


We even all slept out one night, under the stars together. "They were awesome with us, and so patient. "We did a really great boot camp, and some of the hotshots who worked with the real guys were our leaders," Kitsch told me. To get the actors ready to credibly portray such a difficult and technical job, Joseph Kosinski sent them on an extended training trip. "I’ve worked with some pretty intense stuff-but 20- or 30- or 40-foot fires, that’s no joke," says Kitsch. But Kitsch, along with the rest of the Only the Brave cast, got a quick education in the reality of life as a hotshot: everything from "water drops," in which massive tanks of water are dropped on a wildfire with enough pressure to destroy a house, to "burnouts," in which hotshots light controlled fires to interrupt a wildfire’s "fuel supply" and limit the spread.Īnd then, of course, there was the process of shooting a movie in the midst of massive, actual fires.
