’s a different world. We shot three hours outside of Santa Fe, in a town called Ruidoso, which was uncannily similar.”

One major logistical benefit of Ruidoso was an abandoned arts college that the production secured in the area, a large campus with actual roads and bends that they could safely and completely control, without having to set foot on any public roads. Once his producing partner Greg Goodman found this spot, Greengrass quickly ditched the initial idea he had about shooting on stage, at the Sphere Las Vegas, realizing that it would rob the movie off that essential kinetic energy he was after.

The only safe way to get real fires was laying gas lines and creating gas burns, without releasing any particles in the air that would potentially cause a forest fire. So the team did exactly that, with real motion and safe fire plumes. Another challenge was lighting, to shoot everything in a visually coherent and realistic manner amid all the smoke. “In forest fires, you get this strange, occluded light, almost like an eclipse because the smoke gets across the sun and then eventually becomes very dense and dark, even though it's 10 o'clock in the morning,” he says. 

The solution for obtaining that exact light was shooting the driving scenes during the similar glow of the magic hour daily in one-hour time slots. That demanded an extraordinary amount of planning and organization, with all gas burners laid out, all traffic pieces, choreography, and stunts rigorously rehearsed, and kids carefully prepared for the process. “It would be a very, very intense experience for the actors. We would get three long takes basically, that’s it. And that gave us the intensity of a theater stage—you can only play it once.”

The film’s terrifying final ride, when the bus is surrounded by fire on all sides with no choice but to drive through it, is when Greengrass thought of Ford’s 1939 classic the most, transitioning the tone from a realistic realm to a more cinematic one. “As they go down the hill, you are in that Stagecoach with them, going through the fire. And then you get to the end, and the parents come. I always find that very moving, [operating] in a more cinematic mode. And hopefully the whole thing mirrors a full movie experience.”

Meanwhile, another master and masterwork became a reference point, when Ingelsby and Greengrass decided to treat the fires as a character, like an on-approach beast with a POV: Steven Spielberg’s timeless blockbuster, Jaws. “I remember saying to my long-time editor Goldenberg, ‘This film needs the shark. We need to personify the fires like the shark in Jaws,’” Greengrass says, calling Spielberg “the last of the great classical motion picture makers.” “That’s why I created those shots of the fire moving. So you felt its voracious appetite and then its insidious character at the end when they get trapped.” 

A thoroughly committed cast 

Greengrass utilized his instincts of marrying truth with fiction in the casting process too, making sure the priority was bringing on “feel-alikes” instead of lookalikes. “Let’s talk momentarily about Matthew,” Greengrass suggests. “He’s a movie star, obviously, but also a brilliant character actor. He comes from Texas, and had an absolute affinity with Paradise and Kevin’s world. It is an interesting place with a lot of passions and a sense that the riches of California have not been divided out fairly to their community. Matthew really got that.” Much of the set-up for McKay’s character involves him trying to be a better father and a better son, and lovingly caring for his terminally ill dog across a heartbreakingly poignant scene. All those details were based in truth, and what made it feel even more real was casting McConaughey’s real mother Kay McConaughey and son Levi McConaughey in those parts. “Incidentally, when I cast his son, I didn't know that he was his son,” Greengrass recalls with a laugh. “And Kevin's son and Matthew's son became pals apparently.”

The team had to approach the scary scenes involving kids carefully, and plan around some time restrictions for shooting with minors. Their golden-hour limited-time approach worked to their advantage, ensuring that the kids were never overworked and all guidelines were easily met. In terms of ensuring their emotional wellbeing throughout the tough scenes, “I have to say Matthew and America were fantastic. They were like surrogate teachers for them,” says Greengrass. “They embraced that [responsibility] and made the movie work. And those kids from the Santa Fe school were proper actors. They were fantastically good.”

A focus on human resilience

There is one moment in The Lost Bus when a fire chief played by Yul Vazquez, while updating the press on the uncontrollable Camp Fire, notes that we would be fools to ignore the fact that these types of wildfires are getting worse. That is pretty much the only moment in the movie when a character makes an overt statement with an aptly environmentalist agenda. “I just felt there had to be one moment, and it felt like an appropriate moment when you've lived through something like that,” Greengrass says. “There are [worsening] fires everywhere [around the world]. I think I made implicit things explicit.”