The Revenant, a tale of the remarkable journey of fur trapper Hugh Glass, injured in a bear fight and abandoned to die, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, is a film full of raw emotion set in a raw wilderness. The mountains, rivers and prairies of Alberta, Canada provided much of the dramatic backdrop for the collaboration of production designer Jack Fisk and director, Alejandro Iñárritu.
 
Fisk has become well known for meticulously creating reality in the films he works on. Firstly he believes in thorough research. and for this film he looked at the writings of the period, including the journals of Lewis and Clark and paintings by George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. His experience in construction may have also enabled him to create a more believable reality in his films. It is good to hear when a production designer favours real materials. The Revenant required a Pawnee Indian village and a large fort and Fisk used reclaimed lumber.
 
The Fort Kiowa set was built to contain everything a fort at that time would have had such as an office, a mess hall, a butchering area, a blacksmith shop, a dormitory, and a trade room. To create this reality Fisk demanded the requirement of imperfections and so carpenters were asked to build like they did back then. The end result was buildings that looked like they were hand built by traditional methods and the reclaimed wood adds to the character.
 
Iñárritu insisted The Revenant should be both 'real' and 'gritty' and even shot the film in natural light. This is why Fisk and Iñárritu work so well together. Fisk said on interview 'it was like music to his ears.'
 
Styrofoam was used for a conical pile of buffalo skulls (they tried with real skulls but these were too messy) and a ruined Romanesque church painted with Mexican religious frescos (a nod to the director's home country). "I think Alejandro was as excited about these few dream sequences as any other part of the film," said Fisk. These sets were made in large lightweight sections in a warehouse outside Calgary. Fisk also designed a keelboat using a reclaimed wood clad aluminum hull and a 300-horsepower jet engine so it could drive upstream in the shallow, rapid-filled Bow River.
 
The film only used natural lighting, so Fisk used an app called Sun Seeker, which showed the path of the sun on any given day and locations were prepped for cinematic and practical reasons. "The mottled gray of the trees was confusing," says Fisk. "So we used a mixture of water and dry color to darken the trees, and we could come in afterward and spray it right off. It was not harmful to the trees, but it had a great effect on the individual and moving shots."
 
Plywood was placed under the snow, which could be as deep as six feet. Fisk says working in the harsh conditions gave him appreciation for how difficult it would have been in Glass's time. The designer recalls coming across fresh bear tracks in the snow while scouting. "Things like that keep you tingling in excitement- -the danger of it," he says. "It was very exciting being in the wild but hoping you'd never be in that situation like Glass was."
 
The Revenant has justifiably earned Fisk an Oscar nomination.