It stars Matthew McConaughey as a bus driver who emerged as a true hero in the midst of the disaster, after he drove 22 children and their teachers to safety during the catastrophic fire, with the film depicting some incredibly dramatic scenes as he took charge of the situation.
Read on for everything you need to know about the true story behind the film.
Is The Lost Bus based on a true story?
The simple answer is yes – the film is based on true events that occurred during the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California’s Butte County, which became one of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s history.
Specifically, it adapts a section of Lizzie Johnson’s non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, focusing on the heroic exploits of bus driver Kevin McKay, who was responsible for navigating 22 children and their teachers to safety in the midst of the carnage.
How accurate does The Lost Bus portray the real events?
In the loosest sense, The Lost Bus appears to be a broadly accurate retelling of events as they happened – but there are certainly areas in which dramatic liberties have been taken to exaggerate certain elements and even add some fictional beats.
For example, the storyline about McKay’s teenage son Shaun is amended for the film. In reality, he had evacuated hours before his father began his perilous journey and so McKay did not need to worry about his son’s safety while he was driving.
Meanwhile, most of the more dramatic action sequences are also an exaggeration, added to transform the film into a cinematic affair: in real life, most of the journey involved them being stuck in traffic rather than driving at high speeds and dodging fires.
Many of the other extra dramatic aspects – including the scene where armed looters banged on the door and the part in which McKay stopped the bus in the middle of an empty park are also inventions, while the loss of connection the bus experienced also appears to have been exaggerated.
So while the heroics of McKay were undoubtedly very real, it’s best to take the events seen in the film with a pinch of salt.
What real events are left out in The Lost Bus?
The most obvious omission in the film is that one of the two teachers who was present in the bus – the then-29-year-old Abbie Davis – is left out of the narrative, with the only named teacher being America Ferrera’s Mary Ludwig. This was actually at the request of the real Davis, who told the filmmakers that she wished not to be included.
Meanwhile, the film also doesn’t deal with the aftermath of the fire, which saw Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) accepting responsibility due to faulty equipment it operated, pleading guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and an additional felony count of unlawfully starting a fire.
Explaining why there wasn’t more focus on PG&E, Greengrass told Time that the film was “not really a film about PG&E” and that while “their failure to maintain the infrastructure was the prime course of the fire”, the “thing that movies do best is [portray] the resilience of human beings in the face of adversity and peril”.
The Lost Bus is available to watch on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ now.
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