Leonardo DiCaprio talks about The Revenant

There’s a lot of buzz circulating around Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead performance in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Many are predicting for DiCaprio to win his first Best Actor Oscar for playing Hugh Glass, who is left for dead by his men after being attacked by a bear. Glass proves to be unbreakable, however, and sets out to get revenge on the men that abandoned him in the cold wilderness.

DiCaprio recently talked to IGN about The Revenant. He stated, “We wanted to immerse ourselves in nature as much as possible. The whole story of Hugh Glass has been well written about, but ultimately it’s stuff of campfire legend and it’s more a representation of this American frontiersman and what they were capable of in – I suppose being able to dominate the wilderness or live with it.”

Leo went on to talk about how the film portrays indigenous people without turning them into Hollywood clichés. “I love the way Alejandro represented them as human beings in this movie and he took great care in learning about the different tribes and the way they interacted with one another,” said DiCaprio. “The larger story for us as far as an environmental undertone was that I was doing a film about climate change simultaneously, a documentary, and I was documenting the change in our weather systems and what a shift of one degree does to an entire landscape.”

The Revenant will hit theaters in limited release on December 25, 2015.