NEW YORK—Basil Iwanyk knew that he wanted to produce a movie about the true story of a team’s recovery from a tragic plane crash. He started out researching a 1958 crash that claimed the lives of seven Manchester United soccer players. As he was working his way through story development, he heard about another plane crash, one that had killed 75 people heading home from a 1970 Marshall University football game. Four players who had stayed behind in Huntington, West Virginia, were all that remained of the team. Also killed were four of the five coaches, the athletic director, and several of Huntington’s leading citizens.

Ironically, when he and director McG were casting the movie We Are Marshall (which opens in Vancouver on December 22), they hired an actor who was very fami­liar with the Manchester United crash. Ian McShane, who is perhaps best known to North American audiences as Al Swearengen in the series Deadwood, grew up in Manchester as the son of Harry McShane, who played for Manchester United between 1951 and 1956.

In a New York hotel room, McShane says that he had déjà vu from the first day he arrived in Huntington to play the father of one of the crash victims. “Both teams have the same initials,” he says. “David Milch [the producer of Deadwood] dropped me off in West Virginia at night and I went on-set a few hours later. I arrived in time for the funeral scene and saw all of these wreaths with MU on them and it jolted me back almost 50 years to the Manchester United crash.”

In We Are Marshall, the university’s president Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) begins to accept the possibility that the program will be cancelled after his coaching choices turn down the job. Eventually, a college coach named Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) convinces Dedmon that the program has a future. It went on to become one of the most successful football programs of the 1980s.

McShane says he saw the same thing happen in England in the 1950s. “The tragedy of Manchester United was that they had cleaned house of most of the older players like my father and started out again with a very young team. The players who died were barely out of their teens, but the team was competitive enough that they were challenging for the European Cup that year. They had to decide whether to find new players quickly and keep going or just dissolve the team. I remember when I went to the first game after the crash. It was a huge event and they borrowed players from here and there and they lost 3 to 2. But they didn’t just give up, and now they are arguably one of the most famous sports teams in the world. But in England, that team, which was known as Busby’s Babes [after coach Alex Busby], is the most famous of the Man U teams. It’s like James Dean. They are forever young in the memory, as is the team from Marshall.”