Will this be the movie to get our dear Leo Di-Cap his golden globe? If the trailer is anything to go by, then there’s reason to have at least a shred of hope. His latest role is in The Revenant, a movie loosely based on true events of one man’s epic adventure of survival, the legendary explorer Hugh Glass. An immersive and visceral film, it delves into the deep psychological power of the human spirit.

Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is brutally attacked by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team. In a quest to survive, Glass endures unimaginable grief as well as the betrayal of his confidant John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). Guided by sheer will and the love of his family, Glass must navigate a vicious winter in a relentless pursuit to live and find redemption.

The movie is directed by the visionary that is Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman, Babel) and, according to a crew member on the set, shooting the film was a living hell as staff and crew suffered blistering temperatures and endured a global search for snow. Even Leo himself had something to say about the conditions:

I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly. I certainly don’t eat raw bison liver on a regular basis. When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction.

[Those scenes]—amongst many other sequences—were some of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career. But the end result is going to be one of the most immersive experiences audiences will ever have with what it would be like to come face-to-face with an animal of that magnitude that is incredibly primal.

Leo went on to say that he knew what he was getting himself into:

The truth is that I knew what I was getting into. This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on, simply because of the logistics of where we needed to shoot and the amount of work and rehearsal that would have to be done to achieve Alejandro and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki] vision.

As we have seen with winners of the best-actor Oscar in the past, putting yourself through extreme conditions play in your favour but, this is Leo we’re talking about and the Academy seems allergic to his efforts.

[source: vanityfair]