Leonardo DiCaprio really paid for himself on the set of “The Revenant”, an extraordinary film by Alejandro González Iñárritu which earned the actor an Oscar…
With Swiss cuckoo regularity, France 3 (re)broadcasts The Revenant. Released in 2016 and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, a mystical and violent adventure film and held high by Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, it is a pure survival, a visceral experience, in the most literal sense of the term.
According to DiCaprio’s own admission, it was the most difficult shoot of his career, as the range of suffering endured by the actor is quite crazy, between temperature flirting with -30°C, logically coming out of a river naked frozen, bison liver devoured raw even though it is vegetarian…
One sequence (among others…) from the film may have made you wonder. It is located approximately 1h46 into the film. Pursued while he tries to escape on horseback, his mount is struck by an arrow on the hindquarters, before he falls with his horse from a cliff.
Waking up for a while not far from his poor animal, killed instantly after the fall, he is then obliged to disembowel and eviscerate it in order to lodge himself inside the carcass of the animal, if he wishes. have a chance of surviving in the face of a blizzard that would definitely kill him.
Memory sequence of an ultimate survival technique that exists. It was also used by Bear Grylls in an episode of season 2 of Man Vs Wildwhere the latter lodged in the carcass of a dead camel in the middle of the Sahara desert….
During the promotion of the film, DiCaprio had – logically – emphasized his involvement during the filming of the film. “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were among the most difficult tasks I’ve ever had to do. Whether it was wading back and forth in icy rivers, or sleeping on carcasses of ‘animals, or what I ate on set’ he told Yahoo Movies.
Was the carcass in which he took refuge real? The answer is no. The film’s renowned production designer, Jack Fisk, will explain that it was a creation, while the animal intestines that Leo removes were a mixture of latex and hair. That said, he pays with his own person since it is he who goes inside naked; a scene shot when it was intensely cold. It was well worth the Oscar for best actor!