Richard Fleischer repeatedly turned down Dino De Laurentiis' overtures to direct the film. He ultimately relented when he realized that the best way to make the film was to shoot it straight and tell the story as truthfully as he could.
Disaster movies tend to inhabit the close-but-not-too-close realm of the ‘what if?’, but Quentin Reynaud’s taut drama evokes a reality that is painfully immediate, as the world combusts around us. Alex Lutz (recently seen as the son in Gaspar Noé’s Vortex) plays a man determined to escape with his elderly father (the ineffable André Dussollier) from a wildfire that is rapidly a...