![]() For 87 days after the blowout, millions of barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, causing widespread and lasting harm to wildlife as well as the tourism and the fishing industries from Texas to Florida. “You kind of know what’s going on in there but you don’t really know.”Īt the same time, the intense government investigation, litigation and political debate that followed the Deepwater Horizon disaster make it more than a simple tale of survival and individual heroism. “It’s like the inside of an NFL locker room,” said Williams, who has left the oil industry since the Deepwater disaster and now runs a couple of small businesses with his wife. While real-life disasters have formed the basis for many Hollywood movies like “The Perfect Storm,” “Titanic,” “The Impossible” and “Everest,” bringing the story of the Deepwater Horizon to the screen presented its own unique challenges.Įxplaining the cause of the blowout requires conveying a large amount of highly technical information and specialized jargon to mainstream moviegoers who may have only the vaguest idea of how oil is extracted from beneath the ocean floor and what life is like on an offshore rig. See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour » ![]() If one single family member objects to this project on the merits - not on the emotional part of it but the merits - then we’ve failed.” … We need to tell the story the way it happened. “But I did accept the challenge of bringing this to the screen and getting it right to speak for my 11 brothers who can’t speak. “I didn’t go looking for this,” said Williams, who served as an on-set consultant during production. I loved the studio’s courage to make a character-driven adult action movie where there’s no chance for a sequel.”įor Williams, Holloway and the other 113 men and women who lived through the catastrophe that unfolded 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, the film represents something more personal: a way to pay tribute to their fallen co-workers and, perhaps, get some closure. “We didn’t want to paint by numbers - you have to make it as realistic as possible. “It has those elements of a disaster movie but it’s a true story,” said Mark Wahlberg, who plays Williams in the film, which is being released by Summit Entertainment. history for those who only followed it on the news, leveraging all the cinematic bells and whistles a major Hollywood production can buy. 30, sets out to dramatize the worst environmental disaster in U.S. That was kind of a trigger mechanism that took me back there every time.”Īnother Deepwater Horizon survivor, Caleb Holloway, says one of his own triggers in the intervening years has been the Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art.”Īrriving in movie theaters just six years after the tragedy, director Peter Berg’s “Deepwater Horizon,” opening Sept. “I could hear a helicopter in my sleep and wake up screaming. “I had this deathly fear of helicopters for probably another two years after the accident,” Williams, 44, said on a recent afternoon by phone from his home in Dallas. ![]() Trapped on the burning rig after a series of explosions, badly injured, Williams leaped nearly 10 stories into the Gulf of Mexico and was eventually medevaced to safety by a Coast Guard helicopter.įor months afterward, just hearing the whirring of helicopter blades would bring traumatic memories back. On the night of April 20, 2010, Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, barely survived a devastating blowout that claimed the lives of 11 of his co-workers. For a long time after the disaster, Mike Williams was haunted by the sound of helicopters.
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