How accurate is The Lost Bus? Exploring facts vs. fiction in the Apple TV+ film

The Lost Bus is the directorial effort of Paul Greengrass, who is known for making films on real-life events.

The survival drama film is written by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, and it's based on Lizzie Johnson's 2021 non-fiction book Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. Its official synopsis, as per Letterboxd, is,

"A determined father risks everything to rescue a dedicated teacher and her students from a raging wildfire."

The film takes the real-life account of Kevin McKay, who saved several lives during the 2018 Camp Fire with his school bus. Let's find out how accurate the film is.

How true is The Lost Bus?

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The Lost Bus is set against the backdrop of the 2018 Camp Fire, which took place in Butte County, Northern California. It began on November 8, 2018, and kept burning for nearly two weeks. 85 people passed away, and a thousand were displaced due to this incident. The fire was attributed to a technical failure in a PG&E transmission line.

In the film, bus driver Kevin McKay carries 22 students who were studying at the Ponderosa Elementary School. They are accompanied by a school teacher, Mary Ludwig. In reality, there were two teachers inside the bus: Mary Ludwig (50) and Abbie Davis (29).

The film showcases McKay getting worried about the safety of his house. But the reality is that his son, mother, and girlfriend had already moved to a hotel in the region to a safe zone.

The Lost Bus has a scene where the fire smoke starts entering the bus. We see the protagonist giving up his shirt and tearing it apart to make a makeshift air filter. McKay did exactly that in real life. In a CBS News interview, he said:

"We were coughing and my eyes were hurting. I knew we had to do something. And that was, you know, our best option with what we had."

McKay's background in the film also runs parallel with the real-life events. He quit his stable and decent-paying job and later started working as a school bus driver.

The film mostly focuses on the characters and the disaster instead of its cause, which was due to a transmission failure at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). Paul Greengrass spoke to Time Magazine about this decision. He said,

"It's not really a film about PG&E, but their failure to maintain the infrastructure was the prime course of the fire, and that's just the facts of it. It's just part of what you need to know to understand why these fires do what they do."

The film is produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Blum, Gregory Goodman, and Brad Ingelsby. Its cast members include,