Blue Miracle is based on the inspiring true story of Casa Hogar, an orphanage for boys in Cabo San Lucas, and a chance victory in the world’s biggest fishing tournament that saved them from bankruptcy. The film follows the head of Casa Hogar, Papa Omar (Jimmy Gonzales), a father figure to all the boys in his care, as he takes a leap of faith and enters a local fishing tournament although neither he, nor any of the boys, has any prior fishing experience. The contest pairs them with the washed-up Captain Wade (Dennis Quaid) who begrudgingly agrees to team up with them, as it’s his only way to gain entry as a non-local fisherman. Once they're out on the water, they are moved by something larger than themselves, enabling Casa Hogar to secure a brighter future for the boys and Captain Wade to find redemption. 

Since he was dealing with a true story, Blue Miracle’s writer-director Julio Quintana had to determine which elements to keep, discard, fictionalize or heighten. 

“I was handed a story about a guy [Papa Omar] who obviously has a fatherly instinct to these young kids in real life, and faith was a big part of his life. And that actually thematically works for the fishing movie, because it's not the kind of sports film where they just train a lot and get good, and ultimately win. There's an element of chance to winning the fishing tournaments. So, you take the bones of what the actual story is—which is fishing and a guy who's a mentor to young boys. The things to explore in that situation are: Questions of fatherhood, questions of faith, and whether or not these kids have been abandoned.”

Ultimately, the story was shaped through the themes and questions Julio most wanted to explore. 

“The way I decide what to keep and what to toss out is really what details either challenge or support the theme that I'm trying to get across. Theme is a real obsession with me… The character's arc is the theme of the movie, essentially. The protagonist has a worldview, something he or she believes, and you create characters around them that represent different aspects, different challenges to that worldview. So that you can kind of see the chinks in his worldview falling apart over the course of the film.”

He created the character of Captain Wade (played by Dennis Quaid) to do just that. 

“There was a boat captain in the real story, but I changed him completely and I made that character a source of thematic conflict, so he could challenge Omar's worldview. The debate about fatherhood and what it means to be a father, and all that stuff. That character [Captain Wade] was essentially created from scratch in order to be able to inject conflict into that situation.”

As Quintana was also directing the film, it gave him the freedom to take risks and infuse the script with a distinct visual style. 

“When I'm directing something, I try to get things across visually when possible. I'm thinking about shots, I'm thinking about music, as I'm going along. I could even have color palettes that will get across certain ideas in a subtle way. As a director, I have the benefit of knowing what it's going to look like. It’s still, at the end of the day, a sales document," says Quintana.

"A script, at the end of the day, still has to go up the chain of command and ten people have to sign off on it," he elaborates. "So, it's not just enough for me to know, 'Trust me, it’s going to work.' I still have to get [it all] across on the paper, so that the average reader who’s not in my head can tell, more or less, what the tone of those scenes would be. But it does give me a little bit more flexibility. There were dream sequences in there, for example, that would inject surrealism into a genre that doesn't really have that sort of thing typically. If I was trying to write that for a director, maybe that would be riskier. But knowing that I knew what it would look like and I could fight for it with the studio, it gives me a lot more freedom.”

Blue Miracle premieres on Netflix May 27th, 2021. Learn more about the actual Casa Hogar and how to help here.