Film-Making and Authenticity

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.”