In August 2010, 33 miners became trapped more than 2,000 feet underground after a collapse at the San José mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert. What followed became one of the most closely watched rescue efforts in modern history, drawing engineers, officials, journalists, families, and eventually a global audience into a 69-day ordeal that ended with the successful recovery of all 33 men.

National Geographic’s Chilean Mine Rescue: A Race Against Time revisits that story with the benefit of distance, focusing not only on the mechanics of the rescue but also on the miners, their families, and the people who worked above ground to bring them home. Scientific Inquirer spoke with filmmakers Chloe Campbell and James Parris about the challenge of retelling such a familiar story, the long-term effects of the experience on those involved, and what they themselves took away from making the series.

Marc Landas: First of all, I really enjoyed the series. It’s an incredible story, and this is a compelling retelling of it. What made you want to revisit the Chilean mine rescue?

Chloe Campbell: I remember talking years ago with the head of the company that made this series for National Geographic. We were having a fairly speculative conversation about different projects, and he mentioned this story. I immediately thought, “That’s the film I want to make. That’s the series I want to make.”

It’s such a positive and extraordinary story. It contains so many elements of people having to overcome obstacles and, in the process, learning something about themselves and the people around them. Ultimately, it’s a triumphant story of hope, and those can be hard to come by.

Marc Landas: It’s also a very well-known story and a relatively recent one. How do you tell it in a way that goes beyond simply revisiting the news coverage?

James Parris: A lot of that comes down to the documentary method. We’re not a news team, and the passage of time gives the people who experienced something like this an opportunity to process it.

Fifteen years is a significant amount of time. The miners and rescuers have been through the original news cycle and the media circus surrounding the rescue, and then they’ve had years when people weren’t constantly asking them what it was like. That gives people time to reflect.

When we approached the contributors, we found that enough time had passed for them to bring a depth of reflection, personality, understanding, and perspective to their stories that simply wouldn’t have been possible at the time.

Of course, telling such a well-known story presents challenges because people already know the ending. They know these men were ultimately rescued. As a filmmaker, that means you don’t have some enormous twist waiting at the end. But it also gives you an opportunity to explore parts of the story people don’t necessarily know.

I’m always drawn to stories that people think they know. They can talk about them for two minutes in a bar or coffee shop, and then they run out of things to say. They realize they knew the headline, but not the whole story.

Having three episodes allowed us to go behind what appeared on the news and tell something much richer and deeper.

Marc Landas: There seem to be three major storylines running through the series: the rescue operation, the miners trapped underground, and their families waiting above. In a sense, the families are trapped as well. How did you balance those perspectives without letting the story become overwhelming?

Chloe Campbell: You’ve identified one of the biggest challenges of making the series.

We were incredibly fortunate to have an embarrassment of riches in terms of access. People were extremely generous and open with us, and they wanted to help us tell what we hoped would be a definitive version of the story.

But having access to all sides of the story can actually make things more difficult. You have to constantly balance them. Another challenge was finding ways for those different perspectives to speak to one another within the narrative.

We looked for moments of tension, emotion, and resolution within those three groups. Whenever possible, we tried to find places where their human experiences connected.

James Parris: Balancing three distinct groups certainly presents challenges, but one of the extraordinary things about this story is that those three groups ultimately came together around one singular mission.

At the beginning, they had very different perspectives and, to some extent, different objectives. By the end, however, this wasn’t simply a story of global unity. It was also about unity among the different groups directly involved in the rescue.

That was an important part of the story we wanted to tell.

Marc Landas: How did you approach the miners themselves? Were some reluctant to participate?

James Parris: We had a wonderful team of producers based in the UK who went to Chile for several weeks before production began. We also worked with local producers in Santiago and in the Atacama Desert. Many of them already had relationships with some of the miners, their families, and the rescuers.

With a story like this, it’s extremely important to approach people with care, consideration, time, and authenticity. You have to be very honest about why you want to tell the story, while also being open to understanding why they may—or may not—want to tell it.

There were people who didn’t want to take part, and that’s completely understandable. We use the word “trauma” so often now that it can sometimes lose its specificity. But everyone involved in this story—not only the miners, but also the rescuers—experienced different forms of trauma.

There are many reasons someone might not want to revisit something like this.

Participating in a documentary is also very different from giving a short news interview. We’re not asking someone to speak for two minutes and then moving on. We build relationships with contributors and ask them to sit with us for hours, sometimes recounting experiences with a level of depth and emotional intensity they may not have explored before.

We always understand why someone might decide not to participate.

At the same time, we found that the miners, their families, journalists who covered the rescue, rescuers, and politicians involved in coordinating the effort were remarkably open and cooperative. I think many of them understood that this wasn’t simply an extraordinary experience for them personally. It was also a story of collective perseverance that says something about Chile and, more broadly, about humanity.

Marc Landas: What did those conversations reveal about the long-term psychological consequences of the rescue? The miners survived, but some of the people involved clearly continued to struggle with what happened.

Chloe Campbell: The impact was very different from person to person.

James touched on this earlier, but I think a number of the rescuers were profoundly affected by the experience. Some seemed reluctant to dwell on their own trauma, perhaps because they felt that, compared with what happened underground, theirs wasn’t the trauma that deserved attention.

But the psychological consequences weren’t neatly divided between the miners and the rescuers. They didn’t depend simply on which side of those 2,300 feet someone happened to be on.

James Parris: Some miners said they would never go underground again, which, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t been through that experience, seems like the most natural response imaginable.

But others returned to mining and actually found comfort in going back to their old profession.

One of the things I took away from making the documentary was an understanding of just how differently people can respond to the same extraordinary event.

Chloe Campbell: There are miners who feel this was the worst thing that ever happened to them and that it had profoundly negative effects on their relationships and their lives.

But others feel the experience fundamentally changed them and made them the people they are today.

One person might say that they would never have met their wife if they hadn’t been trapped in the mine, or that they learned profound things about themselves and their ability to survive.

That genuinely surprised me: speaking with people who, in some sense, were grateful that they had been trapped underground for 69 days.

Marc Landas: By the third episode, the media attention surrounding the rescue becomes an increasingly important part of the story. It’s often described as a “media circus,” which is obviously a cynical way of looking at it.

But there’s another interpretation. The enormous attention also demonstrated that people around the world genuinely cared about what happened to these men. How do you view that balance?

James Parris: From my perspective, it was all of those things at once.

Some of the miners were incredibly excited about the attention they might receive when they reached the surface, but they were also frightened by the possibility of entering a media circus that could completely change their lives.

We’re cynical about the media now, but people were plenty cynical about it then as well. I think the miners understood what was waiting for them.

At the same time, the reason the story generated such global interest was precisely because of its universal themes—the extraordinary courage of the miners and the incredible feat of survival they were undertaking.

What I came to understand was that the rescuers on the surface also relied, to some extent, on that media attention. It generated awareness, brought resources to the site, and helped attract the expertise required to carry out the rescue.

During those first 17 days, when the miners didn’t even know whether anyone would find them, one of their deepest fears was that they would be forgotten.

And in a larger sense, throughout those 69 days there was always the possibility that the story itself could fade from attention and that the resources needed at this incredibly remote site in the desert might not arrive.

So there was a complicated relationship between the media spectacle and a very real sense of collective humanity. Both played a role.

Chloe Campbell: The miners often say, “We didn’t choose to be heroes. We’re not astronauts. We didn’t choose to go into space and become famous.”

I think some of them felt that a piece of themselves had been taken and made public without them ever having chosen that.

That brings us back to the question of consent. One of the privileges of telling this story with some distance is that we could take the time to let people decide whether they wanted to participate.

And when they did, we could give them the space—sometimes an entire day on camera—to tell their own story in their own way.

Marc Landas: The standard final question would be, “What do you want audiences to take away from the series?” I’d like to turn that around. What did you take away from making it?

James Parris: Go for it.

Chloe Campbell: On a very basic level, I came away with the extraordinary experience of traveling to Chile and sitting across from people who had gone through something almost unimaginable.

In some cases, they spoke about things they may never have told anyone before—things other people may even have been afraid to ask them about.

It’s an incredible privilege to be sitting in that chair, but there’s also a tremendous responsibility involved. You’re creating a space where someone can explore something deeply personal in front of you.

That’s what I took away from the experience more than anything. It was an extraordinary privilege to conduct those interviews.

James Parris: The story is clearly one of extraordinary international cooperation and collaboration. But what struck me, particularly in speaking with the miners, was that none of that cooperation would have mattered if they hadn’t been able to find these deep reservoirs of perseverance and resilience within themselves.

Each of them, in their own way—and the families on the surface as well—showed extraordinary strength.

They endured something almost unimaginable and still found ways to hold on to hope when things appeared hopeless. They also managed to hold on to a sense of who they were even as their personal experience became this enormous international story.

Ultimately, they were the ones who had to live through the rescue, but they also had to live through everything that followed in the years afterward.

That was profoundly inspiring to me.