FORREST GOODLUCK

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A few months ago, if you had heard of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant, it was most likely because of the erroneous rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio gets raped by a bear in it. This week, the buzz is more likely about the three Golden Globes the movie picked up over the weekend—for the film, DiCaprio’s performance, and Iñárritu’s direction—or the powerfully harrowing nature of the film, which explores man’s brutality to man in a frigid and inhospitable wilderness. DiCaprio is tipped to finally win an Oscar for his brutal portrayal of Hugh Glass, who recovers from a grisly bear attack only to see his son murdered, launching him on a quest for revenge, but Forrest Goodluck, the young actor making his professional début as the ill-fated son Hawk, says he worked hard to think of the Hollywood legend as just another costar. “I tried to take it one day at a time,” he recalls of working with DiCaprio and Iñárritu, as well as other big names like Tom Hardy and Domhnall Gleeson. “The huge superstars, they’re just amazing, smart, talented people, and I tried to see them as a whole person rather than put them on a pedestal. Whenever I got back from working on a scene, my mom would jump up and be like, ‘How’s Leo?’ or ‘How’s Alejandro?’ but I needed to see these people as people, so it was really just stepping back and trying to see them as humans. I think I did that and just took everything in stride.”

Still, Goodluck readily admits that it was a steep learning curve on set, in a viscerally realistic production that racks up dozens of dead bodies on a trek across a landscape of mud, snow, and ice. “I was very nervous,” he says of his initiation, a powerful scene that opens the film, which finds Leo’s party of fur trappers besieged by raiding Native Americans. “My first take of the entire film was a shot of Leo and me running in the mud to the boats and he’s yelling at everyone and he’s yelling at me and he’s telling me to launch the boats and I try to. I run full speed ahead and there’s chaos happening all around and horses running everywhere and arrows flying everywhere and I hit a patch of mud and just trip and fall. Leo pulls me up and throws me and we cut. I told Alejandro after, with a face full of mud, that he baptized me into the film industry.”

Now seventeen, Goodluck has already been acting for several years, and is also a budding filmmaker in his own right, having found his way to the art form in school, growing up in New Mexico. “My handwriting is horrible,” he laughs, “so I needed another form to express myself. I think the camera came so naturally to me and it was a way that I could really express these ideas that I have in a way that I think is so vivid and clear. I had never found anything like it before, where you could really just freely express yourself and get someone to understand very large, complex ideas through storytelling.”

Currently finishing his senior year in high school, Goodluck has already had his work screened at several film festivals, even winning a youth prize from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. (Goodluck is a member of the Diné, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Tsimshian tribes.) His acting career has gone hand in hand with his filmmaking, as roles in local productions and student films led to a canceled project by the Native American director Chris Eyre, which introduced him to casting director Rene Haynes (responsible for the wolf pack in Twilight), who eventually sent along the script for The Revenant.

Goodluck says he was initially drawn to the project by Iñárritu, whom he says he admired both for his “beautiful films” and for being “someone who looks like me,” a rarity in the mostly while world of prestige studio films. He was won over further by the script itself, which Goodluck calls “one of the few scripts I had received that took an Indian character and made him someone that is a whole person, someone who is not just a caricature.”

Despite that violent opening scene, the main conflict in The Revenant is not, as in Westerns of old, between whites and Native Americans, but between DiCaprio’s Hugh and Hardy’s John Fitzgerald, a seething racist who has survived a scalping and is full of rage at the mere existence of Hawk, son of Hugh and a Native American woman. Goodluck says that his character, despite being murdered relatively early in the film, can be seen as a linchpin of sorts, which he learned in a meeting with director just before filming began. “[Iñárritu] starts explaining how Hawk is the heart of the film,” Goodluck recalls. “He’s the character that really is the force in the film and he’s basically the heart and soul of the film. He asked me to be that character and of course I was speechless for a second.” He adds, “That was an amazing moment for me. It was very cool to see a role that was directly challenging the actual history of Hugh Glass and placing this fictional character of Hawk in the script and the story to really emphasize a very nuanced point about racism in America.”

Given that powerful script, Goodluck says he worked diligently to make his performance as authentic as possible. He learned to speak Pawnee (the tribe Hawk’s mother comes from) and studied with the Native American historian Loren Yellow Bird to understand the nuances of the era. “He taught me the language and a lot of the cultural values that would have existed then, so he was really the main force in understanding what it was like being an Indian in that time,” Goodluck recalls.

Since filming wrapped, crew members have come forward to complain about working conditions on set, with Iñárritu’s insistence on waiting for real snow and his penchant for putting his actors through the difficult conditions their characters endured. But the power of the final product speaks for itself, and Goodluck says that, despite the sometimes difficult environments, there was something almost transcendental about the experience. “Being in such a beautiful area, I never felt discontent about being in the elements. It was such a great experience to be humbled every day, to be shooting inside a forest in the mountains that are going to be there long after you are gone,” he says. “The prevalent sense in the film is man and nature, man and God, man and whatever you want to call it, and literally every day on set, if there was snow, if there was rain, if it was cold, if it was windy, there was nothing that we could do about it and we just had to endure it. It was a really humbling experience.”

And, of course, Goodluck says it was all worth it in support of the vision of Iñárritu, whose most important lesson to the teenage auteur may have been the confidence of his own convictions. “Birdman was just coming out about halfway through the shoot and once I saw it I was like, ‘Oh god, this is the man who made probably one of the greatest films to come out in the past decade.’ Then he won the hat trick of Oscars, and after that happened, he could get away with anything he was doing artistically on set. He could just pursue his vision 100%, so I knew that this film was going to be something that was so special and something that had never been done on film before.”

The Revenant is out now.