Leonardo DiCaprio recently landed the Best Actor Award (Drama) for The Revenant at the Golden Globe Awards and in his acceptance speech he was quick to praise director Alejandro González Iñárritu for his commitment and vision.

With the film coming out on top of this year&’s awards, it&’s an incredibly strong sign DiCaprio&’s about to sail through to that dearly coveted Academy Award on 28 February. Excerpts from an interview:

Watching the opening of The Revenant, all one could think was that it looks really cold.

It was physically gruelling for everybody. We had to have this massive crew go to faroff locations and move around all over the high altitudes in Canada from Calgary to Vancouver. Like in Birdman, Alejandro Iñárritu created these very intricate shots with (director of photography Emmanuel) “Chivo” Lubezki, where he was weaving in and out of the forest. He would have the camera veer off to this expansive battle sequence, then come right back to another intimate moment with the character. They had coordinated all that stuff with a lot of precision. But of course when we got there, the elements, sort of, took over.

What drew you to the role of Hugh Glass?

Glass was a campfire legend — and it&’s all true. He survived a savage bear attack, was left for dead, then travelled through this uncharted territory of North America, crawling through hundreds of miles of wilderness on his own. So to me the story was a simple linear story but in Alejandro&’s hands, of course, it becomes a sort of visual, existential poetry.

Not a lot of directors wanted to take this on because of how difficult it would be to shoot. The script had been floating around for a couple of years. It wasn’t until Alejandro was attached to this man&’s struggle in nature that it got going. I decided to embark on what I would characterise as more of a chapter of my life than a film commitment — because it was epic in every sense of the word.

So you’re filming outside, it&’s cold, dirty and brutal. Were there times when you asked yourself, “Why am I doing this?”

Moments? Every single day of this movie was difficult. It was the most difficult film I’ve ever done. You’ll see that when you see the film — the endurance that we all had to have is very much up on screen.

What was the worst part?

The hardest thing for me was getting in and out of frozen rivers. (Laughs.) Because I had elk skin on and bear fur that weighed about 100 pounds when it got wet. And every day, it was a challenge not to get hypothermia.

How prepared was the crew for that? Did they say, “Well, we’re going to throw DiCaprio into a frozen river, we better have some EMTs here”?

Oh, they had EMTs there. And they had this machine that they put together — it was kind of like a giant hair dryer with octopus tentacles — so I could heat my feet and fingers after every take, because they got locked up with the cold. So they were basically blasting me with an octopus hair dryer after every single take for nine months.

And there were a lot of takes.

Alejandro and Chivo had this vision to shoot in natural light. We had months of rehearsal beforehand but every day was like doing a play. Each actor, each bit of the set, needed to be like gears in a Swiss watch, because the camera was moving around and you had to have your timing perfect. So we rehearsed every day, and then had a two-hour window of natural light to shoot. This movie is a little like virtual reality — it&’s the closest thing to being submerged in nature. In the bear attack, you can almost feel the breath of the bear. It&’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

There was talk you had problems with snow.

We had a lot of complications while shooting, because it was the hottest year in recorded history. In Calgary there were all these extreme weather events. One day we were trying to do a scene and it turned out to be 40 below zero, so the gears of the camera didn’t work. Then twice during the movie we had seven feet of snow melt in a day — all of it, within five hours — and we were stuck with two or three weeks of no snow in a film that&’s all snow. So we had to shut down production multiple times.

You even had to wrap early and resume filming when you could find snow again, right?

We had to go to the South Pole!

That&’s crazy…

We had to go to the southern tip of Argentina, to the southernmost town on the planet, to find snow.

Do you have a lot of outdoor experience? Are you a survival school kind of guy?

I love being immersed in nature and wild places. I love scuba diving, and I’ve been up and down the Amazon. But as far as dropping me off with a small bit of rations? Before this movie I wouldn’t have known the first thing about it.

Of course, any talk of survival has to include climate change and you are a vocal environmentalist. How did that start?

So there was a period in my career, post-Titanic, where I took a break and I wanted to re-evaluate the other great passion in my life — I’ve been interested in science and biodiversity ever since I was very young, probably from watching films about the rain forest at the Natural History Museum.

What do you see as the biggest challenges?

We’ve seen such a tremendous lack of leadership and we’ve allowed these trillion-dollar industries to manipulate the argument about the science for too long. This year is a massive tipping point in the climate struggle. As I said, it&’s the hottest year in recorded history. July was the hottest month in recorded history. We’re seeing methane bubbling up from underneath the seafloor.

The question is what do we do to mitigate this? Are we going to come together as a world community? Are we going to evolve as a species and actually combat this issue? The human race has never done anything like that in the history of civilisation.

Wired