Here’s the bit about The Revenant.
I’ve been joking that “The Revenant” would have been no worse had it been shot in a studio, using a green screen to paint the landscapes in behind the actors—or if, in lieu of DiCaprio dragging his body through frozen terrain and dipping it in frigid rivers, the movie had been made on location with stunt men with DiCaprio’s face digitally applied, as was done with Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” But the joke is unfair—the movie would likely have actually turned out better had it been made that way, because the artifices of a studio production and its digital contrivances would have pushed Iñárritu outside his narrow aesthetic ideology regarding physical reality and spiritual redemption. Escaping the self-imposed limits of climatic and theatrical rigors alike might have sparked his imagination.