Leonardo DiCaprio Talks of “Living Hell” While Shooting The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio is shamelessly promoting his new film The Revenant and he should!

After nine months of filming in non-livable areas of Canada and Argentina, sleeping in animal carcasses and eating bison body parts, the 4-time Oscar nominee says that shooting The Revenant profoundly changed him and the film will have an equally groundbreaking effect on the moviegoers.

“It’s going to be one of the most unique film-going experiences that audiences have seen in modern times,” the 40-year-old actor said in a recent interview with Yahoo Movies.

DiCaprio touched on the difficulties surrounding the shooting of the Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, including shooting a scene in which the actor fights a bear. When asked whether the bear used for filming was real, DiCaprio said:

“Well, I’m not going to give any specifics on how we did it — you’ll figure it out on your own. 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. [Those scenes] — amongst many other sequences — were some of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my entire career.”

When asked whether he worries as an actor and producer of The Revenant whether the project will be as well accepted as certain franchises and superhero films so popular right now, DiCaprio said:

“I do. I put a lot of thought into that, actually, because The Revenant is a film that is so incredibly unique. It’s a very linear and simple story, but it doesn’t have all the formulaic plot points [found in] a lot of films have coming out of the studio system. What’s interesting to watch, as television becoming that much better, I think a lot of these stories are going to be going toward television. Television is better than it’s ever been in history. A lot of stories are being pushed — because of how complicated they are to make —toward Netflix and other channels on cable. But we’re going to see whether or not movies like this can survive anymore. It’s like the Last of the Mohicans — these type of movies. I don’t know if [these kinds of films] going to get financed anymore. So all I can do as a lover of film is, when I see these opportunities, to jump on them. [They’re] maybe a dying breed.”

The film opens in theatres on December 25, 2015.