"The Revenant" (directed by Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu) picked up five trophies at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards on Sunday night, including an award for the sound edits in the movie. Part of what helps a movie envelope you in fantasy is the ability to make you feel like you are there with sights and sounds. What might surprise you are the sources for the bear's noises that make fantasy a reality to your senses.

The bear noises were made by bears... and horses, camels, elephants, dogs and a human.

Randy Thom, Oscar winning director of sound design at Skywalker Sound who was called in to supervise the movie's sound design, told The New York Times that he used about 50 different recordings of bears in "The Revenant." "What the bear does visually is so complex and varies over time," Thom said. "She's breathing, coughing, salivating, moaning, roaring, snarling, calling to her cubs. Every moment is different."

"It was important to convey the series of emotions that the bear goes through. That's an enormous challenge in terms of trying to find recordings of real world animals that will evoke all of those different kinds of emotions in a believable way," Thom said, according to Pro Video Coalition. "In the bear sequence I am using real bear recordings, I am using recordings of camels, of elephants, horses, dogs and my own voice also."

Check out a bit of the bear's noises in the trailer for "The Revenant."

Since Thom didn't have any sound recordings of a bear in distress to match the scene after the lead character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) shot the bear - and since a bear wasn't actually shot during filming - there were no real injured bear noises on set, so Thom went equestrian. "...I didn't have any recordings of hurt or injured bears," he said. "But I did have a recording of a horse that was sick and having problems breathing."

"The main trick that I used was to introduce some of the horse breathing elements before the bear gets shot, but at a very low level compared to the bear breathing elements," Thom told The New York Times. "And then I gradually increased the level of the horse breaths relative to the bear breaths, so that by the time the bear wanders off screen, it's almost entirely this sick horse you hear breathing. Then every third or fourth horse breath, I would replace with one of the more familiar bear breaths from earlier."

The drooling sound attributed to the bear had actually come from a camel, Thom told The New York Times. "I had to resort to using my own voice a couple of times, too. Luckily I'm a big guy with a big voice and so I can pass as a 400-pound bear if necessary," Thom said, according to Mix.

And yet, in the Twitterverse, this happy bear is getting the credit.


"There was no bear ever on set," stuntman Glenn Ennis told Global News. "The closest a bear ever got to set (that we knew of) was at the Calgary Zoo."

"If you notice the bear head in the picture, they wanted the bear mouth to be right on his lower back. I was supposed to grab his jacket with my hand to make it look like the bear's jaws were pulling it," Ennis told Time. In order to have the bear's jaw in the small of his back, basically my face was in his butt. My face was in Leo's butt for a fair bit of time. I can see how that's someone's fantasy, but it wasn't mine!"

@ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.