Leonardo DiCaprio on “Agonizing” ‘Revenant’ Shoot: I Was “Sleeping in Animal Carcasses”

Leonardo DiCaprio is not looking to curl up inside an animal carcass again anytime soon.

The actor told Yahoo Movies that the shoot for director Alejandro G. Inarritu’s upcoming film The Revenant involved “some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career.”

“I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” admitted DiCaprio, who plays a 19th century explorer in the Western. “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,” he continued. “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.”

A key plot point of the film involves his character’s encounter with a bear. It required some cinematic magic, but it still was not easy to execute.

“I’m not going to give any specifics on how we did it — you’ll figure it out on your own,” said DiCaprio. “But I will tell you it involved cables, it involved me flying around the forest, and it involved a tremendous amount of rehearsal. And it was pretty agonizing to do.”

DiCaprio addressed sources who have said that there was substantial turnover among the crew due to individuals quitting or getting fired. He called the project “incredibly ambitious” and said Inarritu was “incredibly specific,” which led to “departments that didn’t agree or departments that didn’t work correctly with the situation.”

“I wasn’t privy to exactly what went on,” said the actor. “But to me, most of the people were there working incredibly hard, and they should be given due credit for the effort they gave this movie because everyone I saw was giving their heart and soul to pursuing his vision.”

The Revenant, co-starring Tom Hardy and Will Poulter, hits theaters Dec. 25.

Email: Ryan.Gajewski@THR.com
Twitter: @_RyanGajewski