That Hugh Glass was one tough hombre.
As The Revenant (starring Leonardo DiCaprio) expands nationwide Friday, it poses the question of just who the legendary 19th-century frontiersman really was.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu points out that “the spine of the film is inspired by true events,” with the screenplay filling in the holes left in Glass' sparsely chronicled history.
“The only thing factual about Hugh Glass is that he was attacked by a bear, was abandoned and survived,” Iñárritu says. “You can interpret as you like, because anything could have been possible.”
But even that truth might have been embellished by storytellers of the day and later generations fascinated with the figure.
“It’s kind of this campfire legend,” DiCaprio says. “The whole journey represented the new frontiersman in American history, the idea of conquering and surviving nature.”
Some aspects of the Glass legend:
The bear attack took place. The real Glass was gruesomely mauled by a mother bear after Glass came across her two cubs sometime in August or September 1823. The actual location probably was around the plains of North Dakota, not in the film's mountains.
Accounts of the attack and Glass's survival quickly spread around the country in a time before telegraphs, which gives an idea of the immediate fascination.
'He was horribly injured, especially along his back by one account,' says historian Jon T. Coleman, author of Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear and the Rise of the American Nation. 'There were numerous bear attacks on trappers around this time. The movie does a great job with what a bear attack would look like and the injuries.'
Glass was left for dead, survived and set out for revenge. Though the veracity of reports from the time are still debated, they state that two men were left behind to tend to Glass and perhaps bury him properly. They were spooked in Indian country and abandoned him.
'They left Glass without any guns and any means of living,' says Clay Landry, historian at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyo., and a consultant on the film. 'Glass traveled approximately 200 to 250 miles, depending on the route. He hobbled and crawled to get back to civilization.'
There was no son on the journey. Accounts claim Glass had lived among the Pawnee Indian tribe, Landry says, which opens the possibility of a wife and family. But no son was part of the bear mauling or revenge tale, as depicted in the movie.
He never got revenge, but he got his gun back. Glass caught up to one of the men who left him (John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy in the film), who had enlisted in the U.S. Army in Missouri.
'Glass wanted to administer his own justice. And the Army said, 'Nope, Fitzgerald belongs to us now,' Landry says. 'But we’ll get your gun back.'
'Guns were special,' Landry adds. 'That gun was for life.'
The river, the battles, that bear. Most distinctly that bear. The sound editors and mixers on “The Revenant,” about a frontiersman’s battle for survival, had many elements to consider when crafting the sonic universe of the punishing 19th-century West in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film. Their work has paid off with several Oscar nominations.
Martín Hernández (nominated with Lon Bender for sound editing on the film) has collaborated with Mr. Iñárritu since they were D.J.s together in college. On both “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” he experimented further with surround sound. “The Revenant” puts viewers in the middle of the woods both with a roving camera and immersive audio. And while the natural sounds of insects and birds are part of the mix, the audio for certain objects was enhanced for additional effect.
The Revenant Bear Attack Wound
“The camera may pass by a fallen tree,” Mr. Hernández said in a phone interview. “A fallen tree doesn’t make any sound, but we put in a resonance, a frequency there, something that would make you feel there is a weight on that object.”
Experimentation was important, but the sound experts faced major challenges for the crucial sequence in which the main character, the frontiersman Hugh Glass, is mauled by a bear. They brought in Randy Thom, director of sound design at Skywalker Sound, who has earned multiple Oscar nominations and two trophies. He is nominated here for mixing along with Jon Taylor, Frank A. Montaño and Chris Duesterdiek. Mr. Thom pulled from Skywalker Sound’s large library of bear sounds to create the mix in that scene.
“What the bear does visually is so complex and varies over time,” Mr. Thom said. “She’s breathing, coughing, salivating, moaning, roaring, snarling, calling to her cubs. Every moment is different.”
Mr. Thom said he drew on roughly 50 recording sessions, mostly of bears. But in a few moments, he had to resort to other animals.
When Hugh shoots the bear, which continues to maul him, “we needed to make it clear that the bear was in distress,” Mr. Thom said. “And I didn’t have any recordings of hurt or injured bears. But I did have a recording of a horse that was sick and having problems breathing.”
But how to convincingly add in a completely different animal without it being distracting or sounding odd? Taj mahal 1963 mp3 download.
“The main trick that I used was to introduce some of the horse breathing elements before the bear gets shot, but at a very low level compared to the bear breathing elements,” he said. “And then I gradually increased the level of the horse breaths relative to the bear breaths, so that by the time the bear wanders off screen, it’s almost entirely this sick horse you hear breathing. Then every third or fourth horse breath, I would replace with one of the more familiar bear breaths from earlier.”
Mr. Thom also used a couple of camel vocalizations to conjure up a bear drooling. And when the bear sticks its nose down to the camera and breathes on it, fogging the lens, Mr. Thom recorded himself breathing.
Revenant Bear Attack Scene Real
“I couldn’t find any recordings of bears breathing that were quite that close,” he said. “I’m a fairly big guy, so that helps.” He pitched the recording down an octave to make it feel bigger and more fierce.
“I can turn into a fairly credible bear if I need to,” he said.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu may have insisted on making his new movie 'The Revenant,' which came out on Christmas Day, as authentic as possible — including having actors go through a week-long boot camp to correctly portray mountain men in the 1800s — but there was still some movie magic needed to pull off this gory revenge tale.That's where legendary production designer Jack Fisk comes in. He's best known for the beautifully designed period settings in movies like 'The Thin Red Line,' ' The New World,' and 'There Will Be Blood' over his three-decade career.Here, Fisk reveals some of the secrets behind the making of 'The Revenant,' including how that now-legendary bear scene came to be.Warning: spoilers ahead.Every year, five films are nominated for an Academy Award in the “Visual Effects” category. This year, each and every nominee offers its own unique inside look at the amazing tricks filmmakers and their effects teams must use to pull off the visual spectacles that make for a big-screen blockbuster. In recognition of these five films — and one of our favorite Oscar categories — we’re putting the spotlight on one “Visual Effects” nominee each day leading up to Sunday’s broadcast, and taking a closer look at what made them stand out.
Previously, we looked at the artificially intelligent android of Ex Machina, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max: Fury Road, and the alien world of The Martian. Now we look at one of the most spectacular scenes from director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s frontier epic The Revenant.
Most of the Oscar talk surrounding The Revenant right now involves leading man Leonardo DiCaprio, but one of the unsung stars of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film isn’t named on any Academy Award nominations — not directly, at least.
In a film filled with dramatic, gut-wrenching sequences depicting the brutality of frontier survival, one of the most memorable is a long, drawn-out attack on DiCaprio’s character by a grizzly bear in the deep forest. The savage scene has proven difficult to watch for some viewers due to its graphic nature, but critics and fans alike have heaped praise on it for being not just a stunning moment in the story, but also a fantastic achievement in filmmaking.
Over the course of the scene, Iñárritu seemingly captures the attack — which unfolds in a series of violent encounters between DiCaprio’s character, Hugh Glass, and the massive bear in the middle of a wooded area — through the use of a single, unflinching shot that drifts between the bear and his victim. It’s the sort of sequence that makes both filmmakers and audiences wonder how it was possible, and much like with this year’s other visual-effects nominees, the answer involves ample parts creativity, ingenuity, and VFX magic.
“What was interesting, thinking back to the early discussions with Alejandro, was how it was all about movement and planning and choreography, but always coming back to how an actual bear attack would unfold,” recalled Industrial Light and Magic’s Richard McBride, who served as the film’s overall visual-effects supervisor, during an interview with IndieWire.
“The other thing was getting into the mindset that this was not a monster: it’s in its natural habitat and just behaving as a normal animal would,” he added. “Alejandro wanted the attack to be sudden and wanted us to feel close to the action and immersed in every detail.”
And detailed it was, with a stunt actor filling in for the bear during a four-day shoot in the forests of British Columbia, Canada, and DiCaprio reportedly performing much of the scene himself. The part of the bear was played by actor Glenn Ennis, who studied video of bear movements — and violent videos of bear attacks — before donning a massive, bright blue suit to film with DiCaprio.
Filming Of The Revenant Bear Attack
“Obviously that [blue suit] doesn’t make it into the film, and the CGI guys paint the bear in,” Ennis told Global News back in January. “Alejandro was adamant that the blue bear moved just like a real bear would move, and it was essential that it had the same nuances that a bear would have. Even though it was a big Smurf bear, it still had to be as authentic as possible.”
“Fur is always a challenge, especially seeing it that close. So we had a lot of artistic detailing and nuance.”
A series of wires attached to DiCaprio allowed the actor to be thrown around in the bear’s jaws and flipped over during the attack, which lasts just six minutes on the screen but feels like much, much longer with the grueling pace of Iñárritu’s visceral, seemingly single-take shot.While the bear attack might appear to unfold in a continuous shot, the scene was actually the result of multiple, extended takes stitched together by the film’s talented VFX team. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, McBride described the team’s use of computer-generated moss in order to create a bridge between the digital bear and DiCaprio.
According to McBride, the CG moss served to “connect the bear to the ground by creating the contact point where she’s stepping, brushing up against something. Sometimes you could sell a movement with the smallest bit of foliage interacting with her.”
The proximity of DiCaprio to the bear tested the VFX team, with extensive digital painting required for many of the scenes featuring the bear breathing down DiCaprio’s neck or sinking his teeth into his prey. Iñárritu’s desire to bring the camera as close as possible to the action only made the team’s task that much more difficult — and their achievement that much more impressive.
As McBride and the VFX team soon discovered, the most complicated element of bringing the bear to life ended up being a furry dilemma.
“Fur is always a challenge, especially seeing it that close,” he recently told Studio Daily. “It has some wetness. There’s a lot of debris caught in it. So we had a lot of artistic detailing and nuance. The bear team studied and matched reference and looked at the environment. They had to mix in blood and wetness from the rainfall. It definitely pushed the pipeline at ILM quite a bit.”
“We discovered some new techniques for creating a detailed groom and translating that into the motion and simulation of the fur,” explained McBride. “For the bear, we had multiple levels of simulation — skeleton, muscles, fascia, skin, fur.”
The final product speaks — or rather, roars — for itself, with the bear providing one of the most talked-about scenes in one of the year’s most discussed films. And with The Revenant contending for 12 Academy Awards this year, it won’t be too surprising if that bear earns the film’s visual-effects team yet another well-deserved Oscar.
The 88th Academy Awards ceremony will air Sunday, February 28, at 7pm ET on ABC.