Netflix, ‘The Impossible’ Director J.A. Bayona Wrap Spain Shoot on ‘Society of the Snow,’ an Uplifting Disaster Movie

variety.com:

J.A. Bayona, director of “The Impossible” and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” is close to wrapping production on the Spanish leg of Netflix’s “Society of the Snow,” (“La sociedad de la nieve”), one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most ambitious upcoming features for 2023.Turning on a 1972 air crash in the Andes that forced its survivors to highly extreme measures, the film, marks Bayona’s return to Spanish-language filmmaking for the first time in 16 years since his 2006 feature debut, “The Orphanage.” What looks set to be a celebration of extraordinary human fortitude in a harrowing intensely physical disaster movie harks back, however, to Bayona’s “The Impossible,” for many still the director’s finest achievement.  “Society of the Snow,” which hosted a set visit for select media a few weeks back, was shot in Andalusia’s Sierra Nevada, mainland Spain’s highest mountain range, using the 15,000-pound fuselage wreckages of three Fairchild Hiller FH-227 passenger aircrafts.

These have allowed Bayona to weigh his options on where to film, depending on weather conditions – which were appropriately bitterly inclement during the set visit.

One fuselage is deposited in an enormous hangar, used as a backlot on the slopes of the Sierra: the second one is nearly buried in artificial snow, and surrounded by olive trees; the third is found above the Sierra Nevada’s high mountain tarn La Laguna de las Yeguas, at around 10,000 feet.

Located south of Granada in Southern Spain, the Sierra Nevada typifies one of the biggest factors luring a flood of big international shoots to Spain: Accessible wilderness, facilitated by an advanced tourist industry developed sown the decades.