Last July, an exposé appeared in the Hollywood Reporter under the heading "How Leonardo DiCaprio's 'The Revenant' Shoot Became 'A Living Hell'". This had not been an easy shoot: large numbers of crew had quit or been fired; the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, had reputedly banned his own producer from the set. There were further rumblings: tales of chaffed genitals, hypothermia and, according to one tall-sounding tale, a flea infestation in Leo's beard that died from extreme cold.
Suddenly, The Revenant, in which DiCaprio plays early 19th- century explorer Hugh Glass, was being mentioned in the same breath as Joseph Mankiewicz's' infamously bloated Cleopatra. Had the film-maker, on the back of the tremendous success of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) gone "native" on his wilderness shoot?
Perhaps. But when the first awe-struck reviews appeared, naysayers were well and truly silenced: raw, tense, gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and boasting a career best performance from DiCaprio, The Revenant will be hard to top when awards season comes around.
“It’s undeniable,” Iñárritu tells me. “The shoot was extremely difficult and challenging. But the emphasis within some of these stories that appeared is not, I would say, truthful. Yes, it would have been easier to say: let’s use a green screen and let’s have warm coffee and let’s have a good time on set. That would have killed the film. We might have been comfortable personally. But what’s the point in taking that road?”
In search of bad weather
Iñárritu’s road less travelled entailed a sequential, survivalist shoot. The initial plan was to film Glass’s perilous odyssey – a trek besieged with vengeful Native Americans, untrustworthy companions, appalling weather conditions and a near-fatal bear mauling – entirely in Canada. But the weather proved insufficiently harsh, so cast and crew moved to Argentina in search of snow.
Lubezki's decision to film using natural light required a two-week break that ultimately lasted for six weeks. (The delay forced co-star Tom Hardy to drop out of Suicide Squad.) Even with the break, certain scenes that were supposed to be set in autumn required actors asked to go without hats or gloves in temperatures that had dropped to -40 degrees – and that's without the windchill factor. Unsurprisingly, the budget spiralled from $95 million to north of $125 million.
“When you have a film like this, it is almost a miracle that it exists at all,” says the ambitious film-maker. “The context is contemporary cinema. And contemporary cinema is corporate. The profits are the only priority. New Regency owner Arnon Milchan backed us all the way. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t betray the ambition of the film. He didn’t want myself or the actors to compromise what we were doing. But the idea that the film was somehow an irresponsible act? No.”
Differing ambitions
The Revenant and Birdman, though equally ambitious, could not be more differently ambitious. Birdman required seamless editing and precise camera movement in order to maintain the illusion that the film was shot in one take. The Revenant required very different choreography and much wider lenses.
"Birdman was a very controlled environment and it was a very different kind of challenge," says Iñárritu. "Here the weather conditions and the unpredictability of nature meant that we couldn't rehearse everything. We had to adapt. We had to respond. We were physically much more challenged. You had animals. And avalanches. The choreography of all those elements was much more ambitious."
He admits that Werner Herzog's equally ambitious and set- troubled Fitzcarraldo was an influence. Yet despite The Revenant's frontier setting, it is not a western.
“Historically, the west didn’t exist when the story is set,” he says. “There’s no Gold Rush. No oil. People knew there was land to the west, but no one had been there. And I was careful that no one wore hats in the film. You have to be careful with genre because genre has the same root word as generic.
"I'm not one of those film-makers who had a lot of film influences. I'm influenced more by music and literature. There were some films I thought about: Andrei Rublev and some Kurosawa, but also the tradition of Jack London. I wanted it to fit with those antique stories about men against nature."
It’s hard to argue with the results. It’s impossible to watch DiCaprio’s on-screen ordeal with actually feeling phantom pain and damp-by-proxy. But surely a little more SFX chicanery wouldn’t have hurt?
“But it’s like biting a real apple instead of a GMO apple,” argues Iñárritu. “You’re so used to the pixel world that we are fed from blockbusters. But what reality can bring is very satisfying and unmistakable.
“I’m not against technology; of course not. But it has to serve the truth. Or at least the truth of your universe. Every possible tool available that will make the film better, I will use it. That’s my job as a magician. I have to produce tricks.”
Magician isn’t far off the mark. A dazzling talent from the get-go, as long ago as 1984, Iñárritu, then 19, was a successful radio presenter in his native Mexico. Between 1998 and 1990 he composed musical scores for six features while studying under Polish auteur Ludwig Margules. During the 1990s, Iñárritu was the head of production at Televisa, Mexico’s national broadcast.
His debut film feature was the much-admired Amores Perros, a global hit and prize winner at Cannes. He went on to direct Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts in 21 Grams, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Babel, and Javier Bardem in Biutiful. Last year, Birdman won four Academy Awards: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Cinematography, as well as acting nods for Michael Keaton, Emma Stone and Edward Norton.
Combatative director
The plaudits match a fearsome drive. Long before The Revenant, Iñárritu had something of an "artistic" reputation. Amores Perros only went into production after 36 redrafts. In 2007, a dispute over the authorship of Babel between Iñárritu, and writer Guillermo Arriaga escalated into a very public row. And now The Revenant has produced a raft of crazy Kubrickian-style stories.
Did life-long vegetarian Leonardo DiCaprio, actually have to eat a bison liver for the sake of authenticity? Did Iñárritu and Tom Hardy really end up wrestling on the ground?
Iñárritu insists that the shoot ultimately created a “sense of brotherhood and camaraderie unlike anything I’ve experienced before,” and that he doesn’t recognise himself as the “crazy genius” depicted in celebrity gossip sites and tabloids.
“I’m not a genius or something like that,” he says. “It’s true that I may be a little challenging to work with. I’m just somebody whose vision is clear and I work my ass off to realise it. I will drive myself and others to make that vision happen. I consider myself a little crazy and irresponsible for doing that. But that’s how I work. I don’t think it’s genius. I suffer from a disease that is chronic dissatisfaction.”
He laughs: “And I think you have to be a little crazy to make films, no?”
- The Revenant is on general release from January 15th
