Getting mauled by a grizzly bear usually spells a painful death, but for one man, a savage bear attack is the catalyst for a quest fueled by revenge, in a wide-sweeping saga that uncovers the willpower to survive against all odds.
“The Revenant,” out in limited U.S. theaters on Friday (December 25), follows the story of Pioneer-era fur trapper Hugh Glass, who was mauled in a grizzly bear attack and left for dead by his companions. Glass exhaustingly and excruciatingly travels across vast, primitive landscapes in pursuit of retribution.
“It’s a very primal, almost Biblical story of a man surviving in nature, the will to live, all of this stuff, the perseverance of the human spirit, what we draw upon to survive against all odds. But for me, what became very prevalent about this movie when we started to do it was, this was a very specific time period in American history and this was the first wave of capitalism, where we started to extract from nature and manipulate nature and dominate the natural world,” actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Glass, told Reuters.
The film is likely to garner DiCaprio his fifth best actor Oscar nomination.
It is a stark difference from his last critically-lauded Oscar-nominated role as the fast-talking Jordan Belfort in 2013’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as Glass is rendered voiceless for much of the film after his attack.
“Wasn’t it clear? Like it was clear when it was happening, we would talk about it on the way home that what he (DiCaprio) was doing was amazing, it was very, very clear, he doesn’t need words to be great, he’s just very great,” said co-star Domhnall Gleeson.
Castmate Will Poulter added, “And no more clear to us than when we actually got a chance to watch the film that’s when it became very, very apparent of just how special his performance was because he is on his own for much of the movie, so we didn’t really get an insight into the full force of what he creates in this film until we saw it last night, it’s a knock your socks off performance.”
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Inarritu, who won the best picture Oscar this year for his intricately choreographed showbiz satire “Birdman,” has said he wanted to explore revenge and the cost it comes at in “The Revenant.”
The making of “The Revenant” is fast becoming a story in itself, from Inarritu’s quest to shoot only in natural light in real snow-covered landscapes to DiCaprio saying he had slept in animal carcasses, like his character does in one scene.
“You have to work with so many different elements that you’re not accustomed to. It’s a really intimate dance with the camera, with all the other actors, it’s almost like being a part of a swiss watch at the end of the day, you have to be incredibly precise. So that was, you know, at first a little bit of a struggle for some of us, but then it just became a matter of trust in Alejandro’s vision, and once we had that, we started making some pretty powerful sequences in this movie,” DiCaprio said of the arduous shoot.
For Tom Hardy, who plays the ruthless and unhinged John Fitzgerald, the hardest challenge was “enduring”.
“Well the hardest challenge I had to encounter was just enduring focus over a long period of time on very small but complicated beats as Leo described. Because the nature of this film, the way it was shot was so specific to a process that Alejandro called ‘the tightrope’, which is something I’ve never heard of before, something I think possibly he made up, in many aspects to that (laughs) we had to then trust him without the ability to watch any playback for the first couple of months as it were,” Hardy said.
“The Revenant” opens in select theaters December 25, 2015 and nation-wide on January 8, 2016. (Reuters)