Monitoring Desk
Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio (finally), has repeatedly spoken about the harsh conditions he experienced while filming The Revenant. We did our own investigating and turns out, he wasn’t exaggerating.
Here are six things that you didn’t know about The Revenant, which make DiCaprio all the more deserving of his Oscar:
1. The cold
Yes, we know it was cold, and from his speech at the Oscars, we know the crew had to travel far and wide to find snow due to global warming.
“We had to go to the southern tip of Argentina, to the southern most town on the planet, to find snow.”
“It was physically grueling for everybody. We had to have this massive crew go to far-off locations and move around all over the high altitudes, from Calgary to Vancouver,” DiCaprio told Wired.
But how cold was it exactly? -30°C to be exact.
Iñárritu’s decision to film in the wilderness of Alberta, Canada posed many problems for the cast and crew of The Revenant. Temperatures rarely made it above -30°C and midway through shooting the film, the cold reached its peak at -40°C.
“We were supposed to do a scene with my son as he’s praying for me. And it hit 40 below zero,” remembers DiCaprio. “At that point we couldn’t really open our eyes. And our fingers locked together and the camera gear locked together, and I just looked at Alejandro and said, ‘I’m all for enduring realism but there comes a point when nothing is operable.’” Iñárritu obliged and filming was suspended for five weeks, The Telegraph reported.
“Temperatures dipped to 25 degrees below zero, or minus 40 degrees with the windchill factor. But since the action at that point was set in the autumn, actors were asked to go without hats and gloves. “Everybody was frozen, the equipment was breaking; to get the camera from one place to another was a nightmare,” Inarritu told The Hollywood Reporter.
So how did they save the Titanic star from hypothermia?
They had a giant hair dryer with octopus tentacles that they blasted him with after every single take for nine months.
2. Raw liver
In real life, Hugh Glass, who was left for the dead by his friends after a bear attack, survived by gathering berries, and even chewing on a dead rattlesnake. During one of his hunger pangs, he ate a raw bison liver — a moment Iñárritu was determined to capture on screen.
However, the prop department’s fake liver wasn’t doing the job.
“It wasn’t bleeding the right way when I was biting into it,” recalls DiCaprio. “Alejandro threw me a real one. The bad part is the membrane around it. It’s like a balloon. When you bite into it, it bursts in your mouth.”
Did we mention DiCaprio has been a vegetarian since 1992?
3. Phlegm
DiCaprio spent a significant part of shooting sick with the flu (sub-zero temperatures can do that to you).
“I got flu quite a few times,” he admits.
In one scene, DiCaprio’s character Glass, is on a stretcher, coughing out a gross stream of phlegm. Turns out it wasn’t fake.
At an early screening, an impressed technician asked the director if it had been achieved in post-production. “No, that was for real,” Iñárritu informed him.
4. Elk skin and Frozen rivers
When Wired asked DiCaprio what the hardest part of filming was, he revealed that it was ”getting in and out of frozen rivers because I had elk skin on and a bear fur that weighed about 100 pounds when it got wet.”
Every time he dove into the river, “the bearskin absorbed about 50 pounds of water, and then it immediately froze,” DiCaprio told The Telegraph.
5. Costume and make-up
Every morning before filming started, DiCaprio woke up at about 3:00am to begin the hair and make up ritual.
To recreate Glass’ wounds and deteriorating physical condition, DiCaprio had to be covered in 47 separate prosthetic pieces, The Telegraph reported. This took about four to five hours, and was followed by a two-hour drive to the film’s remote location.
6. Real avalanche
According to the New York Times, director Iñárritu ordered a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse during the filming of The Revenant.
Iñárritu’s commitment to using as little CGI as possible is evident in one scene when Leonardo DiCaprio is walking through a valley as a thunderous avalanche unfolds in the distance. While other filmmakers might leave an avalanche to digital artists in post-production, Iñárritu decided to make his own.
He arranged to have planes drop explosives on Fortress Mountain in Alberta, Canada, to set off a real avalanche where they were filming. The timing had to be precise, since they only had one take, reports From the Grapevine. “We triggered that avalanche,” he told Wired. “And then to coordinate it with cameras, with actors, with horses – it was stressful but thrilling.” Well, now that we know, we have new found respect for Leo. He definitely deserves that Oscar!
