(INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
Tell you what. Let's get started.
-(WHISPERS INDISTINCTLY) - Yeah. Thank you.
ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU: I think... I always believe something.
There's a line of Goethe that says something like,
"The poet might know what he wanted to write,
"but he will never know what he wrote."
You know, what's it mean? And I think that's true.
That you go through a process, you do your best, wanting to go there,
but then, at the end, by all the process that you went through,
that obviously you have to adapt,
at the end you never know exactly what you end up writing, you know.
In that time, this was, like, five years ago,
I was going through a difficult period,
in a way that I was trying to define something else,
and approach things in a different way, and get out of my comfort zone.
And I'm not saying this lightly.
I think you have to be a little, kind of, crazy
to embark in a film like this.
The physicality of it, the setting, the nature,
as a transformative experience.
That was exactly what I wanted personally to go through,
in my personal life.
So suddenly I thought I would love to be submersed, one year, in the nature.
I didn't know what I was thinking about.
(LAUGHING) It's crazy, 'cause it's harder than you think.
I think it was pretty clear since the beginning
who was part of this cloth of madness.
We are less and less used to being exposed to the real elements,
and try to solve it with the reality, in every level.
It's a transforming experience
to get through so many challenges every day,
as if there's a puzzle that is already written
and you just have to find the right piece to fit in that precise moment in that corner,
and cannot be another way because it doesn't fit.
So it's something you find that piece and shape that is perfect, that fits.
If not, all the puzzle collapses.
And scary, because that involved a lot of people, a lot of money,
a lot of risk-taking, you know?
This is not a tiny, intimate film in an apartment.
It's involving a lot of things.
And you don't know the answer, you don't if you'll succeed.
Mostly likely not. Maybe we didn't.
And the amount of hours and passion, and trying to get the very best,
and trying to figure out how to make this experience
palpable for people in a different way that they have seen this period of time,
was scary.
(WATER GUSHING)
(GLASS CLICKING TONGUE)
Hawk.
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: Revenant was a screenplay that I had read years before,
but it had never been green lit because of the complications
and how to shoot some of the locations.
What Alejandro accomplishes is his ability to put you there,
this almost virtual reality,
where you really feel like you're out in the elements with these characters.
You really feel immersed in their lives.
And then you get the visual perspective
of a character in the movie, almost.
(G ROANS) My foot!
Enough of this shit!
We'll never make it across like this, Captain.
- He's burning up. -(COUGHING)
DiCAPRIO: Hugh Glass is, you know, stuff of legend by the American campfires.
He's a real-life Paul Bunyan type of character.
A man that survived extreme elements
and was left to die by his hunting crew, and buried alive,
and crawled through the entire American wilderness on his own
through hundreds of miles, through the dead of winter,
to seek revenge on the men that had done him wrong.
So he's this sort of part of American folklore.
But he was a real person, and these things really did happen.
But I think, more than anything,
what Alejandro wanted to do was create poetry in that story.
The poetry of what it means to have all the chips stacked against you,
to have, really, very little chance at survival.
And yet this sort of triumph from the human spirit.
And what we can endure, and what we go through,
and what Hugh Glass realizes on that journey,
and whether revenge is ultimately
the thing that will quench his thirst at the end of the day.
(PANTING)
(CATTLE BELLOWING)
The pulse of the heart of the film lies on the father-and-son relation.
All my films, by some reason, I always have had that.
And you can have sons or not,
but you are a son of somebody, and that will always define you forever.
Your boy...
He's seen a lot.
He got a mother you need to get him back to?
INARRITU: I thought that the father-and-son story
will make a dimension in the character that will not just be about the gone
or about a revengeful thought of, "You abandoned me."
But when a filial relation is involved,
it just gets a much more powerful understanding of your being
and your reason to be.
So it was not like just as easy.
Sometimes they want to see like Indians against white people.
No. Having Indian blood will make much more complex situation for both of them
in the middle, with the Western trappers.
(WHISPERS IN OTHER LANGUAGE)
DiCAPRIO: Hugh Glass is not a traditional fur-trapper.
He has a son that is, you know, both white and Indian.
And the unique set of challenges that he has as a father,
and his son has growing up in an environment like that,
is something that is an undertone throughout the movie.
It's never over, it's never spoken,
but you get the essence that they're alone in this world.
And so the father-son bond becomes a very powerful thing
because he needs to teach his son to sort of disappear, to not be there.
To, you know, just keep your head down and focus on what you need to do.
(SPEAKING OTHER LANGUAGE)
FORREST GOODLUCK: So what do you think people say back home
about The Revenant, huh?
I mean like, historically,
Natives haven't been portrayed correctly at all in any type of real art form.
Especially in, like, Hollywood cinema.
I don't know. I was just kind of afraid of that.
Who'll stay?
I'll stay.
I'll stay with him.
GOODLUCK: Basically, I just don't want another film
of people pushing their agenda on me or on our people.
Saying, "This is how we see you." And pushing it as, like, us and them.
Every tribe has its own story,
and of course, our ancient stories and our creation stories.
But there is the modern story of why this lake is even here.
MAN: I mean, this is like what Grandma talks about all the time.
Remember that photo? We've seen online.
You see all those... Everyone in Congress signing this land away,
and signing it to the army corps of engineers.
To build as a dam.
Everyone who is displaced here...
Like do you remember that picture?
GOODLUCK: I mean, it's just a deep wound for a lot of people who live here.
And it's a symbol of the movement and destruction of our culture.
INARRITU: Many themes that the film, in a way,
deals with as a context, as a frame,
I think they are very permanent and relevant today.
The fur trade was a massive, lucrative business.
And these men went in to a, sort of, pristine landscape and...
The truth is, we massacred a lot of the indigenous population for these resources.
And to me, what's relevant about it is,
here we are, at this day and age, seeing what we've done to our planet.
There are similar themes there.
To me, it's like the first steps
towards this, sort of, massive undertaking that mankind has put forth
to extract resources from our environment, and at what cost.
DARYL LYSON: It seemed like it was just overnight.
These people didn't know what to expect.
They were signing leases for pennies,
compared to what these oil companies are making
off of the wells that they drilled on the reservation.
(HAMMERING)
JACK FISK: I think the Indians in the time of our film are...
They were cautiously welcoming the trade.
But they didn't...
It's like in Jamestown, the Indians welcomed the English colonists.
But they didn't expect them to stay.
LYSON: Some companies are good, don't get me wrong.
Some companies are good.
They actually help the community. They donate back to the community.
But then there is a lot of fly-by-nights who are in and gone.
They don't care.
MAN: You know, we've seen the car accidents go way up, then...
MAN 2: House fires.
Yeah, a lot of house fires from drugs and stuff like that.
Just a lot of fatalities and oil field accidents, in general.
FISK: The greed of everybody coming west, wanting those beaver skins, they...
It didn't matter whose land it was.
If it had treasure on there, we were gonna get it.
WOMAN: This is where we originally were.
So, if you can imagine underwater, this is where
the tribe in our family were doing very well.
But then with the coming of the dam,
that's when that way of life was taken away again, too.
We think of history and these things happening way long time ago,
but it's in our lifetime, and it's still happening.
Hey, Glass.
Is it true what they say 'bout you shooting that lieutenant
while he was living with them savages?
Fitzgerald.
INARRITU: The rejection of the otherness and the fear of the otherness.
I think in every part of the world,
people have lived together and they don't like each other,
but you don't kill the other just because you don't like it
or because it's different.
FITZGERALD: That what you did?
Shot one of your own to save this little dog right here?
Shut up!
Why? Was you playing with this little boy's mama, huh?
Fitzgerald!
Did he kill her?
Hey, you can quit polishing that rifle when I'm talking to you.
INARRITU: Fitzgerald is precisely that.
He can't stand the fact that somebody can have a half-breed son
involved with other society that he considers inferior that he don't understand.
And by not understanding, he's afraid.
But at the same time, I always want Fitzgerald not to be a villain,
because I don't consider people who are racist bad people.
I think they are just ignorant,
and by not having the knowledge or the conscious or the awareness,
they are irresponsible and they can bring a lot of pain.
Tell me right now and be honest. Did you see 'em?
- FITZGERALD: Put your rifle down... - Did you see the Ree?
MAN: All right!
INARRITU: Tom Hardy, in a way, embraced that character with such complexity
without falling into the cliches and the stereotype of the bad, racist guy,
but a guy that is a victim of his own culture.
(SHOUTS)
I hate you!
(LAUGHS)
CLAY LANDRY: The worst thing you can do, looking at history,
is to judge people in historical settings
on today's values and interpretations.
You've got to put your mind back there, you've got to understand the total picture,
and what their philosophies about life and religion and everything else were.
The people that really saw the country when it still belonged to God
were the mountain men.
They were the first ones to see it, besides the Natives that lived here.
I wanna know their story.
I wanna know what they felt about the country
and how they saw it
and if they appreciated it, if they really understood what it was all about.
I like to equate it to any other time in history
when there's economic need to make a living.
And these men were frontiersmen, they were Kentuckians,
they were Virginians, they were Tennesseans,
they were Scotch, they were Irish, they were Spanish, they were French,
they were Canadians.
They were from all sources.
Listen up.
When them plews is cleaned, I want you to hoop 'em up real tight.
LANDRY: $200 per annum,
at a time when an average man made, you know, $10 a month.
Okay.
Ree's is what the mountain men called.
LANDRY: And beaver were worth $5 a pound
which, a good beaver weighed a little over a pound.
That's quite a bit of money.
There is an importance to understanding your history.
Two triggers. You gotta set the back trigger first.
(RIFLE SHOTS)
The history of your family, the history of your area,
the history of your ethnicity, whatever it is,
if you have an understanding of where you came from
and how you got here,
because the events that brought us all to where we are now
did not happen in a vacuum.
There's a cause and effect, why these things happened.
Learn those causes and effects.
What caused those men to be here at a certain time?
Why were they here? What were they after?
What made them think that way?
(MEN GROANING)
JACQUELINE WEST: The irony is it was all based on a fur top hat.
The look of men in Europe changed and this hat became a status symbol.
And that said, they all wanted a beaver hat.
Every man was... You couldn't dress up without it.
And so, there was like a 20-year period
where the beaver population of America was almost wiped out.
Where a choice was made to make money
over a population of animals, of people, and of environment.
And I think this movie, on a positive side,
really shows what the fur trade did.
And how, both Native Americans suffered and our psyches, I think, suffer.
REPORTER: (ON TV) An independent review of a recent oil spill
in Vancouver's English Bay
is making 25 recommendations as to how to improve oil spill response.
The report released this morning was commissioned by the coast guard
after 2,700 liters of bunker fuel
spilled from a freighter in English Bay back in April.
Jill Bennett is following the story for us
and joins us now from downtown Vancouver
with more on what the report says.
Well, it's 90 pages long, as you mentioned.
25 recommendations made by John Butler in this report.
You can boil it down, though, to one word. Communication.
It finds great lack in communication
that some of those things that have been addressed presents.
But I'll just read you of a couple of the findings...
HOWARD: Being on this production has motivated me.
I remember being on set and I just felt the character that I'm playing
and the kind of warrior he is, it's inspired me.
Whoever would have thought a skid row kid would be working
with Tom and Leo and Alejandro.
I've never dreamed that.
"Everything we have has been stolen.
"Everything."
HOWARD: Elk Dog... I tried to my best ability to
make people feel him.
There were certain scenes that were just powerful.
(SPEAKING OTHER LANGUAGE)
- WOMAN: Just start singing again. -(MAN LAUGHS)
Come and picked him up, his legs still kicking and he's still fighting.
He was getting packed off.
I'm grateful that I'm allowed to sit here on your land.
And to share our experiences that we go through.
- Did you know my dad, too? - Yeah, yeah.
I was just a young boy...
We are people of the land, First Nation's people.
We're gonna fight till the bitter end for the land.
A lot of people don't realize how much poison that's been going through.
It's all about money.
It's all about ownership.
It's all about them.
WOMAN 1 : Can't eat anything out of here anymore.
When do you think oysters stopped showing up here?
WOMAN 2: I know, I think they're more delicate than the clams and crabs
'cause seems like they went first.
WOMAN 1: Like, 50 years ago?
WOMAN 2: Yeah, there's a leak in one of these oil refineries
and they said they're not gonna fix it.
HOWARD". The Squamish and the Tsilhqot'in nation people
lived off of that water.
Now they can't even swim in it.
You can't even swim in it now.
INARRITU: Capitalism, as we know it,
were, if you understand it as use natural resources
as your own convenience to get profit,
not understanding the surrounding and not respecting animals and nature
and societies, just for the fact of getting what you need.
I think we are still digging and cutting
and extracting every natural resource we can.
But I don't know when we will understand that until we kill the last animal,
and we eat the last fish and we cut the last tree,
we'll understand that we will not...
We are not able to eat money.
(LAUGHING) There is going to be a moment that we will realize that.
And yes, of course, this is happening all around the world.
WOMAN: I'm not talking for myself anymore.
I'm a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother.
I only think about my future generations.
There comes a time in your life, stand up for something.
It doesn't have to be this way.
We can change.
We have a whale song.
I don't know if you remember it.
(SINGING IN OTHER LANGUAGE)
(CONTINUES SINGING)
LANDRY: You know, somehow you gonna have to have an ability
to understand what resources can be used and how much.
I think the mountain men saw that the day was coming
where the beaver were gonna be pretty scarce.
So the mistakes that were made during this era
were repeated in generations after that
when it came to mining and timber and things like that.
We keep climbing till we reach Old Gabe.
LANDRY: Every generation can see it.
I don't understand why we don't study it or learn from it,
but, well, I think we can see it.
Captain?
MAN: Yeah.
JONES: Murphy says there's a way down there.
Who we following?
ANDERSON: Just follow who you want!
I'm going up!
- Murphy! - Stubby, keep going UP!
JONES: Come here! ANDERSON: Keep moving up!
DiCAPRIO: For me it was interesting
because I got to play a character that wasn't very verbal.
So it was different for me
because I had to convey a lot of that without words or in a different language.
(PANTING)
It was almost like doing a documentary in a lot of ways
because when you do a movie, you can plan a lot of stuff out, structure-wise,
as far as what the story is going to be beforehand.
But, really, the elements of nature came into play a lot while doing this movie.
We had to sort of adapt to our surroundings.
So it was the closest thing to a documentary I think I've ever done
as far as an actor is concerned.
It was reacting to what nature gave us.
INARRITU: t knew that the weather
and the autumn and the winter will be transforming the landscape.
It will be transforming the actors, it will be transforming our psyche,
our spirit, our emotional state.
So, by navigating the same season,
and exposing our bodies and mind to the same season,
in chronological order, allowed me or the crew and especially the actors,
to get into a journey, emotionally and physically
that allowed them to bring those emotions to the characters and feel it.
(BREATHING HEAVILY)
FISK: Alejandro had made this story much more interesting
because he got into the spiritual life of Glass
and into his mind.
And life is... l think that we probably all grow from suffering.
And I think that it was a growth for him, that he...
When he found he wasn't dead and he had to live again,
then he could approach it as a whole new life.
(SPEAKING OTHER LANGUAGE)
I'm Arthur RedCloud. I live in Fort Worth, Texas.
WOMAN: And where are you... What's your...
- Are you Navajo? - Yes.
- Do you speak the language? - Just a little.
HOWARD: When Alejandro told me that he wanted an actor,
that was a huge awakening for me, because I never thought of myself as one.
I'm just a driver in Texas, delivering gas and fuel to these stations,
and all of a sudden I'm on this big, huge production set.
Where does that come from? How does that happen?
How does all that come about?
This is just a picture of Grandfather a long time ago,
when he was young.
Just the preparation for battling life as well as in our spiritual lives.
And he took me to be under his wing and teaching...
...and to be his next, to take his place.
HOWARD: He was a Navajo guy.
And he was a well-known medicine man even on the reservation
because a lot of people. ..
'Cause I didn't even realize the role I was really even preparing for,
that he was working with me on as I was growing up.
He knew who I was.
'Cause I think he even had an idea exactly who I was gonna be,
but I couldn't even see that at the time, but he did.
I was trained, as even when I was a young kid, was to be a medicine man.
And on this journey, I've kind of learned how to become one.
And then actually doing it on film was a whole big thing,
a whole big awakening.
Even singing over Leo and praying over Leo,
I could mentally prepare.
But if I'm not spiritually prepared, then I won't be mentally ready.
And that took a lot of faith, trust, you know, to build up.
INARRITU: I think that, yes, Arthur, in a way,
was such a pleasant, positive presence in the set.
That is true.
He always brings that energy that you need when you are stressed.
And I love how many of these guys, Arthur and Duane,
and many of the other Indian actors that work around them,
in a way, they have always this spiritual dimension of existence.
You know, they are aware of other realities
rather than what really is in front of their nose.
I remember one beautiful thing
when I was interviewing one of the guys.
His second name was Starlight, don't remember his first name.
But Starlight told me, "You see these lands outside the office? This is where I live.
"I have lived all my life here." He was like 50 years old.
And I said, "What you have been doing?"
And he said, "Well, I hunt, I fish, but not anymore."
And I said, "Why you don't fish or you don't hunt anymore?"
He said, "Well, because I made a deal with nature."
(LAUGHS) And there it is.
That was Starlight, looking at me.
And basically, he told me that three years ago,
he has an adolescent boy who went out at night, to the forest with his friends.
And he never returned.
And they were really afraid that he was dead.
And he went out to the woods
praying and begging to the nature to return his boy.
And one day later, the boy came back.
And the promise he did, when he asked nature to bring his boy back,
he said, "if you do that, I will never kill any animal, and I will never cut a plant,
"and I will never eat a fish."
And the nature came with his son
and now he was not able, and promised the nature that honorable kind of trade.
And I found so moving, that thing, that I said,
what a beautiful understanding of... Consider nature a live entity,
not just like a piece of trunk or a piece of thing for me.
To make me feel, it's like
when you suddenly realize that you are alive
as a plant or as a fish or as an animal, or as a tree,
then the experience of being alive is enhanced enormously.
And that's what I learned from this guy.
So I was really, really moved by that.
(THUNDER RUMBLING)
It was very shocking to see...
When we were shooting in Calgary,
all the Natives from there, they were telling us
that they have never experienced that weather that we were going through.
Never in their lives.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
I saw the difference between one degree.
The difference of one degree, it's literally between water and ice.
And we saw how ice melts and probably every single thing changed,
and how the ecosystem was completely different and destroyed,
and changed and transformed.
MAN: Action!
There's no way through. You need to turn back.
- We have to keep going. - There's no clear path, though.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
INARRITU: I thought that we were in big trouble.
And we did everything we can to finish there,
but there was a moment,
in a river scene, where the film should end,
that when we were scouting,
we were expecting it to be absolutely full winter and a lot of snow.
There were yellow grass and bees
in a month that, supposedly, normally,
historically has been super low temperatures.
So there was nothing to do.
And then you have to surrender.
And yes, it's madness.
(AVALANCHE RUMBLING)
I truly believe that there is a lot to consider in revenge.
The challenging thing for me was
that even when in the surface, revenge is a driven force,
which it is, obviously, by the pain and by the rage Glass has,
I wanted to get through revenge
revealing other aspects that could possibly bring the character to realize
that there is something better than that or bigger than that.
Or let me put it this way, for me it was to make it clear
that revenge, once it's accomplished,
it just leaves you empty.
And then the meaning of life just collapses,
because if that is your driven force,
nothing that you do to damage other people will satisfy you
or will bring what you lost.
DiCAPRIO: There's some powerful themes there for me,
because I feel like this was the first sort of denigration
of the wilderness, of the environment.
This is the first bits of capitalism at play, this massive fur trade that went to Europe.
It was, you know, right after whale oil and right before the Gold Rush,
and before we found in these natural resources
around the world.
It's mankind's first imprint on land in the Americas.
WOMAN". You know, someday, you may come back here.
MAN: Yeah. WOMAN". As you get older,
you might come back this way to live.
So what is it you want to see when you come back here?
This is your home.
This is your homeland, you have family that has always been here.
INARRITU: There's a war in the system that we have applied to our self.
There's a war to death.
In a way, when there is no protection, and nobody is saying, "This is enough."
Or, "Now this interest of you to get profit is damaging the community and the society.
"And you don't protect nothing."
Then we become animals. We become to the savage era.
We become to the primitive era, that the big one kills the small one.
GOODLUCK: I think things like the boom that come in here
really just tear up the Earth, and tear up relationships with people,
and really just tear up a lot of the beauty of the land that was once here,
and may not be here.
And for me, what I wanna see,
is, I guess, just a betterment of every generation,
and the generations to come.
And, um... I don't know.
Okay-
(BOY SINGING)
All right, sounds good.
How do you want for your kids and your grandkids to live on the reservation
when you're all old?
I want them to pick their favorite spot.
GOODLUCK: Yeah, live in their favorite spot? Forever?
Excellent.
By the time when my kids grow up, they'll be up high with me.