Revenge best served cold
THE REVENANT: Elements just one of the challenges of filming Inarritu epic
Like probable Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, young actor Will Poulter suffered severe physical hardships to shoot The Revenant for director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Especially on locations in Canada in winter.
“Yes,” Poulter admits with a sly smile, “it was a toughie!”
Poulter, the 22-year-old Londoner who played Gally in The Maze Runner, returned to Canada for a brief visit to promote the Friday release of The Revenant — which is in the running for a clutch of Oscar noms, including best picture.
On this visit, Poulter is comfortably ensconced in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Toronto. On his previous forays, he found himself in the winter wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia after segments of The Revenant had been filmed in the foothills in Alberta, specifically in the Kananaskis Country park system.
“I think this was about 20 below anything else I had ever experienced before,” Poulter says in a conservative estimate. “I didn’t even know it was possible to be as cold as I was on this movie. But it all felt absolutely necessary and it gave me a great appreciation for the outdoors and for nature and for just what a beautiful place Canada is.”
The Revenant was shot primarily in Canada, with some scenes filmed in the U.S. and the end sequence in the remote Tierra del Fuego in Argentina when Inarritu found that his delayed shoot overstayed the snow in Canada.
Set in the rugged American west during 1823, The Revenant tells the true and famous story of frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by DiCaprio. Ravaged by a bear and cruelly left for dead by his companions, Glass survived his ordeal and set out on an odyssey of revenge. Unlike his Oscar-winning Manhattan stage drama Birdman, Inarritu’s new film is bitter, violent and staggeringly beautiful in its natural setting.
Poulter says the cast and crew (at least those who did not quit the production during the ordeal) had to endure harsh conditions to at least suggest the world of Glass. The film focuses on the European-American intruders and the First Nation peoples who populated the West.
“I think to be able to create what is a very immersive and visceral assault, we needed to experience a lot of this for real,” he said. “We really did need to be out in these locations. We really did need to confront these elements and experience extreme weather patterns. We did that for the experience of watching it as a very real and very emotive story.
“I don’t think we could have achieved this if we had been in a studio with a snow machine. We needed to be on the side of a mountain experiencing that snow for real and living in that cold.”
Poulter says, “from Day 1,” he realized that the Mexican-born Inarritu intended to do more than just tell the saga of Hugh Glass. “I was made aware that he wanted to do more with this film than just capture one man’s story of survival in the elements. That was just a drop in the ocean of what he wanted to achieve — and that was very encouraging.”
So beyond the obvious tale, The Revenant is a spiritual journey, Poulter says. “I think this is a commentary on the destruction of natural resources, on our disrespect for native cultures and on how we took from the land without really any thought about the consequences.”
“I didn’t even know it was possible to be as cold as I was on this movie. But it all felt absolutely necessary ...” — Will Poulter