With the most nominations for this year's Academy Awards, “The Revenant” has undergone a lot of analysis. Some peg it as a modern Western, others see it as a critique of early American capitalism. However you read the film, there’s more to this telling of Hugh Glass’ epic survival story than a brutal bear attack.
“The Revenant” star Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner to win the Best Actor trophy for his portrayal of the determined fur trapper. DiCaprio says the film resonates with him as a cautionary reminder of a time in history when frontiersmen were hastily exploiting nature for profit. A longtime environmentalist, DiCaprio draws comparisons between the misuse of natural resources in 1800s and modern day America.
DiCaprio appeared at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences panel hosted by The Frame’s John Horn. The actor spoke about the difficult making of the frontier drama and why he sees an environmentalist theme beyond the film’s flurries of snow.
On the making of “The Revenant”
A lot of the time during the rehearsal process, we would work with all the different departments during the day, and it would almost be like doing theater during the day and live television for the last hour and a half of magic light. So we had to make sure that certain nuances were captured, certain beats were captured, certain emotional moments were captured — and we got to rehearse that during the day. It really gave you a great comfort because you knew that the cameraman was going to be there at the exact right moments for these beats. And you got to think about them in great detail.
What they were able to do certainly in some of these vast, incredibly beautiful action sequences is capture incredible intimacy with the characters and then weave seamlessly around to an unbelievable David Lean-style shot. You know, I’ve never quite seen anything cinematically like that.
On his character, Hugh Glass
From the onset, Hugh is always the outsider. He has a Native American son, but he is trying to disappear in the context of this environment in order to survive. And those are some of the things he’s trying to instill in his son. So he’s always within and without. He’s there, he’s an operative, he’s a scout, but he’s trying to remain detached from this whole wave of capitalism surging towards the wilderness. So he’s a survivor. Much like every character in this movie is a survivor — from Tom Hardy to the Arikara chief to the bear.
On the environmentalist themes in “The Revenant”
Historically, we look back at human nature and what we’ve done to other races, what we’ve done to the natural world. And we say, God, how ignorant we must have been, how shortsighted. And here we have this first wave, this first influx of capitalism out east. And of course, we carved up nature for our own comfort. But here we’re looking at the modern era and we think we’ve learned these lessons from the past.
I was doing a climate change documentary simultaneously to doing this film. And I got to go to the Canadian Tar Sands where swaths of forest the size of Florida were being cut down for what is one of the most destructive practices on Earth. We’re systematically doing this on a mechanized scale that has never been done in history.
Doing a film about climate change, studying climatic change around the world, having to relocate to the southern tip of Argentina just to find snow was the greatest irony. Here we are, a bunch of artists saying, Let’s go into nature and see what it tells us. Well, nature was f***ing telling us that the world is changing unlike ever before. 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history and these are unprecedented weather conditions happening all over the world. And it hit us right smack in the face. We had to shut down production multiple times — extreme weather patterns in both directions, the locals telling us that they’d never seen this in the history of their provence. So that’s what, ultimately, I’m going to be left with: the year 2015 where all the tipping points happened and we immersed ourselves in the natural world to hear it for ourselves.