Only the brave cast how to#

“For me, what (Marsh) did for Brendan, and I think he did it for a lot of guys, he gave guys a chance that no one else did,” Kosinski said. While the film incorporates, to varying degrees, all of the hotshots, its focus is on the unique relationship between Marsh and McDonough, details of which are slowly revealed. 'The ultimate goal for me was if someone heard the song, one of the families of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshot firefighters who passed away, if they heard the song they’d feel like it honored their husbands and the sacrifice they’re making as well,' Bentley said. All the other details were kind of natural.” We would meet on almost every scene … and we would go over every line to make sure that the culture was correct, to make sure the tone was correct. So when we actually got to that point it was so easy. I knew at that point, this guy has attention to detail. “We went to the actual deployment site and we went to the juniper tree (that the crew saved in an earlier fire, which figures prominently in the film). “The first time I met Joe we went and we cruised around,” McCarty said. “It was a huge sense of relief to walk in there and see this and see that every detail was going to be taken care of,” he said, “and I had an open-door policy with (Kosinski), or props, or art, and they actually would come to me and say, ‘Hey, how do we make this look right?’” A team effort

… The culture of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the brotherhood, the love they had for each other, being able to get that right for me was the heart of the film, more than anything.”

Only the brave cast how to#

“No amount of research can replace having Pat, who was on the inside and on the team, to not only let us know how to do what wild-land firefighting is like from a technical point of view, but almost more importantly … to get the culture right and get the people right, because he knew them personally. “I wanted to get as much of the details right as I possibly could,” Kosinski said. The production hired Pat McCarty of the Prescott Fire Department and a former Granite Mountain Hotshot (he left the team a year before the Yarnell Hill Fire) as a technical advisor. Tough scenes from imperfect lives aren’t the only things Kosinski worked to get right. (Fiction, after all, often gets closer to more-universal truths that a straight telling.)īut it’s clear Kosinski and the producers of “Only the Brave” felt a different kind of responsibility with this film. Which, of course, is fine feature films are not documentaries, and what’s most important is an accurate representation of the truth. It really gives you that perspective and depth of who these men really are.'įilms that carry the sometimes-worrisome tag “based on a true story” often play fast and loose with the “true” part of that description. 'To be able to show people, not only as firefighters why these men are such great people, but just as humans in general in their willingness to help others in many different, unique situations was just phenomenal to be able to see.

'No, you know, everything that I’ve been, all these trials and tribulations that I’ve had in my life, you know my brothers have been there to help me and bring that success in my life,' he said. McDonough said it didn't bother him to see these parts of his life played out in the film. The film shows Brendan McDonough, the lone survivor of the Yarnell Hill Fire hotshot crew, who is played by Miles Teller, using drugs before he joined the team, and struggling to make sense of his life.