The Revenant's Jack Fisk on Outdoor Movies & His Life with Sissy Spacek
The Revenant, just nominated for eight (!) BAFTAs, opens nationwide today so here's our last interview of the week to celebrate this wilderness epic.
Jack Fisk, the Oscar-nominated Production Designer (There Will Be Blood) is no stranger to outdoor challenges. Many of his most famous films, due in no small part to his long collaboration with Terrence Malick, feel the spiritual pull of nature as does the man who designs them. He prefers to build on location and with the tools that would have been present at the time, whatever time the movie happens to take place in.
When he signed on for The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gave him a copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev which he used for inspiration of scale and detail. His longtime collaborators Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki (Cinematographer) and Jacqueline West (Costumes) Fisk -- who he had worked with on many projects though only once altogether (The New World, 2005) were also on hand to realize this brutal of frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) surviving bear attacks, bloody skirmishes, and mercenary Tom Hardy.
I asked Fisk about his onscreen life with auteur collaborators, his offscreen life with one of the great screen actresses, and his preference for outdoor cinema. Our conversation is after the jump...