FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby brekin » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:25 pm

semper occultus » Fri Jan 01, 2016 4:59 am wrote:
brekin » 31 Dec 2015 20:10 wrote:I don't consider myself even worthy to even talk about John Carpenter original. Do you?


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:34 pm

.
Nordic » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:53 am wrote:Anybody seen "Revenant" yet? I've always been fascinated by the original story which I read back in the 9th grade.


Haven't seen it yet, but definitely on my list (along with a few others already mentioned in this thread.)


About That Bear: Alejandro G. Iñárritu Discusses Making ‘The Revenant’

A hellbent quest for authenticity produced some indelible on-set moments for Alejandro G. Iñárritu as he directed “The Revenant,” his two-and-a-half-hour opus of death, love and improvised surgery in the American West of the 1820s. But only one of those moments, thankfully, involved a bison liver.

It came during the filming of a scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the real-life trapper and mountain man Hugh Glass, is offered his first solid food in many days by a Native American feasting on a fresh kill. Mr. Iñárritu brought two liver options: a fake, which he described as “some kind of jelly thing,” and a genuine, glistening slab of offal.

“It was his call,” Mr. Iñárritu, sitting in the tearoom at an Upper East Side hotel, recounted one recent afternoon. “And he said, ‘Let me give it a shot.’”

Mr. DiCaprio’s attempt to snarf down a giant bite of organ meat went poorly, at least judged by today’s standards of dinner-table etiquette. By Mr. Iñárritu’s standards of cinéma vérité, on the other hand, the actor’s spontaneous and messy reaction — which is right there in the film — is perfect.

“It was very helpful, because it’s the first solid thing that the character has eaten in a while,” Mr. Iñárritu said. “So it makes sense that his throat is not ready.”

Sipping a Coke and occasionally stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee, Mr. Iñárritu looked surprisingly relaxed for a man who only recently wrapped a project that seems destined to join “Apocalypse Now,” “Fitzcarraldo” and others in an unofficial Hollywood Hall of Fame for Most Difficult Shoots. At one point in the hourlong interview, he referred to himself and the cast and crew as “survivors,” and the word seemed only a bit of a stretch.

Some ordeals were imposed by nature at various locations. This includes subzero temperatures and frozen cameras in Calgary, Alberta, and torrential rains in British Columbia, wreaking havoc on equipment, not to mention makeup. In pursuit of snow, the production scrambled to Ushuaia, a port at the southern tip of Argentina — next stop, Antarctica.

But Mr. Iñárritu imposed hardships of his own. He insisted on shooting in natural light, which severely limited the production schedule to as little as 90 minutes a day; in some places, the sun set at 3 p.m. And the single-take, tracking-shot technique he made famous in his 2014 backstage theater drama “Birdman” — for which he won the best-director Academy Award — was far trickier to pull off in the middle of a forest. One scene, an attack by an Indian tribe, required a month of rehearsals with 200 extras, ultimately yielding about eight minutes of film.

There were enough grumblings from the crew about delays, safety and overall misery that The Hollywood Reporter published an article in July in which one source described the experience as “a living hell.” Ten people either quit or were fired during filming, Mr. Iñárritu said, and he will not apologize for that.

“I have nothing to hide,” he said. “Of the 300 we started with, I had to ask some to step away, to honor the other 290. If one piece in the group is not perfect, it can screw the whole thing up.”

The “whole thing” is a deeply visceral tale about a group of trappers who are attacked by Native Americans and must flee, on foot, for the safety of a fort hundreds of miles away. The story quickly pivots to a revenge drama, with Glass, who serves as the group’s navigator, chasing the malevolent and greedy John Fitzgerald, a mumbling and nearly unrecognizable Tom Hardy.

Glass pursues his foe while recuperating from a near-death encounter with a bear, and he dodges both arrows and amoral Frenchmen every agonizing step of the way. (The movie’s title refers to a folkloric corpse, reanimated to haunt the living.) The torments of life in the untrammeled wilderness of the period are so convincingly captured that you leave the theater elated to lay eyes on civilization — cars, restaurants, men without hatchets.

“I’ve heard people say the movie is violent,” Mr. Iñárritu said in his deep and resonant voice, inflected with a Spanish accent. “But there is no gratuitous violence. These guys were eating animals, wearing animals; they were threatened by accidents, diseases, tribes, wars. This is the real world. This isn’t pasteurized.”

Compared with the people whose story he tells in “The Revenant,” we are a bunch of wimps, he said time and again, though he used a more graphic term. And the challenge of recreating the experience of frontiersmen, without cutting corners — using stage sets or green screens — was part of the appeal when he read an initial draft of the script, by Mark L. Smith, in 2010, based on Michael Punke’s novel of the same name.

None of the essential players flinched in the eight months it took to film “The Revenant,” Mr. Iñárritu said. That included a producer, Arnon Milchan, who didn’t balk as the price tag soared to a reported $135 million, from original estimates of $60 million.

“Revenant”-related flinching will commence now that the film is reaching audiences. Arguably, the most unnerving, gaze-averting scene is the bear attack, which could do for the woods what “Jaws” did for the ocean. The horrors of this sequence are so rattling that Fox, in response to a preposterous report by The Drudge Report, released a statement that said, essentially, No, Mr. DiCaprio was not raped by a bear in the course of the film. (Why anyone thought the assault was sexual is confounding; as the statement noted, the bear is a mother hoping to feed her cubs.)

Mr. Iñárritu would reveal little about how this chilling spectacle was confected, other than to describe it as a bit like a magic trick insofar as the “how” of it would only spoil a mystery. The film’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, said in a telephone interview that he and Mr. Iñárritu spent months researching how the bear should behave. They interviewed the author of a book on bear maulings and watched attacks caught on video.

“Then we rehearsed a lot in Los Angeles and in Canada,” Mr. Lubezki, who also won an Academy Award for “Birdman,” said. “But when you move the scene to the wild, it’s different. There was foliage under Leonardo, instead of a rubber net. And it didn’t really jell until we were on location. Then it started raining.”

Though cinematic sleight of hand was deployed — no humans were maimed during the making of this film — Mr. DiCaprio really is tossed around like a trout in the scene. During a separate interview, however, he said that other parts of the film were tougher to endure, even if they look tamer, because they were shot in numbing cold.

“Standing in a freezing river and eating a fish, or climbing a mountain with a wet bear fur on my back — those were some of the most difficult sequences for me,” said Mr. DiCaprio, who is considered a strong contender for an Oscar nomination for his performance. “This entire movie was something on an entirely different level. But I don’t want this to sound like a complaint. We all knew what we were signing up for. It was going to be in the elements, and it was going to be a rough ride.”
That Mr. Iñárritu persuaded actors, crew and producers to join him on this ride is an achievement in itself. The ambition of this movie, its sheer scale, as well as its demand for clockwork precision in grueling conditions, places him squarely in the tradition of madcap auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick — directors with vision, charisma and more than a touch of monomania. Mr. Iñárritu is known for exasperatingly high standards and fiendishly complex stagings, which in this movie included a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse.

In person, though, Mr. Iñárritu has the chilled-out affect of a man who meditates every day and loves long walks. The only hint of intensity, and just a tinge of anger, comes when he discusses other movies. Too many of them today are like the products of fast-food chains, he said, ordered up by corporations that prize predictability and sameness over all else.

“What about going to a restaurant to be surprised?” he all but shouted. “That’s the risk that everybody avoids! In the context of cinema now, this movie is a bet.”

Raised in Mexico City, Mr. Iñárritu, 52, is the son of a banker who would eventually file for bankruptcy and end up selling fruit and vegetables to hotels and restaurants. The younger Iñárritu started off as a radio host, playing music and writing provocative, comical sketches with a political bent. He studied theater and learned to direct by shooting brand-identity commercials for a television station. By the time he landed his first feature, “Amores Perros,” released in 2000, he had spent hundreds of hours behind a camera. Then came “21 Grams” (2003), “Babel” (2006) and “Biutiful” (2010).

He wanted to make “The Revenant” next, a plan that was iced when Mr. DiCaprio peeled away to make “The Wolf of Wall Street.” So he co-wrote and directed “Birdman” and was taking bows for it the evening of the Oscars with production of “The Revenant” already underway.

“That night, I was getting messages saying, ‘This location collapsed,’” he said. “You ask me how winning that award changed me, the answer is, I don’t know. Because the night after I won, I flew to Calgary for this movie.”

Because the two films overlapped, Mr. Iñárritu has been working nonstop for years. Now he is eager to return to Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife of 23 years, Maria Eladia Hagerman. Asked if he would consider another movie in conditions as punishing as “The Revenant,” he was unequivocal: “Never again.”

Perhaps the setting of his next film will be a warm and beautiful country, he daydreamed with a smile, and focus on wine tasting.

“It would be a simple story,” he said, “of rooms and gardens.”

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Cordelia » Fri Jan 01, 2016 5:41 pm



Good thriller, and delves into German WWII program Lebensborn
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Nordic » Thu Jan 07, 2016 6:48 pm

Finally saw "Whiplash" last night. Wow. Was looking for a conversation about it here but the search function is coming up with nothing.

Highly recommended. It didn't really go in the direction I thought. A lot to think about.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Cordelia » Mon Jan 18, 2016 1:31 pm

stefano » Thu Dec 31, 2015 3:01 pm wrote:I watched Sicario this week - fantastic. So beautifully shot, with all the aerial pans hinting at constant surveillance. And an awesome score, very atmospheric and very unusual, completely staying away from the usual Hollywood string arrangements. And a great plot. One of the better movies I've seen this year for sure.


Great film. Brutal, but no gratuitous violence, and as the filmmaker called it, a 'dark poem'. Rare experience of wanting to watch it again as soon as it ended.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby norton ash » Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:33 pm

Inherent Vice. This is one that really bears repeat viewings, because it gets funnier and spookier and more meaningful each time. It immerses me in a warm infusion of dark California, very RI. See it again... I had mixed feelings the first time I watched it, but now I think it reflects the combined mad skills of Pynchon and PT Anderson... it's become one of my favourite films.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:40 pm

norton ash » Fri Jan 22, 2016 3:33 pm wrote:Inherent Vice. This is one that really bears repeat viewings, because it gets funnier and spookier and more meaningful each time. It immerses me in a warm infusion of dark California, very RI. See it again... I had mixed feelings the first time I watched it, but now I think it reflects the combined mad skills of Pynchon and PT Anderson... it's become one of my favourite films.


Same.

I was really struck by how funny it was because reading the book, I took it all as seductively sinister -- and very reminiscent of Vineland, which would also make a great Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation, come to think of it.

The attention to detail, and sly layers of dialog, do indeed make it ripe for repeated viewings. It starts good and gets better.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:46 pm

Vineland was a great read, and the only Pynchon I've read. My niece was trying to get me to read some modern fiction, something I've shied away from more often than I should have, in favor of non-fiction, and she sent me a hard copy. I'm glad she did, because I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby divideandconquer » Mon Jan 25, 2016 11:07 am

The BBC TV series, The Field of Blood , based on Denise Mina's crime novels, set in Glasgow Scotland in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the miner's strike, is very good. The second season contains somewhat RI-ish themes... government cover-up, corruption, specifically the manipulation of journalism and law-enforcement to serve of the interests of the established order. Very well done.
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eye'm caught in the grip of the city

Postby IanEye » Mon Jan 25, 2016 2:16 pm



When I was about 12 years old I had an avid interest in the concept of time travel.
A friend of my parents gave me a copy of the above book, "Who Goes There? and Other Stories" as well as a copy of "The Technicolor® Time Machine".

The two Campbell stories, "Twilight" and "Night" had a deep impact on how I thought not only about time, but also society.

"The Technicolor® Time Machine" is just a fun read.



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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby brekin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 3:59 pm

Saw Bridge of Spies, pretty good. Movies for adults like that are getting rarer.

However, there are some pretty big narrative through-lines that are extremely misleading to big whitewashes as others have noted. In fact, some of them are so key, I recommend you don't read about them until after you see the film, because it will probably spoil the film for you. Let it be spoiled after you have watched it. A good complex, well acted propaganda movie for the whole family is getting rarer.

Historical accuracy[edit]
The film is based on the real-life arrest and trial of US spy pilot Gary Powers, who was shot down by Soviet forces when flying over the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1960.[7] While the film has been praised, and "The movie's departures from the historical record aren't, in themselves, a factor in its merit",[8] as with many Hollywood films there are such departures from the historical record.

Commentators have noted that the shortening of timespans in the film at times gives a misleading impression.[9][10] One key example is the depiction of the Berlin Wall. Donovan did not see Berlin wall escapees being shot: the shootings most similar to the one depicted being the killing of Peter Fechter that happened the summer after the Powers/Abel exchange on the Glienecke Bridge.[9][10][11]

Similarly, the circumstances of Frederic Pryor's detention were not accurately portrayed – he could not have crossed a part-built wall,[10][11] and further, was convicted of obtaining "confidential" material.[9]

Apart from the depiction of the Wall, it is notable that Donovan did not suffer quite the extent of violence depicted: he was not shot at in his home,[9][10] and he did not have his overcoat stolen.[9] The film also changed the location of Donovan's suggestion to the judge to spare Abel for the sake of a possible future exchange, which was in fact made in open court.[8][10] Donovan is portrayed as just an insurance lawyer, but in fact had a history with US intelligence: during WWII, he was the general counsel for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA).[12]

Abel, an English-born Soviet intelligence officer (whose real name was William G. Fisher) most likely did his best work for the Soviet Union not as a spy in a dishevelled New York City lair full of radio gear, but before and during World War II, when he trained agents and radio operators for clandestine work in Nazi-occupied regions. This training is thought to have been critical to what his mentor, Pavel Sudoplatov, later called one of the most important radio deception operations of the war.[12]


The most alarming misdirection is how Donovan (Not to be confused with Wild Bill Donovan of OSS/CIA fame) is portrayed as an insurance lawyer with some previous experience at the Nuremberg trials and criminal law but not familiar with or part of the intelligence world. In fact, the whole films central premise and reason it works is that Donovan is portrayed as an "everyman" who has a strong sense of ideals and duty to America, but especially American due process and The Constitution. In fact, the CIA is portrayed as mendacious, meddling and opportunistic, while Tom Hanks (Americas go to actor for everyday great Amercian Joe's) is principled and conscientious. Which isn't to say the real Donovan wasn't or couldn't have been, it just defies logic, reason, common sense for someone not to go, as far as intelligence work, spy shit, is concerned in the film that, "Oh, and Donovan was General Counsel to the OSS for 3 years to." Honestly, its like watching Forrest Gump and then at the end you find out that Forrest also just happens to have a Mensa level I.Q. Or sticking more to the genre, finding out Atticus Finch was actually an secret FBI agent. (Which now that I think about explains his sharpshooting skills.)
Last edited by brekin on Mon Jan 25, 2016 6:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby brekin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 5:26 pm

brekin » Mon Jan 25, 2016 2:59 pm wrote:Saw Bridge of Spies, pretty good. Movies for adults like that are getting rarer.

However, there are some pretty big narrative through-lines that are extremely misleading to big whitewashes as others have noted. In fact, some of them are so key, I recommend you don't read about them until after you see the film, because it will probably spoil the film for you. Let it be spoiled after you have watched it. A good complex, well acted propaganda movie for the whole family is getting rarer.

Historical accuracy[edit]
The film is based on the real-life arrest and trial of US spy pilot Gary Powers, who was shot down by Soviet forces when flying over the Russian city of Sverdlovsk in 1960.[7] While the film has been praised, and "The movie's departures from the historical record aren't, in themselves, a factor in its merit",[8] as with many Hollywood films there are such departures from the historical record.

Commentators have noted that the shortening of timespans in the film at times gives a misleading impression.[9][10] One key example is the depiction of the Berlin Wall. Donovan did not see Berlin wall escapees being shot: the shootings most similar to the one depicted being the killing of Peter Fechter that happened the summer after the Powers/Abel exchange on the Glienecke Bridge.[9][10][11]

Similarly, the circumstances of Frederic Pryor's detention were not accurately portrayed – he could not have crossed a part-built wall,[10][11] and further, was convicted of obtaining "confidential" material.[9]

Apart from the depiction of the Wall, it is notable that Donovan did not suffer quite the extent of violence depicted: he was not shot at in his home,[9][10] and he did not have his overcoat stolen.[9] The film also changed the location of Donovan's suggestion to the judge to spare Abel for the sake of a possible future exchange, which was in fact made in open court.[8][10] Donovan is portrayed as just an insurance lawyer, but in fact had a history with US intelligence: during WWII, he was the general counsel for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA).[12]

Abel, an English-born Soviet intelligence officer (whose real name was William G. Fisher) most likely did his best work for the Soviet Union not as a spy in a dishevelled New York City lair full of radio gear, but before and during World War II, when he trained agents and radio operators for clandestine work in Nazi-occupied regions. This training is thought to have been critical to what his mentor, Pavel Sudoplatov, later called one of the most important radio deception operations of the war.[12]


The most alarming misdirection is how Donovan (Not to be confused with Wild Bill Donovan of OSS/CIA fame) is portrayed as an insurance lawyer with some previous experience at the Nuremberg trials and criminal law but not familiar with or part of the intelligence world. In fact, the whole films central premise and reason it works is that Donovan is portrayed as an "everyman" who has a strong sense of ideals and duty to America, but especially American due process and The Constitution. In fact, the CIA is portrayed as mendacious, meddling and opportunistic, while Tom Hanks (Americas go to actor for everyday great Amercian Joe's) is principled and conscientious. Which isn't to say the real Donovan wasn't or couldn't have been, it just defies logic, reason, common sense for someone not to go, as far as intelligence work, spy shit, is concerned in the film that, "Oh, and Donovan was General Counsel to the OSS for 3 years to." Honestly, its like watching Forrest Gump and then at the end you find out that Forrest also just happens to have a Mensa level I.Q. Or sticking more to the genre, finding out Atticus Finch was actually an secret FBI agent. (Which now that I think about explains his sharpshooting skills.)


(Spoiler alerts) To just put it in perspective a further bit, one of the very first things Donovan's (Hank's) client, the accused Russian spy, alludes to is that Donovan works for the CIA/Government. He basically takes it as a no-brainer that the CIA/Government would have Donovan as an employee orchestrating his "defense". Donovan makes it very clear that he works for him, not his government. And there are lovely scenes where Donovan gives the CIA the cold shoulder when they want him to violate the attorney-client privilege, and gets all sanctimonious when they don't want to raise certain objections or appeal. Spielberg and the Cohens seem completely blind (or think the public is ridiculously naive) to the fact that Donovan having deep ties to OSS would necessitate that he would probably still be involved with the CIA and be very familiar/friendly with many of the key players. A scene where Donovan meets Dulles we are lead to believe that it is for the first time, but how could you be the General Counsel for the OSS, 1943-1945 and not have met Dulles? This again is not window dressing to the films plot, Donovan is just an upright insurance lawyer who had some key legal experience with the Nuremberg trials, and him being "just a citizen" is why he is tapped for the initial case and the subsequent international negotiation. But Donovan is just another spy! What a great post movie reveal. Nucking futs.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby KUAN » Fri Jan 29, 2016 11:47 am

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Re: eye'm caught in the grip of the city

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Jan 29, 2016 12:03 pm



I was pleasantly surprised to see Dan the Automator's name featured in the opening credits of this 2013 HK movie I watched the other day called Control. Shame that the movie sucked, but it was cool seeing his name listed as composer right up front.

-

Here's a really good movie I've been thinking of posting something about:

The Attorney

Image



It was inspired by the real-life "Burim case" of 1981, when during the authoritarian Chun Doo-hwan regime, 22 students, teachers and office workers who belonged to a book club were arrested without warrants on fabricated charges that they were North Korea sympathizers. Roh Moo-hyun, then a tax lawyer from Busan, formed a legal team with his allies (including Moon Jae-in and Kim Kwang-il) to defend the arrested individuals against the government. After the case, Roh became an influential human rights lawyer throughout the 1980s; he later entered politics and became the ninth president of South Korea.


Not only a tour de force performance from Song Kang-ho, also a very well done depiction of the anti-Communist secret police pogroms of one country.

(Flash forward to the later part of Roh Moo-hyun's life, circa 2009: S. Korean ex-president Roh dies in apparent suicide)
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Jan 29, 2016 12:11 pm

Belligerent Savant » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:34 pm wrote:.
Nordic » Fri Jan 01, 2016 2:53 am wrote:Anybody seen "Revenant" yet? I've always been fascinated by the original story which I read back in the 9th grade.


Haven't seen it yet, but definitely on my list (along with a few others already mentioned in this thread.)


About That Bear: Alejandro G. Iñárritu Discusses Making ‘The Revenant’

A hellbent quest for authenticity produced some indelible on-set moments for Alejandro G. Iñárritu as he directed “The Revenant,” his two-and-a-half-hour opus of death, love and improvised surgery in the American West of the 1820s. But only one of those moments, thankfully, involved a bison liver.

It came during the filming of a scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, the real-life trapper and mountain man Hugh Glass, is offered his first solid food in many days by a Native American feasting on a fresh kill. Mr. Iñárritu brought two liver options: a fake, which he described as “some kind of jelly thing,” and a genuine, glistening slab of offal.

“It was his call,” Mr. Iñárritu, sitting in the tearoom at an Upper East Side hotel, recounted one recent afternoon. “And he said, ‘Let me give it a shot.’”

Mr. DiCaprio’s attempt to snarf down a giant bite of organ meat went poorly, at least judged by today’s standards of dinner-table etiquette. By Mr. Iñárritu’s standards of cinéma vérité, on the other hand, the actor’s spontaneous and messy reaction — which is right there in the film — is perfect.

“It was very helpful, because it’s the first solid thing that the character has eaten in a while,” Mr. Iñárritu said. “So it makes sense that his throat is not ready.”

Sipping a Coke and occasionally stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee, Mr. Iñárritu looked surprisingly relaxed for a man who only recently wrapped a project that seems destined to join “Apocalypse Now,” “Fitzcarraldo” and others in an unofficial Hollywood Hall of Fame for Most Difficult Shoots. At one point in the hourlong interview, he referred to himself and the cast and crew as “survivors,” and the word seemed only a bit of a stretch.

Some ordeals were imposed by nature at various locations. This includes subzero temperatures and frozen cameras in Calgary, Alberta, and torrential rains in British Columbia, wreaking havoc on equipment, not to mention makeup. In pursuit of snow, the production scrambled to Ushuaia, a port at the southern tip of Argentina — next stop, Antarctica.

But Mr. Iñárritu imposed hardships of his own. He insisted on shooting in natural light, which severely limited the production schedule to as little as 90 minutes a day; in some places, the sun set at 3 p.m. And the single-take, tracking-shot technique he made famous in his 2014 backstage theater drama “Birdman” — for which he won the best-director Academy Award — was far trickier to pull off in the middle of a forest. One scene, an attack by an Indian tribe, required a month of rehearsals with 200 extras, ultimately yielding about eight minutes of film.

There were enough grumblings from the crew about delays, safety and overall misery that The Hollywood Reporter published an article in July in which one source described the experience as “a living hell.” Ten people either quit or were fired during filming, Mr. Iñárritu said, and he will not apologize for that.

“I have nothing to hide,” he said. “Of the 300 we started with, I had to ask some to step away, to honor the other 290. If one piece in the group is not perfect, it can screw the whole thing up.”

The “whole thing” is a deeply visceral tale about a group of trappers who are attacked by Native Americans and must flee, on foot, for the safety of a fort hundreds of miles away. The story quickly pivots to a revenge drama, with Glass, who serves as the group’s navigator, chasing the malevolent and greedy John Fitzgerald, a mumbling and nearly unrecognizable Tom Hardy.

Glass pursues his foe while recuperating from a near-death encounter with a bear, and he dodges both arrows and amoral Frenchmen every agonizing step of the way. (The movie’s title refers to a folkloric corpse, reanimated to haunt the living.) The torments of life in the untrammeled wilderness of the period are so convincingly captured that you leave the theater elated to lay eyes on civilization — cars, restaurants, men without hatchets.

“I’ve heard people say the movie is violent,” Mr. Iñárritu said in his deep and resonant voice, inflected with a Spanish accent. “But there is no gratuitous violence. These guys were eating animals, wearing animals; they were threatened by accidents, diseases, tribes, wars. This is the real world. This isn’t pasteurized.”

Compared with the people whose story he tells in “The Revenant,” we are a bunch of wimps, he said time and again, though he used a more graphic term. And the challenge of recreating the experience of frontiersmen, without cutting corners — using stage sets or green screens — was part of the appeal when he read an initial draft of the script, by Mark L. Smith, in 2010, based on Michael Punke’s novel of the same name.

None of the essential players flinched in the eight months it took to film “The Revenant,” Mr. Iñárritu said. That included a producer, Arnon Milchan, who didn’t balk as the price tag soared to a reported $135 million, from original estimates of $60 million.

“Revenant”-related flinching will commence now that the film is reaching audiences. Arguably, the most unnerving, gaze-averting scene is the bear attack, which could do for the woods what “Jaws” did for the ocean. The horrors of this sequence are so rattling that Fox, in response to a preposterous report by The Drudge Report, released a statement that said, essentially, No, Mr. DiCaprio was not raped by a bear in the course of the film. (Why anyone thought the assault was sexual is confounding; as the statement noted, the bear is a mother hoping to feed her cubs.)

Mr. Iñárritu would reveal little about how this chilling spectacle was confected, other than to describe it as a bit like a magic trick insofar as the “how” of it would only spoil a mystery. The film’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, said in a telephone interview that he and Mr. Iñárritu spent months researching how the bear should behave. They interviewed the author of a book on bear maulings and watched attacks caught on video.

“Then we rehearsed a lot in Los Angeles and in Canada,” Mr. Lubezki, who also won an Academy Award for “Birdman,” said. “But when you move the scene to the wild, it’s different. There was foliage under Leonardo, instead of a rubber net. And it didn’t really jell until we were on location. Then it started raining.”

Though cinematic sleight of hand was deployed — no humans were maimed during the making of this film — Mr. DiCaprio really is tossed around like a trout in the scene. During a separate interview, however, he said that other parts of the film were tougher to endure, even if they look tamer, because they were shot in numbing cold.

“Standing in a freezing river and eating a fish, or climbing a mountain with a wet bear fur on my back — those were some of the most difficult sequences for me,” said Mr. DiCaprio, who is considered a strong contender for an Oscar nomination for his performance. “This entire movie was something on an entirely different level. But I don’t want this to sound like a complaint. We all knew what we were signing up for. It was going to be in the elements, and it was going to be a rough ride.”
That Mr. Iñárritu persuaded actors, crew and producers to join him on this ride is an achievement in itself. The ambition of this movie, its sheer scale, as well as its demand for clockwork precision in grueling conditions, places him squarely in the tradition of madcap auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick — directors with vision, charisma and more than a touch of monomania. Mr. Iñárritu is known for exasperatingly high standards and fiendishly complex stagings, which in this movie included a helicopter-induced avalanche that had to be perfectly timed with several actors and a horse.

In person, though, Mr. Iñárritu has the chilled-out affect of a man who meditates every day and loves long walks. The only hint of intensity, and just a tinge of anger, comes when he discusses other movies. Too many of them today are like the products of fast-food chains, he said, ordered up by corporations that prize predictability and sameness over all else.

“What about going to a restaurant to be surprised?” he all but shouted. “That’s the risk that everybody avoids! In the context of cinema now, this movie is a bet.”

Raised in Mexico City, Mr. Iñárritu, 52, is the son of a banker who would eventually file for bankruptcy and end up selling fruit and vegetables to hotels and restaurants. The younger Iñárritu started off as a radio host, playing music and writing provocative, comical sketches with a political bent. He studied theater and learned to direct by shooting brand-identity commercials for a television station. By the time he landed his first feature, “Amores Perros,” released in 2000, he had spent hundreds of hours behind a camera. Then came “21 Grams” (2003), “Babel” (2006) and “Biutiful” (2010).

He wanted to make “The Revenant” next, a plan that was iced when Mr. DiCaprio peeled away to make “The Wolf of Wall Street.” So he co-wrote and directed “Birdman” and was taking bows for it the evening of the Oscars with production of “The Revenant” already underway.

“That night, I was getting messages saying, ‘This location collapsed,’” he said. “You ask me how winning that award changed me, the answer is, I don’t know. Because the night after I won, I flew to Calgary for this movie.”

Because the two films overlapped, Mr. Iñárritu has been working nonstop for years. Now he is eager to return to Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife of 23 years, Maria Eladia Hagerman. Asked if he would consider another movie in conditions as punishing as “The Revenant,” he was unequivocal: “Never again.”

Perhaps the setting of his next film will be a warm and beautiful country, he daydreamed with a smile, and focus on wine tasting.

“It would be a simple story,” he said, “of rooms and gardens.”



Saw this one. Really enjoyed it, solid 5/7.
Discussed the bear scene with friends after the movie.
Says me- "was that bear a sadist or what?". Questioning looks and repeats of "that mama bear was just protecting her cubs".
Bullshit.
That Bear was in a post-partum sexual rage and came across the perfect victim to assuage those urges.
Leonardo Dicaprio.
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