For a long time after the disaster, Mike Williams was haunted by the sound of helicopters.

On the night of April 20, 2010, Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, barely survived a devastating blowout that claimed the lives of 11 of his co-workers. Trapped on the burning rig after a series of explosions, badly injured, Williams leaped nearly 10 stories into the Gulf of Mexico and was eventually medevaced to safety by a Coast Guard helicopter.

For months afterward, just hearing the whirring of helicopter blades would bring traumatic memories back.

“I had this deathly fear of helicopters for probably another two years after the accident,” Williams, 44, said on a recent afternoon by phone from his home in Dallas. “I could hear a helicopter in my sleep and wake up screaming. That was kind of a trigger mechanism that took me back there every time.”

Another Deepwater Horizon survivor, Caleb Holloway, says one of his own triggers in the intervening years has been the Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

Working as a floorhand on the rig's drill crew, away from home for weeks at a time doing physically demanding work, Holloway had the words of the song written inside his hard hat for inspiration. In the wake of the disaster, he heard it sung at memorial services for the men he'd worked alongside.

“Every time I hear that song, tears well up in my eyes and I get a lump in my throat,” Holloway, 34, said recently from Nacogdoches, Texas, where he works as a firefighter.

Arriving in movie theaters six years after the tragedy, director Peter Berg's “Deepwater Horizon,” opening Friday, sets out to dramatize the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history for those who only followed it on the news, leveraging all the cinematic bells and whistles a major Hollywood production can buy.

“It has those elements of a disaster movie, but it's a true story,” said Mark Wahlberg, who plays Williams in the film, which is being released by Summit Entertainment. “We didn't want to paint by numbers; you have to make it as realistic as possible. I loved the studio's courage to make a character-driven adult action movie where there's no chance for a sequel.”

For Williams, Holloway and the other 113 men and women who lived through the catastrophe that unfolded 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, the film represents something more personal: a way to pay tribute to their fallen co-workers and, perhaps, get some closure.

Berg says his aim from the start with “Deepwater Horizon” was to keep the focus squarely on the human story at the heart of the disaster.

“To this day, when people think of Deepwater Horizon, they only think of an oil spill, they think of an oil spill and dead pelicans,” said Berg, who took on the project after original director J.C. Chandor stepped away because of creative differences.

The basis for the film's script, written by Matthew Sand and Matthew Michael Carnahan, was an exhaustively reported 2010 New York Times article on the Deepwater Horizon's final hours by David Barstow, David Rhode and Stephanie Saul. Figuring out how to boil the sprawling story down to a manageable size was no easy task. But eventually the narrative centered on a handful of real-life figures, including Williams, Transocean offshore installation manager Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), bridge officer Andrea Fleytas (Gina Rodriguez) and BP rep Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich).

A riveting 2010 interview with Williams on “60 Minutes,” in which he recounted his harrowing escape from the rig, helped give the story much of its emotional spine. But when Williams was first approached about the project, he was hesitant about being cast as any kind of hero.

“He was very nervous about what he called ‘stolen valor,'?” Berg said. “He wanted to make sure that we didn't present him in a way that made him look like he did a bunch of things that he didn't do or was any more heroic than any other people on that rig. And I respected that.”

As one of the crew members most familiar with the workings of the rig, and one of the last to make it off of it alive, Williams was an invaluable resource, Wahlberg said.

Looking back on the tragedy, Williams, whose head smashed into a door when the rig was rocked by explosions, says it's a miracle more people weren't killed, himself included.

Like Williams, Holloway isn't sure why he survived the Deepwater disaster when others didn't. “The first year after this happened, I was continually asking, ‘Why?' But it got to a point where I had to finally embrace it and just thank God for the time I got to spend with the guys who passed away.”

josh.rottenberg@latimes.com