Sporting long hair and a shaggy beard, A-list actor Leonardo DiCaprio may be keeping a low profile during the long Alberta shoot of the western, The Revenant, but sources say the actor has been in the province off and on for more than a month for the technically innovative film.

The five-time Oscar nominated actor is shooting the revenge western alongside actor Tom Hardy for director Alejandro González Iñárritu in various locations in southern Alberta. Most recently, the secretive production was at the Morley reserve west of Calgary for epic battle shots that required dozens of native extras.

“As they need him, they bring him in, the same as Tom Hardy and the same as all of them,” said a source familiar with the production who asked not to be named. “There are a lot of sequences that are being shot where they don’t need to be here.”

In August, the 39-year-old DiCaprio made headlines when he visited Fort McMurray, ostensibly to do research for an upcoming environmental project. While there his foundation made a $100,000 donation to the ALS Ice-bucket Challenge on behalf of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and issued an ice-bucket challenge to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Since then he has regularly made the news and celebrity websites. Some of this has been for noble reasons: his Sept. 23 speech on climate change to the United Nations as its newly minted Messenger of Peace; his foundation’s donation of $2-million towards ocean conservation; teaming up with Netflix for a documentary about gorilla preservation. Some of it has been for not-so-noble reasons: tabloids placed him at Robin Thicke’s end-of-marriage party in Hollywood Hills alongside Hardy and a bevy of beautiful young women. Whatever the case, it seems clear that the actor is making use of the short flights from Calgary to Los Angeles.

Production on the Revenant began in late September and is expected to last into February or March in various Alberta locations, including Drumheller, Kananaskis Country, Dead Man’s Flats and areas near Canmore.

It will also shoot for one week in Squamish, B.C.

It is based on a novel by Michael Punke. DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a frontiersman in the 1820s who vows revenge on men who left him to die after he was mauled by a bear.

Some of the shots have required more than 50 extras and 60 to 70 Alberta crew members, said IATSE 212 Motion Picture Business Agent Michael Gibney.

In the next months, Alberta film workers will also be doing some major construction for the film in Kananaskis Country, said Gibney in an interview with the Herald last week.

“Right now they are in an intense stage where they have 14 makeup artists, 14 wardrobe people every day because they are doing all the big scenes,” he said.

Director Iñárritu has also been getting a good deal of media attention lately, thanks to the critical acclaim and Oscar buzz of Birdman, a dark comedy starring Michael Keaton. The Mexican filmmaker, who earned an Oscar nomination for directing 2007’s Babel, is winning praise for the dazzling technical prowess of that film, which unfolds as if it were shot in one two-hour take.

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for Gravity, shot Birdman and is working on The Revenant. The film is being shot in sequence, which is rare.

“This is a new way of making movies,” says Gibney. “It’s this new system, where you rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. It’s very complex shooting — lots of long, long shots and that kind of stuff.”

In a recent interview in Rolling Stone Magazine, Inarritu joked about the complexity of his process when asked how hard it is to co-ordinate the long shots.

“It’s one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it,” he told Rolling Stone. “Right now, I’m working on a western and I’d written a scene in the script that simply says “Indians attack.” That’s two words, one f — king line — and now everyone on the production is paying for it, including me!”

The Revenant is scheduled to be released Christmas Day, 2015.

evolmers@calgaryherald.com