Bayona: That’s one of the main concepts in this story. This screenplay was difficult because we’re dealing with these characters that don’t do anything to survive.
If you take a family and you put them in the center of this and give them heroic actions that define their survival, it would be like telling the other people who didn’t make it that maybe they didn’t do enough. So the heroic actions of these people have nothing to do with survival, and that’s what makes this story so beautiful.
We don’t know many things about this family before the wave, because I want them to be a blank canvas where the audience can project themselves, so you can participate in the story. One of the things I like about not knowing much about the characters before the wave is that you humanize them after the tragedy. People felt life in a more intense way.
One part in particular I like is the decision of the mother to save another little boy in addition to her own son. It’s the idea of keeping dignity—it’s not just survival, it’s about the price of survival. This is a woman who thinks she’s lost almost everything she has, except she’s not willing to lose dignity in front of her son. That was a beautiful message, it was the most important emotion to me. We started to do research, and we realized very soon that in most of the cases of people who had lost everything, they were the ones with the empathy to help others.