It’s been an excellent weekend for the makers of The Revenant. The new western expanded to theaters nationwide and very nearly unseated Star Wars as the #1 movie at the box office, and just a few minutes ago it also cemented its awards season contender status with three Golden Globe wins, for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Dramatic Film.
We knew that everybody would eventually be talking about The Revenant, so we got on the phone before the holidays with screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who adapted – very, very loosely – Michael Punke’s 2002 The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, and then collaborated with director Alejandro G. Inarritu on the final draft of the film that we are now seeing in theaters. We held onto this interview until after the film’s wide release because we talk about the whole damned story, from beginning to end, and we didn’t want to spoil The Revenant before everyone at least had a chance to see it for themselves.
Related: ‘The Revenant’ Review | Apocalypse Snow
The Revenant stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who is mauled by a bear and left for dead by a viciously pragmatic man named Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy. But Glass isn’t as dead as he looks, and he crawls tooth and nail through the icy wilderness to exact his revenge. Many of the strange events that follow are described below, so we are issuing a VERY BIG SPOILER WARNING for anybody who hasn’t watched The Revenant yet.
You have been warned.
20th Century Fox
Crave: Where do you start with The Revenant, except where you must have started? Tell me about where it began.
Mark L. Smith: I started in 2007. Anonymous Content, Steve Golin, they sent me the book and asked me if I would be interested in adapting it, and if I was, then I could go around and maybe pitch to studios and see if I could sell it that way. And so I read it, I liked the story, I liked a lot of the elements in it. But then I started playing with the idea – in my head – of what the pitch would sound like, as I’m trying to sell a studio on this period piece where your lead actor gets mangled and nobody talks for a half hour at a time and everything.
So I just said, “I’d love to do it but I should probably do it on spec.” So I wrote it on spec and it came out. It flowed. It was fun to write. And I didn’t use a lot of the novel, I guess, and I don’t outline. So when I knew what I wanted to do Iiked the idea of the challenge of almost trying to write almost a silent film. That was what I think drew me to the project, because I knew that the way I saw it there were going to be these long, extended periods with no dialogue. So the challenge of trying to convey story and emotion and motivation, all of that stuff, without words? I thought it would be fun to try.
So I dove in and did that, and it came out okay, and we attached a writer/director in 2007 and I thought, “Oh my god, this is going to happen so fast.” And then that was 2007.
“Hugh Glass, in some ways almost he’s like a Paul Bunyan-esque thing.”
There’s a lot to unwrap there. Let’s start with the fact that this is officially “based in part on a novel.” What got left out to make The Revenant yours?
What we kept from the novel itself was really the characters – Hugh Glass, Fitzgerald, Bridger, Captain Henry, those guys – and then the grizzly attack, and then the abandonment. Those three things are really all we took from the novel.
Everything else, every other scene, every other action and motivation and character thing, it was either created by me between the years of 2007 and 2010, or with Alejandro [Iñárritu] and I in 2011, 2012. That’s the “based in part on.” I guess that’s what they finally all agreed on or something.
So yeah, it was weird because as I was researching it, Hugh Glass, in some ways almost he’s like a Paul Bunyan-esque thing. There’s a lot of legend, you know, as much as fact. So we grabbed a lot of different things that were written and stuff, and tried to kind of condense them into what I thought would make the most interesting version; for my mind, the most interesting version of the film.
20th Century Fox
The inciting incident here is the attack by the Arikara. They are on the rampage because someone has kidnapped the Chief’s daughter. Was that your invention? You didn’t mention that.
No, that was something that we did. We came up with it. It wasn’t in the novel at all.
Why was that necessary? What did it give you?
As far as having the Indian attack?
Yes, and their through line throughout the film.
In my very first draft, knowing that I was, like I said, I was going to write almost like a silent film, what I had to do was try to make sure that all my action was good enough that people would keep turning the pages. Because I was writing it for readers. So it was like, I’ve got to keep writing stuff that the action is good enough that people forget nobody is talking.
“What I had to do was try to make sure that all my action was good enough that people would keep turning the pages.”
And I don’t outline. I’m a notoriously bad outliner, but what I did do was write down these moments that I knew would kind of carry me through things, and I knew I wanted to grab the reader right off the bat. So I did the Arikara battle, because then you immediately knew the world, you knew the threats, you knew everything. What the Arikara provided was kind of the push, something that was kind of pursuing; while Glass is pursuing one thing, others are pursuing him in a way. So that gave us that.
Alejandro came in and added the element of the daughter having been kidnapped, and what he liked about that – and I agree with him – was that Glass’s journey is a father/son thing, and it always was from my earliest drafts. That’s really what I cared about, much more than the revenge aspect, was the father/son element and what that feeling, that love, that emotion could drive a person to do to survive. But by having the Arikara looking for his daughter they’re almost on parallel journeys in away.
What Alejandro liked about that was we have to completely different cultures, and different worlds, and enemies in a lot of ways, but yet we’re watching them do something very similar. At the heart of it, they’re both fathers searching for either a piece of their son or searching for their daughter. It’s a nice parallel, so that’s what it gave us. It gave us something to push and pursue Glass but also that emotion.
20th Century Fox
The way that those stories come together at the end, I have to equate it to another movie just because it’s shorthand: there’s almost a Training Day element there, where Glass’s rescue of the daughter unintentionally saves his own life.
Yes.
Was that a thought? Did you think about other movies when you were working on The Revenant? Were there other movies that were an influence?
Well no. I mean not really, not for this one, because I couldn’t think of any… I don’t pull from different genres, I guess, so I couldn’t think of – other than Jeremiah Johnson – anything that kind of took place in that time period, and that would relate.
“I really did feel like I couldn’t waste any of my words of action. They were all so crucial. They were like little pieces of gold to me…”
But story and character-wise I don’t, usually. I don’t kind of pull from other things [but] the one thing I did pull was the carcass, where he climbs in the horse. I’d gotten that idea, something always stuck with me from when I was a kid reading Call of the Wild when he put his hands in the dog because his hands were freezing. So that’s where that came from. It was that moment. I just wanted to say, “Okay, we’ll take those hands but we’ll make this even bigger and even more insane.
So that’s where that came from but as far as the Arikara girl, that was Alejandro’s addition. That was important to him to have. So where that came from […] I think that was just purely him. He just saw that as a way… In my earlier versions it had been that Glass was in this pursuit, and the Arikara had been following him, but they had seen what he’d gone through to get to this point and the messages he’d left and they realized…
It was almost, instead of the daughter, it was a sign of respect at the end that they rode by him and let him live. Alejandro liked the father/daughter element to parallel the father/son, so it just kind of worked. It worked for that scene at the end.
20th Century Fox
Talk about writing with and for Alejandro Iñárritu. By the time you were writing together, were you thinking to yourself, “Okay, how’s he going to do this in one take for five minutes?”
[Laughs.] No! Because when we did it, we did it pre-Birdman, and so we actually started writing together early 2011, and it was supposed to happen with Leo [DiCaprio] like late 2011, 2012, and then Wolf of Wall Street came together and so it got bumped, and then when it got bumped Alejandro did Birdman.
Then he kind of figured out some things he liked to do, technique-wise with Chivo [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki], so then it just added another element to the script, to the story, the film and the way it’s shot. It immersed the audience more in it, which I love about it. It just feels like you’re so much a part of his journey. You’re right there with Glass.
But as far as we were writing it, no, I didn’t consider. I wrote a lot of action and I describe, even the grizzly attack is not just like, “Oh yeah, now a bear attacks and they roll down a hill and blah.” I went through the beats where it comes out of the brush, and the first swipe knocks him into a tree and the leg snaps, and then the other thing. Again, because I wasn’t using dialogue and I wasn’t using any words, I really did feel like I couldn’t waste any of my words of action. They were all so crucial. They were like little pieces of gold to me because that was all I had to keep people interested.
So yeah, I tried to write as visually as I could and then it just worked well with Alejandro, the way he likes to shoot. It was kind of a nice match.
“You could have given me a million guesses, I would have never predicted the bear rape.”
Were you surprised when people started dramatically misinterpreting the bear scene?
[Laughs.] Yeah! Yeah, that happened. We were doing some Q&A’s in New York when that one broke and one of the questions was about the “bear rape” scene, and my line was, “That was totally Alejandro. He rewrote me completely. In the original it was totally consensual, and Alejandro took it to a much darker place than it was.”
But that was one of the most bizarre things. You always expect hurdles. Something a little wrong is going to go here or there, little bumps in the road, but you could have given me a million guesses, I would have never predicted the bear rape.
20th Century Fox
What do you think that means? Do you think people are looking for bear rape and they just found it wherever they could?
It is something that we really don’t have enough of, possibly. Who knows? Maybe we haven’t seen enough of that. Then when you throw in the fact that it’s actually a female bear, I mean, maybe it’s more of an equal rights thing. I don’t even know where you would go with that.
No, I mean… Then the rumors were like, no, okay, who planted this? Where did this come from? Who’s trying to do it? It was a shame but I couldn’t believe how it spread. I mean, it spread so much that Fox then had to react, you know?
It was very odd. I want to talk about my other favorite animal moment, although this is all in dialogue. Tom Hardy’s speech about God and the squirrel is an excellent piece of writing. Is that from the book, or did you cull that from your own experiences with squirrels?
[Laughs.] No, and again, I’m going to give full credit to Alejandro for that scene. That was something that they actually came up with. I wasn’t on set for a stretch, and he did that. He was looking for another moment to pull away from Glass’s journey, and I was out of town. They did that. The first time I saw it was in a cut back in September, August or something.
“What’s the point of God if you’re starving to death? [That] kind of thing. Will you eat God to survive?”
But I know where it came from. I know what he’s going for. It’s kind of Fitzgerald’s… not “code,” it’s his thing with religion and survival. What’s the point of God if you’re starving to death? [That] kind of thing. Will you eat God to survive? It was that kind of a thing but I’ve talked to Alejandro. He’s got a few of these sneaky things in all of his films, that he wants people to interpret, and I’ve asked him a couple Birdman questions and I’ve asked him other things, and he goes, “What do you you think?”
Oh, I hate that! That’s not satisfying at all.
I know. So there are a few of those, even in this one. I’m not allowed to say. But this one he hasn’t told me. It’s like, “What do you see and what do you think?” and I just go, “You know, I know Fitzgerald’s character so that’s where I’m going.” And he goes, “Yeah, I like that too.”
It’s just… It’s Alejandro. It’s how he works. It’s that Emma Stone look at the end of Birdman, what is she seeing and what has just happened? And of course he’s never going to tell us.
20th Century Fox
What a jerk.
Yeah. [Laughs.] He loves… This is what he loves. We actually pulled back a lot on some character stuff because he wanted it to feel like, the way he was shooting it, he wanted the audience to feel like they were there. He wanted to feel real life.
So there were moments where he wanted… like, [when] three people walk in a room and meet somebody, you might all have a different perception, a different feel. He was going for that. He wanted the audience to have things to discuss about different characters. “Did you pick up on this? Did you think this is what he meant?”
He loves, he loves audience interpretation. So there are those moments in it.
Even the whole film. I left the theater talking to a friend of mine, and one of the film references we used to discuss it was Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. In that film there is even to this day some debate about whether Clint Eastwood’s character was real or a vengeful ghost.
Right, yeah.
“We actually pulled back a lot on some character stuff because he wanted it to feel like, the way he was shooting it, he wanted the audience to feel like they were there.”
You could even potentially apply that to The Revenant and say that maybe Hugh Glass did die and came after them from beyond the grave, and that’s the only way he was able to survive all the horrific things that happened to his body.
Right, no, that’s it. We’ve been asked that as well. It is, and that’s that kind of thing that’s fun for me to hear the different theories and different things, knowing what I know. And I like it because in some ways, I don’t know, in some ways I like oftentimes to see a movie and know exactly what I’ve seen. But at the same time there are other ones that I really enjoy where I discuss it with friends and family afterwards, just like, “What do you think? What do you think happened after that, from that moment? If there was another frame what would we see?”
Sometimes those can be more interesting and those stick with you a little longer, and I think that’s what Alejandro is going for.
20th Century Fox
So are there other adventures of Hugh Glass out there in the ether?
This is pretty much it. I mean he did a lot of stuff. Pre-grizzly attack I think he was with Jean Lafitte, he did some pirate stuff. He was on ships and things. So he had some adventures before this, living with Indians and stuff, but no, this was his famous moment.
So if there’s any potential for a franchise, it would have to be a prequel?
Yeah! Yeah, definitely. No, I don’t think he’s ready to take anything, and I can almost promise you if there’s a sequel we won’t be able to get Leo back in there. [Laughs.] I don’t think we’ll throw him back out in the snow again easily. It’ll take a lot of us to get him there. But don’t you think he was so great? I just thought he was so great.
“I can almost promise you if there’s a sequel we won’t be able to get Leo back in there.”
The whole cast is great. Honestly it was Tom Hardy’s penetrating eyes, and his vile pragmatism. It’s one of my favorite performances of the year, honestly. He was just fantastic.
Yeah, I thought so too. It’s funny because his character, so much of what he does comes from fear. Because he’s the one guy who’s survived [an] attack. He’s been scalped before. So all of his actions, they seem kind of selfish and stuff in a way, and they are obviously, but it comes from… When other people are worrying about Glass being tortured or the pain he’s going through, [Fitzgerald] is worrying about his screaming bringing more people.
Whenever he kills Hawk, Glass’s son, it’s out of panic. It’s not like, okay, he just wants to kill him. It’s like, “You’re going to bring [the enemy], you’ve got to shut up.” So much of what he does, especially early on in that first half, is fear-driven. But no, his performance. I think Hardy’s amazing.
Top Photo: 20th Century Fox
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
