If Hollywood scuttlebutt is to believed, The Revenant’s wintry shoot was an anguished time littered with the souls of the damned, where the crew members looked like Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining and even the on-set snowmen were chain-smoking. “Hellish” is a word that’s often associated with those snowbound months. But as Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo prove, from even the most arduous and remote shoots can come majestic movies. Judging by all we’ve seen so far – including this beautiful, widescreen new still from the film - Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival epic has every chance of joining them in the canon of greats.
Making great art can require big sacrifices, and as Empire discovers in the new issue, Iñárritu demanded plenty of his cast and crew along the way. "It was an extremely challenging shoot,” he tells us in the warmer climes of his Santa Monica offices. The conditions were hardly conducive to swift filmmaking. “People get sick, or the cameras shut down because of the cold, or you get so frozen you cannot move your fucking feet,” he remembers. "Everything takes triple time.”
Also suffering for his art was Leonardo DiCaprio as a wounded, abandoned fur trapped called Hugh Glass. Left to die by his fellows (Tom Hardy and Will Poulter), Glass must deal with his wounds, some peckish wildlife and a hostile wilderness peopled by hostile Native Americans of the kind orchestrating the assault pictured above.
In Empire’s new issue - onsale tomorrow - we celebrate the audacity of the Mexican director’s vision. To shoot with only available light and brave temperatures that dropped to -40 takes the kind of chutzpah you’d only find in the kind of man who’d send Michael Keaton into Times Square in his underpants. Luckily, Iñárritu is that man.
You’ll be able to see the end result when The Revenant lands in UK cinemas on January 15. Bring a beanie.