Their Thai Cave Rescue Film Was Done. Then 87 Hours of Footage Arrived.

The documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi lives in fear of not telling a complete story. What if there is another angle to explore? More footage to uncover? Is her exploration of a topic ever really complete? Those feelings were occupying large swaths of her brain back in May when she was finally able to travel to Thailand.

Vasarhelyi, 42, and her husband, Jimmy Chin, 47, are best known for their Oscar-winning, death-defying climbing documentary, “Free Solo.” The duo had already spent three years painstakingly turning over every piece of video available to them for their new film: “The Rescue,” which opens Oct. 8 in theaters. It tracks the 2018 global effort to retrieve 12 young soccer players and their coach trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand. The filmmakers had scoured international news feeds and local Thai footage, often…