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January 2016

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www.postmagazine.com 26 POST JANUARY 2016 O S C A R buzz exican director Alejandro González Iñárritu won three Oscars — Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay — for Birdman last year. That huge success capped off an amazing run since he directed and produced his acclaimed 2000 debut feature film, Amores Perros, which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film and received over 60 prizes, becoming the most awarded film around the world in that year. Iñárritu's 2003 follow-up film, 21 Grams, which he conceived, directed and produced, won Oscar noms for its stars Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. His 2006 feature Babel, starring Cate Blanchet and Brad Pitt, earned seven Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Director, and his 2010 feature, Biutiful, won its star Javier Bardem a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Now Inarritu has taken his Birdman technical innovations and pushed the limits of cinema even further with The Revenant, a grueling, intense, harrow- ing tale of survival, endurance and revenge set in the frozen frontier of 1820s America, which he co-wrote. Loosely based on a true story, it follows guide and hunter Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), who barely survives a brutal bear-mauling only to be betrayed, aban- doned and left for dead in the wild by the ruthless and mercenary fur trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who has killed Glass's teenage son. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Iñárritu talks about making the film and his love of post and editing. This is so different from Birdman. What sort of film did you set out to make? "I wanted to make a very cinematic, pure, monolithic film that's about this incredible physical experience that Glass went through, and it deals with what people can endure when they're stripped of everything." You and DP Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, who shot Birdman for you, worked with all natural light. Talk about the biggest technical challenges of making that happen? "We decided early on to just use natural light and firelight, as light is the element that makes cinema. And if you have the right light, you have the right picture and right emotional impact. And the complexity of natural light is very dif- ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU: THE REVENANT TAKING HIS BIRDMAN TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS AND PUSHING THE LIMITS OF CINEMA BY IAIN BLAIR M Inarritu and DiCaprio on-set. The feature was shot with Arri cameras, including the new Alexa 65.

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