‘The Lost Bus’ True Story: How Accurate is Matthew McConaughey’s Movie to the Real Bus Driver Kevin McKay?

It’s been less than a decade since a deadly wildfire ravaged the community of Paradise, California in 2018, but you can already watch the Hollywood version of events in The Lost Bus, the new thriller movie that began streaming on Apple TV+ today.

Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Greengrass (known for The Bourne movies, United 93, Captain Phillips, and more), with a screenplay written by Greengrass and Brad Ingelsby, The Lost Bus is based on the 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson. The film tells the true story of school bus driver Kevin McKay (played by Matthew McConaughey) and school teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), who heroically navigated a bus full of children through the 2018 Camp Fire, aka the deadliest wildfire in California history.

But as shrewd movie viewers know, just because a film is based on a true story doesn’t mean what you see on screen is what really happened. In the case of The Lost Bus movie, quite a bit of the story was exaggerated, added, or changed for the sake of telling a more dramatic, more compelling version of the truth. Read on to learn more about The Lost Bus true story, and how accurate the movie is to the story of the real Lost Bus bus driver Kevin McKay.

Is The Lost Bus based on a true story?

Yes, The Lost Bus is based on the true story of Kevin McKay, a school bus driver who was hailed as a hero after he responded to an emergency call to pick up 22 students from Ponderosa Elementary, to drive them to safety during the 2018 wild fire in Paradise, California. The Camp Fire, as it’s called, was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history, killing 85 people, displacing well over 50,000 people, and burning an entire community to the ground.

How accurate is The Lost Bus movie to the true story of Kevin McKay?

The Lost Bus movie is a highly exaggerated, fictionalized, Hollywood version of what really happened on the day Kevin McKay drove 22 kids to safety during the 2018 Camp Fire.

Here are the parts that are true, according to a 2018 CNN report about a week after the incident. It’s true that McKay, 41 at the time, had only been on the job a few months when he responded to an emergency call to pick children whose parents hadn’t been able to come collect them from Ponderosa Elementary School in Paradise, after the school received a mandatory evacuation order.

It’s also true that a second grade teacher, the then-50-year-old Mary Ludwig (played by 41-old America Ferrera), also evacuated with the students at McKay’s request, along 29-year-old kindergarten teacher Abbie Davis, who is not featured in the movie. The real Ludwig did leave the vehicle in search of additional water at one point, though, according to an excerpt of Johnson’s book, she found it thanks to the generosity of a stranger who donated some from his trailer (and not, as happens in the movie, nabbed from in an abandoned RV surrounded by thugs).

It’s true that McKay was forced to drive the bus down a narrow, dangerous road known as Roe road. Finally, it is true that McKay donated his shirt to be ripped into strips of cloth doused in water, to use as a make-shift air filter for the kids. The thick smoke that surrounded the road seeped into the bus, causing some of the kids on the bus to experience smoke inhalation symptoms, such as drowsiness.

“We were coughing and my eyes were hurting. I knew we had to do something,” the real McKay told CBS News.” And that was, you know, our best option with what we had.”

And that’s about where the true stuff ends. Now let’s get into the not-so-true stuff. While the real McKay does have a teenage son named Shaun (played by McConaughey’s real son, Levi McConaughey, in the film), the real Shaun—along with McKay’s mother and girlfriend—had already evacuated to a Chico hotel many hours before McKay made his big drive. McKay knew this after he got a text that his family was safe, and was able to “focus completely on this terrifying situation,” he told CNN.

While it was no doubt a very scary situation, there was not any of the high-speed, fire-dodging action sequences that you see play out in the movie. Yes, McKay and the kids could see many fires from the windows of the bus, and smoke obscured his view, but they didn’t actually drive through any flames. Mostly, the bus was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, turning a 30-mile journey into a five-hour trip.

McKay did try to take back roads, which is what happens in the movie, but in reality he was turned away by law enforcement, according to an excerpt of Johnson’s book in The Washington Post. McKay definitely did not stop the bus in the middle of an empty park, with flames surrounding the vehicle, hoping to wait out the fire.

And no, no “looters” in knit beanie caps banged on the bus door, waving a gun. (According to the CNN write-up, the bus was sideswiped by a car at one point, which Davis said sounded like someone punching the bus, so perhaps that’s where that detail came from.) In fact, far from keeping “looters” out, the real McKay actually offered a ride to a 20-year-old preschool teacher, who was standing on the side of the road after her car ran out of gas. But I guess it’s not a Hollywood movie without some stereotypical bad guys.

Another change from reality in the movie was the loss of radio connection between the bus and the school, which is a major plot point in the film. (Hence why it’s a “lost” bus.) Though Johnson’s book makes no mention of a radio on the bus, it seems there was scattered communication via cellphones, when the overwhelmed towers allowed service to come through. It doesn’t seem like the bus was ever truly lost.

In other words, this was a very scary situation in real life, and the real McKay did a heroic job. But the version you see in The Lost Bus movie is not by any means an accurate representation of what really happened on that bus.