Leonardo DiCaprio got a “terrifying” up-close look at the effects of climate change while shooting his Oscar-tipped film The Revenant last year, he told reporters backstage at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday night.
“Our weather is dramatically changing,” the actor and longtime environmental activist told reporters after picking up the Best Actor prize Saturday night, according to the New York Daily News. “We had to go to the southern tip of Argentina just to be able to find snow to complete the film.”
Echoing comments he made last month, DiCaprio said that residents in Calgary, where the film was partially shot, had never seen the “unprecedented” weather conditions that plagued the filming of the award-winning bloody revenge epic. The actor, who picked up a Golden Globe for the same role last month, also revealed that he is currently working on a climate change documentary that would be completed “in the next few months.”
“We are in the process of changing our climate for tens of thousands if not millions of years at this very moment, so this is a very significant turning point for me to witness it first-hand while doing this movie and simultaneously doing the documentary, and it’s absolutely, absolutely terrifying,” he added.
The six-time Oscar nominee, who has called climate change “the most existential human crisis that the world has ever known,” raised eyebrows last month when he suggested that “warm gusts of wind” that blew through the snow-capped Canada set of The Revenant were caused by the effects of climate change. DiCaprio was referring to the Chinook winds, a common seasonal wind that affects portions of Alberta every year.
The actor met with Pope Francis in Vatican City last week, where the two exchanged gifts and discussed climate change during a brief 15-minute meeting. Backstage at the SAG Awards, DiCaprio said it was “an incredible honor to meet him.”
“He’s been inspiring and revolutionary, to come out and be outspoken about the issue of climate change and endorse the scientific community,” DiCaprio said.
Check out the complete list of winners from Saturday night’s SAG Awards here.