Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera star in harrowing true story The Lost Bus

Jamie Lee Curtis has served up no shortage of iconic performances over the years, from her scream-queen debut in horror classic Halloween to classic comedy caper A Fish Called Wanda to absurdist multiverse drama Everything Everywhere All at Once. Her latest project, however, finds the Academy Award-winning actress on the other side of the camera, serving as producer for fact-based drama The Lost Bus.

The project originated when Curtis read about the bravery of the local community in Paradise, California, during a devastating 2018 wildfire. What she’d read left the actress compelled to make a different kind of cinematic impact. “I read an article in the Washington Post about the book that Lizzie Johnson wrote,” she recalls. Johnson’s book, Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, recounted, among other stories, how local bus driver Kevin McKay and schoolteacher Mary Ludwig ferried 22 kids through the flames, ultimately leading them to safety. “I called [producing partner] Jason Blum, and I said, ‘I want to make a film. I think it’ll be the most important thing either one of us does as filmmakers in our lives.’”

To embody McKay and Ludwig, Curtis and Blum secured Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. To helm the nail-biting thriller, they chose British documentarian-turned-director Paul Greengrass, whose depictions of the events in Bloody Sunday, United 93 and Captain Phillips had preserved the authenticity of these real-life incidents. Greengrass was captivated, and immediately took to the assignment. “What I loved about this film was it had those simple human elements of the bus, the schoolteacher, the bus driver and the kids, yet it spoke to something very, very universal,” he says. “The idea of making a film about a wildfire seems so absolutely of our world today — it’s part of the sense that people have all over the world that our world is burning.”

The film catches Kevin McKay in a moment where he, as a single father, is struggling to connect with his teenage son (played by McConaughey’s real-life son Levi). Juxtaposing McKay’s sense of failure as a parent with his selfless actions that made the difference between life and death were, for the Dallas Buyers Club Oscar winner, defining of his character, as depicted in a scene where McKay answers the call to evacuate the kids at Ponderosa Elementary school.

“Kevin’s just made the biggest decision of his recent life to try to salvage the relationship with his son and pick up his mother and get them to safety,” says McConaughey. “But 35 seconds later, the next biggest decision comes to him. When he hears, ‘We’ve got 22 kids stranded,’ he wants someone else to pick up that call and say, ‘Yeah, I’ve got it,’ but no one does. When he makes that decision, coming right off the back of making the other decision, that was my most memorable scene because it’s doing a 180 after I just did a 180. That’s something Paul likes to do, put compression on your protagonist.”

As in his past films, Greengrass is committed to simulating real circumstances as much as possible. This meant surrounding the actors with real, gas-fuelled fire and real-life first responders, as well as filming the scenes mostly at dusk. “Critical to conveying the reality of a large fire is what the light does, because what happens in these large fires is that very quickly the sun gets covered [by smoke] and the light becomes very occluded and strange,” the director explains. “That was by far the hardest challenge. The closest, in reality, to it is magic hour, which is that short time at the very end of the day before the night comes. Generally, it’s like half-an-hour, 40 minutes, so the way we shot the movie was to shoot it basically in a one-hour period a day.”

Those time constraints worked in the production’s favour when it came to working with 22 children within claustrophobic conditions. “We decided to shoot on a real bus going along real roads with real traffic, with real gas burns so that gave the whole experience a sense of reality,” says Greengrass. “Because it was shot in this very compressed time, it gave it an intensity in the bus that also impacted the kids. There’s a lot of very small children on that bus, and none of them were actors. And lastly, you end up with Matthew and America. I mean, it’s not easy to shoot in a bus. We didn’t have time for them to leave so we all just sat on the bus for hours at a time and bonded.”

While the actors experienced extreme conditions to retell this story, their efforts were nothing compared to the sacrifices made in Paradise in 2018. “Kevin’s mother was quite ill and home alone with his son and Kevin still took the decision to go and get those kids,” says Curtis. “That sacrifice was repeated with the first responders, who all had families at home. Every mother who evacuated herself with her kids in the midst of this inferno is a hero. Even the 85 people who lost their lives. It’s a beautiful thing, highlighting Kevin and Mary, but it’s a story of resilience and what’s really important to me, is that today Paradise is surviving and thriving as a community. We’re going to join them in creating a memorial to those lives lost and the town coming together.”

The Lost Bus begins streaming on Apple TV+ Friday, October 3