Alejandro González Iñárritu was certain that Leonardo DiCaprio would go to the ends of the earth to make 19th-century survival epic The Revenant exactly the way the famously meticulous director wanted.
He knew that DiCaprio was the best person to play Hugh Glass, a real-life fur trapper who survived a bear mauling, and then went looking for those who left him for dead in the wilderness.
The film was in production for nearly a year, during which time the Oscar-nominated actor and environmentalist proved his commitment time and again. He ate raw bison. He stripped naked in sub-zero temperatures. He even jumped into an icy river.
“It’s a really primal story of man and the natural world,” says DiCaprio. “It’s almost Biblical.”
In the CGI era, this was an unconventional shoot. Iñárritu travelled with his crew to Calgary, Alberta, and to Argentina when the Canadian snow melted earlier than expected.
As if filming on location isn’t hard enough, he and cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki opted to shoot only in natural light. This often gave only 90 minutes a day to achieve complex long takes. The duo had done it before with the Oscar-winning Birdman – but not in the unpredictable wilderness.
DiCaprio knew very well what he was signing up for. “When you’re out in the elements like this – and there are people who have much harder jobs than people making a movie – you just appreciate the endurance of man and how we’re able to adapt to circumstances,” he says. “You’re signing on to find elements that will ultimately transform the narrative and find the poetry.
“That’s what the whole thing was about. It was all basically us really putting ourselves in this environment and seeing what happens.”
He researched the role and rehearsed the scenes – but when the cameras rolled, everything became very animalistic, a largely silent performance rooted in instinct and reaction.
“For me it was about really thinking these thoughts and really trying to feel this man’s pain,” DiCaprio says.
The grit of the shoot, the trials and tribulations, the tension of getting that perfect shot, it’s all on the screen – particularly during the scene in which Glass is attacked by a bear.
“I think it will go down in history as one of the most voyeuristic action sequences ever created,” DiCaprio says. “You feel the blood and the sweat. You almost smell the bear. It accomplishes what movies do at their best, which is to really make you feel like the rest of the world has evaporated and you’re singularly in that moment.”
Iñárritu is keeping how he achieved such a harrowing sequence to himself. “I wanted people [to] feel the cold, smell the fear. It was difficult, but that’s what we were supposed to do.
The Revenant is out in cinemas on January 7.
* The Associated Press
