The first trailer for The Revenant arrived last week and managed to impress most that saw it as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s follow-up to last year’s Best Picture-winner Birdman has been hotly anticipated from the moment it was announced.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, the story centers on explorer Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) as he’s brutally attacked by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team. In a quest to survive, Glass endures unimaginable grief as well as the betrayal of his confidant John Fitzgerald (Hardy), turning the film not only into a tale of survival, but also revenge and redemption.
The film, which began shooting in October 2014 in Calgary, overshot its production schedule, which is why Hardy had to drop out of Suicide Squad. Then sudden heat melted the snow in Alberta and the production was put on hold until only recently as the cast is now headed to Ushuaia, in the Tierra del Fuego region of Argentina, to find some more snow and complete the final scenes.
Inarritu recently told Imagen the film is 90% complete, but won’t be ready until December, which means anyone expecting it to hit the fall film festival circuit can forget about it. Inarritu confirmed as much to Hollywood Elsewhere saying leading up to the film’s Dec. 25 release date he’ll still be “editing and in full post-production until then. Not finished at all.”
Leading up to the Ushuaia shoot, however, Inarritu and DiCaprio spoke with Grantland, providing a little more information on the film and its characters. Perhaps most interesting, though not at all surprising, is word DiCaprio’s character has few lines of dialogue throughout the feature.
“It was a different type of challenge for me,” DiCaprio told Grantland, “because I’ve played a lot of very vocal characters. It’s something that I really wanted to investigate — playing a character that says almost nothing. How do you relay an emotional journey and get in tune with this man’s angst … without words?”
With the character DiCaprio says he “tried to capture — or emulate on film — a different type of American that I haven’t seen on film very often… This [was] an unregulated, sort of lawless territory. It hadn’t been forged into the America that we know yet. It was still sort of up for grabs.”
Inarritu tells Grantland’s Chris Connelly he sees Glass “as an example of the relentless possibilities of the human spirit against so many challenges: racial, physical, spiritual, social. I took that opportunity to create my own Hugh Glass: my interpretation of who he could have been.”
I’ve already written about cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki‘s take on the frigid shoot as he said, “We’re doing a lot of exterior work with natural light and Steadicam. The lenses are very wide and close to the actors. It’s extremely visceral. The temperature has dropped as low as -30°C [-22°F], and we’ve been experiencing some difficulties with the equipment. At one point, it got so cold our monitors froze!”
Inarritu iterates the point as only he can:
“There was something very positive about shooting in those conditions, to understand what those guys [from the 1820s] went through,” Iñárritu says. “We don’t have adventures anymore. Now people say, ‘I went to India … it’s an adventure.’ No: We have GPS, a phone, nobody gets lost. Those guys really were in a huge physical, emotional adventure in the unknown territory. After you see what these guys went through, you understand what pussies we are: Our apartment is not at the right temperature, there is no ham in the fridge, and the water is a little cold … When did that happen?
“Actors were not in sets with green screens and laughing,” Iñárritu says. “They were miserable! And they really feel the fucking cold in their ass! They were not acting at all!”
The rest of the Grantland piece even includes details about the film’s opening including a scene with Glass and his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) as they hunt elk followed by a sequence at a trappers’ settlement, described as “messy, random, and reeking”, just how production designer Jack Fisk (There Will Be Blood, Knight of Cups) wanted it. “Film cleans everything up so much,” Fisk notes. “I wanted to be able to smell their environment, and Alejandro wants that grit and reality.”
The story is more than enough to get anyone that may have been on the fence excited about the final product. DiCaprio speaks to the large amount of planning that went into each scene saying, “To pull off these complicated sequences, like a ballet, movement needed to be precise… When it came down to that nail-biting moment to capture that magic light, every day was like putting on a mini-piece of theater. If we lost that one hour, if we didn’t accomplish what we had to accomplish, we were there the next day. And oftentimes many of these locations were very remote. So it was a very intense set, because we knew we only had one shot every single day. Otherwise … we would be back there again.”
