Filmed in chronological order to allow the actors to steadily lose weight to accurately portray the effects of starvation.
The director said particular attention was paid to the sound to reproduce the silence and the noises of the snow and high mountain, including conversations with specialised guides used to those climates.
The movie depicts the flight crashing on the same day it left Uruguay. In real life, the flight actually had to make an overnight stopover in Mendoza, Argentina, due to bad weather over the Andes. Argentinian law states that a foreign military aircraft is allowed on their soil for only 24 hours, so the pilots had to either return to Uruguay or continue on to Chile. The next day, the pilots decided that although the weather over the Andes was not perfect, it had improved enough to continue on to Chile. This leg of the trip led to the accident.
You can visit the crash site through organized annual tour in February each year. Alpine Expeditions are the organizers with an expert guide, Ricardo Pena, and they go back each year with one of the survivors, Eduardo Strauch. It takes three days and involves going by four-wheel drive, horse, and on foot. Altitude sickness is always a concern for anyone visiting the area.
Taking advantage of the premiere of the movie, a documentary mini-series Andes Plane Crash (2024) was produced where the 76-year-old survivor Eduardo Strauch goes back to the place of the disaster, not only explaining the accident but also revealing how 50 years after the plane crash, climate change left the mountains without snow, allowing them to find more remains of the plane that were previously covered by it.