In New York about 50 people made last night’s screening of “The Revenant.” Meanwhile in LA, they had a screening at the Academy packed with Oscar and VIP, SAG voters and press, as well as star Leonardo DiCaprio’s good buddies Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly.
Tobey was accepting kudos from Academy members for his performance as Bobby Fischer in “Pawn Sacrifice.” “Entourage” star Connolly, will be directing the upcoming– and long suffering– “Gotti” film starring John Travolta.
DiCaprio told the crowd that the film was, “almost a silent movie performance from me.” Leo speaks about 20 lines of dialogue in the film.
Director Innarritu called the film “almost like an impossible task.” Leo said, “to tell you the truth, it’s all a beautiful blur to me.”
Leo then went on to say that because the rehearsals took months with the complicated camera moves worked out with the actors before they went into the wild. “We all felt an intensity and a unity with the whole crew that you had to grasp the entire shot every day We only had about 90 minutes a day to capture the beautiful, illustrious Chivo light,” a reference to the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki who is nicknamed Chivo.
Leo continued, “It was a brilliantly simplistic script about a man avenging the death of his son. We wanted to find the poetry in that.”
Given the weather and the intricate camera work involved, he added, “By far, this is the most difficult film I’ve or any of us have ever done.”
Inarritu confirmed that by saying, “I never knew how difficult it would be. There were times when I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I’m a tropical man from Mexico City!”
