Survivalist Les Stroud Breaks Down Survival Scenes from Movies | GQ

there is a tiger this is her home territory where we're putting you she has some Cubs she's killed 22 people this year but it's okay she's only eaten 12 of them okay well then that's great my odds are good Pam let's drought hustle Nona Survivorman and this is the breakdown this is into the wild this kind of frantic sort of crawling around behavior that is accurate at home we might want to run into a bathroom or run outside but in his state malnutrition a starvation dehydration even that right there you'd think you could drink water to make it feel better but when you have poison in your stomach even water in your mouth is going to feel like poison it's going to feel painful and so him actually not swallowing the water was spot on the thing about trying to identify wild edible plants through books you could have nine books in front of you with photographs and line drawings and descriptions you will just never ever be a 100% certain there is only one way to learn wild plants and that's to have a teacher there showing you when somebody says to you yes pick it oh go ahead and eat it oh you're too shy okay here I'll show you see as soon as you see somebody else put it in their mouth you go okay I guess it's all right when you start to learn what an edible wild plant is you start to pay attention to all of the nuances of plant morphology the leaves are they spiked are they smooth are they basal are they around the stem there's all these different descriptions and that's what he's doing around here lateral veins and then you hold it up and you look are they lateral are they vertical it's tricky to do that to this day I will probably not chase tests a plant until I've been able to find somebody that knows I'm doing mushroom season and I go out with friends I go guys who really know their mushrooms to know that I'm getting the right one in the case of wild edible plants most poisonous plants will just make you sick maybe make you vomit but we're dealing with an individual who's already starving if he'd had a larder full of food then even eating the plant would have made him sick for a day or two that's it and he would have recovered this is gonna come back as a refrain the use of the grizzly bear when you start to get into states of starvation things become very surreal which is why when this bear showed up I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be a dream the concept of a bear like that just walking by as no that's not gonna happen the likely case scenario is the bear is not going to come close it's going to more than anything stay away from him and his bus I think Sean Penn handled the confusion of the lot edible plants and the books and the identifying very well because it is confusing and the bottom line the moral of the story don't do it don't eat it if you don't know 100% bigger scale my opinion of Chris I think he was probably a very wonderful man a lot of people liked him he's been deified almost at this point but he was a terrible survivalist he didn't know anything oh no but he had all those experiences what if you really pay attention and check out his story the truth is he always got out of things by somebody else pulling him out somebody always kind of helped him out of bad situations when he got up to Alaska there was nobody there to save him he was probably a very charming very well-spoken man Alaska doesn't give a crap if you're charming I don't believe Chris had to die I think with a few bits of knowledge he could have gotten by there he could have done things much differently I know in the story he has a moose and it spoils on him there were so many ways he could have had that moose last him the entire time he was there but he didn't he just simply didn't know how to do it this is the edge this is one of those films I purposely didn't watch it based on the poster alone imagine you are a lawyer or your partner is a doctor and they make a TV show out of it you know you sit there going no that's what I do when it comes to survival films if it's really that cold I know he's got a little bit of the hand up to the mouth thing the thing that you want to protect the most is actually your head 80% of your heat is lost through your head I mean I'm bald and so for me a cap in the wintertime is just vital otherwise I really lose heat okay right there do you see any footprints of him walking up to that spot because I don't see any this is what Hollywood just doesn't get it all of that snow around him that should be all mucked up it's like it was placed there by the camera crane or something here we're gonna put you down there and we're gonna film the scene a grizzly bear of that size can sneak up on you that quickly and that's I'll I don't know which bear this is and in Hollywood terms it's probably Bart Bart the bear is a famous bear used in so many films nicely groomed bear by the way what we're about to see is a bear attack and a very silly one that grizzly is going to come after you they run full steam super fast much faster than you can and a lot of times they're back two legs they'll go in unison because they're really pushing at it so what we have here is an acting bear lollygagging along behind him frolicking in the snow here's a tip here the real thing to do in the case of a grizzly bear attack is to play dead the way I look at predators we have what I think are accidental predators and apex predators an apex predator are those creatures on this planet that truly would like to eat us great white shark would truly like to eat us not because we're prey or they want to find us or anything like that but because they're kind of haphazard eaters they'll taste test stuff but the way you react to a predator is going to be different each time with a grizzly you don't stand a chance can't outrun it one thing you can do to a grizzly bear is bore them they may taste test you while they're getting bored which means you might have to put up with a chomped hand or something but you keep all the extremities in and you curl up into a ball and you get boring and you play dead that said would you or I run damn straight we'd run I'd probably run too I can sit here and say I should play dead but I'd be like maybe there's a chance fare like that is not going to run through those trees snapping them over what's going to happen is they're all green and growing and young they're all going to bend and be pushed to the side these things are snapping like dry toothpicks have been standing there for 20 years dead you know what I guess I could throw a little kudos here to one thing if you are going to protect yourself from an animal that big getting in a grove of trees or a jumble of big branches like that that actually is a smart thing to do just a little behind the scenes magic Bart the bear and the other acting bears they never growl when a grizzly bear growls he truly is angry these guys are trained actors they've taught the bear to just hang their mouth open or even open their mouth with all the saliva and the fangs in reality there's zero sound coming out of their mouth they have to dub all that in later oh that's a pet peeve he's a man Killa oh my gosh we've been fed that for a lot of years even back in the days of the movie Born Free it is that tiger a maneater or is it just enacting its own survival the following is the whole time he's stalking us the torches if you can have a safe and massive fire I'm talking like six feet flames do it when they start throwing these torches those torches are treated by the special effects unit so that they will not blow out as they throw them in the air I've drawn lots of burning logs in the air sometimes they stay going most of the times they snuff out while they're flying classic Hollywood the grizzly bear growling off in the distance that will happen with cats not so much bears - guys the fire all of that the Bears just gonna take off running they're not gonna hover around the outside growling but we always see them in Hollywood films growling like yeah I'll get you this is 127 hours that's really true to course when you're that dehydrated even a sprinkle of rain or you're out there running around trying to catch the drops this is a really nice depiction of flash flight I've seen rivers go up 20 feet in a matter of a couple of hours my canoes were about to get washed downstream it you can imagine how fast that is and that's the danger of flash floods they don't have to happen where you are they just have to happen uphill from where you are the thing about this is Aron Ralston who the film was made about is an incredibly experienced adventurer even though this is a dream sequence the depiction of the reality on his face of what's going on water wise is very real people who do a lot of this kind of adventuring can recognize the signs and he knows he's in a crevasse that has thousand crevasses leading to it and every single one of those crevasses is about to become a stream that's the crazy part about a flash flood you have to see it to believe it because it's not like oh well we got time let's walk out of the way let's go up higher mat walls of water coming down the crevasse 15 to 20 feet high and try to get out of the way that any course he's trapped a little nuance that I like they didn't have him calling for help so often the scene in the film is already hopeless it gets worse and then they start calling for help so if you haven't had help for 12 hours all of a sudden you think someone's gonna come now because you're yelling and then that's a cool part this is when rocks and big trees and lots get moved around it's possible that this water could have given that kind of buoyancy and that force and push on the rock to move it so that in his dream he pulled his hand out I have to be careful but I don't have to be careful some of these films are made on real stories so that one clearly is that's aron ralston story the 127 hours the one thing during that movie I wanted to talk with him about was drinking his own pee for dehydration and the reality is no that's that's a no-go like no you do not do that in a survival situation I think in truth what he really felt was it was a sense of comfort it wasn't necessarily hydrating himself even though it's 92 percent water but there's all the toxins and so on but here's the missing link most the time when you're that dehydrated you don't pee this is the office an episode actually called Survivorman producers contacted me and said Michael Scott's gonna go out and try to be you that couldn't have been more honored this is the highlight of my career I've got the DVD at home it's sitting on my shelf you can bet it's funny how right Steve Carell got things now this way I can't retrace my steps I don't know what streets move it oh yeah I did that i blindfolded myself and I had them paddle me into the swamp he's mimicking of me is so embarrassing Lennie spot-on I was like God am i that cheesy am i that bad please allow me to have one cathartic experience in my life there's a lot of weekend warriors that want to have exactly what Michael just said they want to have a cathartic experience playing survivor man I will remain close by done see that happened to me I've had my crew go are you sure les can we just like check in on you I've had to argue with my crew if you go to do something like this a lot of times the people around it they won't let you in the Arctic might one of my very first episodes I had a hunter that watched me from afar through his gun sights in the Amazon jungle I had a native elder he kept showing up I'm in the middle of the jungle and I'm like a little catching some shrimp and I'm filming I'm doing this I'm doing Michael Scott's do and I'm talking to the camera now I look over and he's standing there and he's just wanted to make sure that I'm okay now everything I brought with me can be used the stupid part about this is this going to be hard for me to critique this because he's copying a Survivorman episode and he's kind of getting it right so many episodes of mine I can't watch anymore because I'm doing something really stupid like that in there Cook Islands I cut off the bottom of my shirt to make a bandana it was just super cool and stupid this can be used for all sorts of okay in a real survival situation what you would do is you try to not damage anything that you have unless you can repurpose it for something better then you don't want to be squeamish about damaging something totally alone right now with only my thoughts I love it now I'm loving it when you're alone out there you do some really silly stuff it's cathartic if you're distraught you might break down and bawl your eyes out if you're angry I mean that argument you had three days ago in the airport on the way here ah I can't believe that she said that you get it all out when you're out there you know he made a mistake cutting his pant legs off and then he had to fix a mistake when you're super hot at 2:00 p.m. you think everything's gonna be fine and then at five-thirty you're like huh and now you're wishing you hadn't soaked your shirt in the lake or something or in his case cut his pant legs I tell you what bugs me halfway through a survival episode my crew leave me alone for seven days and I know that on the day three when I'm really hungry they're having a beer and a filet mignon I have made this spear ridiculously embarrassing I made a spear that wasn't much straighter than that and the Cook Islands one time and I knew it wasn't gonna work but I had to do something I had to try well you know what you eat when you're out there very little little grubby things that's why you know a highlight catching a scorpion or crickets or something like that that's what you really get nobody runs and impales a rabbit you don't accidentally come upon a sea bear that you can just eat because it's laying there in Africa with nobody touching it well survival you grovel I have been without food for a good three hours or so now that's hilarious if my kids say to me after two hours after lunch oh god I'm starving so you realize you've got the wrong father to say I'm starving too people think that three hours six hours without food and they're going to perish three days and you're still pretty lucid and okay and without water with food you'll get lethargic but you got ten days of still being able to do things without eating its greens birthday today happy birthday to you there's a lot of moments just like that not singing happy birthday just sitting there huh okay you have to get your mind together you have to think about what you're gonna do next it's actually a good thing the truth about survival in a survival situation and filming it is that real survival is really boring you hardly do anything you think about it I'm out there for seven days you've got a 43 minute episode that you watch that's 43 minutes across seven days a lot of that time nothing that's the truth in reality of a real survival situation it's not wham bam thank you ma'am full of packed action and just kind of sitting there singing happy birthday this is life a pie I read the book but I read the book after I saw the movie you know I don't know what it is the difference between filmmakers when they try to depict certain scenes that actually happen in life some just do a silly job of it others nail it and they make you feel every moment and this is one of those films where you can feel that door opening underwater and the pressure difference everything so far so good when frantic scenes like this happen it's a very difficult thing to get right you can take the camera and Joss look around like you're the character you can slam it into walls and things but too often Hollywood shows the the missteps and the slips is ridiculously dramatic which is fine if you're watching The Avengers but if you're watching something like this you know you want it to be pretty spot-on to how someone would slip on the deck how someone would catch themselves what I love about this scene is how quickly the boat slips away from the main boat when the storm is that crazy you can be out of reach of your safety within a split second I'll bet you in the brain it all happens in slow motion but in real life it happens this fast with waves like that you're going to be tossed about you're nothing more than a cork really I think they depicted him being at the mercy of being tossed from a ship as perfect as I can imagine I tell you your voice can only carry so far I've been on the other side of a river with some basic rap it's not even rushing rapid and young person on the other side can't hear you your voice does not cut through storms and rain and wind and Forrest very well at all whistles do that's why whistles matter and survival they cut through the sound they travel long distance a lot better than you yelling help it's one of the reasons why I taught myself how to whistle if i whistle right now I blow the microphones out now that little moment right there is very true I've been in the ocean with crazy waves trying to get on board small vessels it is often the wave that will get you on board when you know them you can kind of tie meant that you know the boats going up eight feet and down eight feet you have to time getting on board that boat with the waves so the tiger did it right there's a few things going on here number one him jumping ship it's a fictional story so I can't even speak to that one seeing the immensity of the wave above them that's a pretty real thing to see going down below like this the instant quiet that's one things I love about diving it can be crazy but once you go underneath surface it just goes quiet they did throw in sharks swimming by for dramatic effect and that's all that is is dramatic effect yeah nicely and beautifully done I don't know if he's a free diver but you can get down that low you can hover and I've done it watching humpback whales this particular scene they did beautifully in Life of Pi this is open water I've done a lot of shark dives I highly advise learning how to dive and diving with sharks it's one of the most amazing things you'll ever do in your life they're set up here people have been forgotten with different companies that companies I don't know especially local companies in small countries I worry they go out with 25 people 26 people and they don't do a headcount you don't pay attention to anybody else you're looking at your own gear and you're you know with your wife or your husband or your partner I won't comment on the acting but as far as the scene goes this is how sharks operate curious at first so they'll bump you and they might bump you another six times a tiger shark might try to taste-test the tank on your back more testing of what these two things up there are by the sharks before an all-out attack it has happened a shark has come out of nowhere and attacked a diver before that has happened so rare compared to the amount of hours that humans are in the water doing all of this to these activities beautiful sharp it actually does portray how he would probably react to that because you get angry when when you get hurt or at least I do in fact friends of mine know that if I get hurt and I go silent I'm really hurt but if I'm swearing up a storm no he'll be fine you know now right there that big chunk out of his leg would a shark do that on a second bump highly unlikely except for the great white most of the Sharks are accidental predators they may attack because of other reason things are going on you know I mean spear fishermen get attacked a lot because they've got dead fish all over them bad scripting my leg is still there right the shark going after that little beacon there it's been proven that sharks are actually attracted to the color yellow I think about that when you buy any sweat suit and so the shark bumping that I don't necessarily think the director meant that to be biologically correct but it accidentally was let's say she's about to put a tourniquet on what a controversial subject pendulum has always swung the use of a tourniquet in a survival situation for a while it was used a tourniquet and it was never used a tourniquet she was a tourniquet and he's never used a tourniquet we're back to pretty much using a tourniquet if you've been given the proper instructions so the idea with using a tourniquet is you learn how to do it properly just as you would get your CPR or your first-aid training so putting a tourniquet on him this is a smart thing to do now I would have gone top of my thigh that's higher just in the crux there nonetheless it's still the right thing to do one of the most painful things you can ever feel in your life is a tourniquet it hurts more than the sharkbite the first time I ever panicked under the water my dive instructor took my head and held it like that and then she went like this and she just calmed me down and that's what's going on in this scene she's kind of doing the right thing in a survival situation with that much panic would there be more sharks you bet there would be they can smell I can't remember the statistic it's one of those crazy statistics like a drop of blood in a million gallons of water or something like that there are going to be different things you can do sharks are like cats they do not want to attack you from the front so I mean in India I wore a mask on the back of my head so that a tiger wouldn't pounce on me from behind in the water when I see sharks you want to make eye contact with a shark Chuck's don't want to attack your face if I were her I would have gone and just kept looking just make sure the shark knows you know it's there the answer to where you should go to save yourself lies entirely in what preparation did you do before this what do you know do you know that you are two miles west from a whole archipelago do you know that you're a quarter mile east of a very large island do you know that do you know the currents get all the information about what you're the hike you're about to do in Peru the dive you're about to go on all of that information should be in your head not just the guides head because what happens when you lose the guide you want to know where did you leave from the boat how far out are you can you make an attempt to swim to safety because I certainly would want to and if the guide doesn't want to give you information you need to stop that trip right there this is alive if we do this we'll never be the same again it's like communion from their death we live people will understand I know this story very very well and I can assure you that the decision to engage in cannibalism is not one you come by easily if I have you for three days or four days with no food and I show you that we can eat scorpions and creepy crawlies and I eat one in five you you're not gonna hesitate give me some of those and you're gonna eat cannibalism total different thing it should be good classic show of leadership here that blank stare from everybody these people thought they were going to be damned to hell some of these people struggled well after their ordeal I believe the Pope even absolved them and assured them that they were still going to heaven I mean wow the psychological kickback from all this has been intense so I hate to be technical about it but gluttonous Maximus you're going to engage in cannibalism that's where all the meat is right I don't mean any disrespect the reality is that the glutes are the most exposed easiest thing to get anything else requires precision like surgery are going in and maybe getting organs and things like that I mean and think about how horrifying to say you know what we should eat the liver first what you do in a situation of cannibalism is you try to dehumanize the body laying in front of you an animal that you catch can be at one moment a cute and cuddly rabbit and then when it's dead it's a piece of meat you need to skin and roast that's what they psychologically have to do they have to take a look at the biggest muscle on the body the place that is the farthest away from the humanism the face this is extreme survival there's no question about it I get asked where's the toughest place to survive what I'll say is wherever it's cold if it's cold it's hard you can't stop if I'm in a really rugged area and there's Jaguar around and poisonous things but it's 75 degrees I'm okay I got forgiveness time I can sleep by a tree maybe when it's cold you can succumb so quickly to hypothermia when you don't have food in your system what's there to keep your body engine warm when it comes to cannibalism and any survival situation you and I can not judge a group of people on the verge of potentially never being rescued and potentially dying or having to make a decision like this so you can't judge and there Jeremiah Johnson my favorite movie of all time the consultant on this film was none other than Larry Dean Olsen one of the godfathers of survival what follows are proper depictions of survival first little slice of realism is that this is the time of year when the fish run in creeks like that I've been in creeks with all the snow around and suckers are just running like crazy bouncing off your legs now you might be asking why would he get himself all wet like that well he's a desperate mountain man looking for sustenance he's going after fish well actually no this was an accidental fight he was trying to trap but he sucks at it this is the very beginning of film and it's the thing we think we can just go up there and just be Jeremiah Johnson you have to train you have to learn these skills if you're going to try and catch fish in a creek even when there's hundreds of them it can be tricky I thought maybe they're just busy about their business until I started doing it several times although they know you're there they swim away from you quickly why because you represent to them likely a grizzly bear anything big that's coming down along the water they don't want to be around it so they try to take off so it's very difficult now what we're seeing here is gonna set up the entire movie which is his friendship with and then war with tribes that were in the area that's a good look of disgust right there now later on in the film actually when he bumps into that native leader again through translation he says you fish poorly and he did we're not looking at a seasoned mountain man yet he's alone abhi this scene here I love this fire scene because again I know that Larry Dean Olsen was consulting showing him this is how it actually works with rock and steel and charred cloth you take a hundred percent cotton and you char it and then if you put a spark on it it catches the spark holds the Ember you put that in tinder you blow it to flame that was their pack of matches that's not like rubbing two sticks together which is even more primitive doing if the fire Boaz goes back in time doing it with your hands goes even farther back in time and different geographical locations the thing about getting a fire going is this you've got to humble yourself and really take your time I still don't understand today getting regular camping how people can't get a fire going with matches and dry wood it just baffles me in the end it's a skill set and one worth practicing and he's about to blow it well that's he done wrong he's got no protection around him he's out of the wind who doesn't have a big supply of wood beside him you have to treat your fire like it's your baby you can do that you will get a great warm fire going the thing that Jeremiah Johnson portrays beautifully is that the romanticism and the power of being out in the mountains are on horseback we're in the wilderness alone it's still very very powerful is it it's a soul experience I guarantee you every man that has seen this movie is playing Jeremiah Johnson in his head when he only watches I could do doc yeah the thing about Jeremiah Johnson and his ability to live and survive in the wilderness is he's just not instantly good at it it takes a long time it comes down in the end he's on the mountainside and he's comfortable and he's roasting a rabbit the character he meets in the beginnings looks at him and just says you've come far pilgrim my favorite line of all time he just without even barely look at him he just says feels like far that encapsulates the journey of wilderness survival it takes a long time and when you get to the end of it it doesn't feel like it went by fast it does feel I can spin out a long journey you know sometimes like boy that went right by not survival not wilderness you get to the end of it you feel weathered you feel tough and you feel like you've been on a long journey that was my breakdown thanks for watching

Channel: GQ

Views: 8,318,275

Rating: 4.9384251 out of 5

Keywords: the breakdown, survivalist, les stroud, survival, survival movie, survival movies, survival scenes, survival movie scenes, survivalist movie, survivalist movies, survivalist scenes, les stoud survivalist, survivalist survival, breakdown, 127 hours breakdown, into the wild breakdown, the office breakdown, survivorman, survivorman les stroud, movie breakdown, scene breakdown, survivalists, best survival movies, 127 hours survival, gq, gq magazine

Id: tCqwT2MqLxI

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nalninek]

Oh man, great to see Les again! Survivorman was my jam back in the late 2000’s!

[u/cxazo]

Haha his review of The Office episode is hilarious. Love Les.

[u/MadFamousLove]

i have had a bear walk by me before, but not from that sort of direction, he didn't see me till he was passed me and then just my movement spooked him, so you could have a bear walk by but it would have to not have noticed you for whatever reason. (i was leaning against a rocky outcropping. )

[u/Nutsonclark]

🐐

[u/Hanginon]

Excellent breakdown Les.

IMHO, the element often missing in outdoor skills/survival videos, classes, instrution in general is a demonstration or description of the wrong thing to do or the wrong way to do things with a good description and explanation of what's wrong in those techniques or decisions and what's wrong with the action/technique. Knowing what and why something is the wrong thing or way is at least important as knowing how and why something is the right thing or way to do something.

End of rant... ;)

[u/tabboulehmafia]

Les is the shit. A true outdoorsman. He’s so knowledgeable and up for a challenge. I don’t think any other tv “survivalist” can compare!

[u/AspektCAS]

I love Les Stroud. His stuff seemed real compared to Bear Grills. At one point he had a website that was essentially all of his work in one spot. It was a paid subscription deal. Everything from survival stuff to big foot to music. I don't think it was getting enough traction so he shut it down.

[u/WWDubz]

Didn’t Les get way deep into big foot?

[u/[deleted]]

I never understood why Bear Grills won out against Les, as far as the tv ratings game goes.