A lot of attention has been focused on the Leonard DiCaprio starring, Alejandro G. Inarritu directed “The Revenant.” Adorama even recently posted an “8 Most Shocking Facts”on the film. Already critically acclaimed and boasting twelve Academy Award nominations, including one for the Best Picture category, “The Revenant” is as much of a technical achievement as it is a visually stunning movie. Not least of all does it feature a fair share of jaw dropping moments, the most notorious of which involves the main protagonist’s fight with a bear.
Production challenges, including extreme climate conditions and budget overruns notwithstanding, Inarritu was steadfast in his determination to make the audience feel the desperate POV of DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass. Glass was a real life trapper and explorer who did, in fact, get attacked by a bear and trekked for many miles without food and shelter while seeking retribution for his abandonment at the hands of an expedition team. The story is the stuff of myth, so it is no surprise that it has been adapted into not one but two movies and a novel written by Michael Punke.
But what about that bear? If you’ve seen the movie, Glass finds himself set upon by a ferocious mammal defending her cubs. And the entire sequence (like most scenes in the movie) is done in one take. So it begs the question as to how did they achieve that effect? It might be the most nerve-rattling moment in “The Revenant.” While the filmmakers were initially coy as to how this came about, it turns out that Inarritu did a lot of research; he was mostly interested in just what motivates such an attack. He read books, consulted with bear experts, even sat down with “Grizzly Man” director Werner Herzog, thus helping to shape the way Inarritu approached the scene.
(“Grizzly Man” is a 2005 documentary focusing on the tragic death of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. Treadwell was an eccentric “bear enthusiast” who spent five years camping in Katmai National Park. The film is notorious for featuring video footage shot by Treadwell including a recording of the fatal attack. Herzog opts to not have this appear in the film, however. Instead, we observe his horrified expression as he listens to it on camera.)
Cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki devised his own way for prepping this scene. In an interview published by Variety, Lubezki states, “Obviously there is no book or instruction manual to tell you how to do a bear attack. Most of the animal attacks that you’ve seen in other movies have multiple cuts and that’s because they are using puppets or pieces of an animal or stuff like that and they feel very stylized.” So Lubezki went to the internet, particularly YouTube, and watched a viral video of a man falling into a zoo pit. “You could feel the randomness of life and the randomness of this attack,” Says Lubezki. “And obviously if you’re not a bear expert, it’s very hard to understand the behavior of the bear. It’s definitely hard to predict, which makes it even more terrifying, and the tempo of the attack is very strange. It feels random.”
Not that the shoot itself was random. A lot of pre-planning and rehearsal went into the making of this scene. Not to mention the time and patience involved in finding the right location to allow the one-take effect to flow easily.
Jack Fisk, set designer for “The Revenant,” said that the bear itself was fully computer generated because modern day counterparts are “all so fat. The trained bears in captivity that you see on TV shows, they don’t look like a wild grizzly bear from the 1800s.” According to Business Insider, DiCaprio trained with the stunt department for months until they were ready to shoot in British Columbia. Fisk then dressed the set with rubber trees so DiCaprio wouldn’t get harmed when he was smashed into them. Cables were attached to the actor as the stunt team swung him around. Although they adhered to the necessary safety precautions, shooting this scene was not without its own risks. Lubezki confirms, “It’s absolutely incredible what Leo goes through to make this shot. We could not do many takes. I think it was probably two takes because you cannot put Leo through that. It’s just like putting somebody in a washing machine at full speed or something like that.”
ILM was hired to render the complex bear animation. VFX supervisor Richard McBride met with Scott McMillion, author of “Mark of the Grizzly,” to learn about all of the potential behaviors and scenarios that could happen in a setting similar to that featured in “The Revenant.” In an article on Indiewire, McBride mentions how they hired a stunt man to act as the grizzly, to have him pull and tug at DiCaprio while “keeping him at a distance where there would be a little less paint work in getting him in and out of the scene and having our bear on top of him.” This visual reference helped the animators at ILM to achieve a realistic but not too digital looking creation. The attention to detail was considerable. Not only did it have to move like a real bear, it had to look like a real bear. So a lot of consideration went into how wet it should appear, whether it would react to random, natural elements like flashes of light, even the accuracy of the color of blood in a wound.
Ultimately, the bear attack scene in “The Revenant” was a collaborative effort between the director, the D.P., the lead actor, the set designer, the stunt team and the visual effects experts at ILM. It’s amazing that with all these chefs working in the kitchen, the sequence wound up being as effective as it is. So much so that it undoubtedly aided in earning “The Revenant” its Oscar nominations.
Here is a behind the scenes featurette on the makeup design in “The Revenant.”
