Survivorman Les Stroud Breaks Down More Jungle Survival Scenes from Movies | GQ

was that acting was that overdoing it in Hollywood style with him talking to the branch not at all I'm embarrassed as to how many times I've talked to a tree or a branch or a rock and don't you effing break yeah that's exactly what I'd be saying hey GQ I'm les trout and welcome back to part two we're gonna be looking at more jungle survival scenes this is the breakdown [Music] all right let's check out another scene from the movie jungle [Applause] so what we have here is hallucination I'd be hallucinating too and the reality is that when it comes to hallucination it doesn't take long it starts with your dreams you want to have great dreams don't eat today the dreams are intense this is how indigenous cultures would have vision quests they would not eat or drink and then the dreams would be insane well when you go this long like y'all see has those dreams become strong while you're awake if you start being unable to differentiate between I'm asleep and dreaming and I'm awake and this is reality how probable is it for Yossi to just walk through the jungle and stumble into some quick Stan it is very probable again he's hallucinating he's exhausted starving thirsty the vision goes fuzzy and you can walk into just about anything with everything else that happened to him I'm amazed he didn't just bump into a big old hornet's nest in the jungle and they are nasty good little move there you get into a situation like quicksand get the backpack off anything that's going to hold you down take it off try to get it away if you're wearing a hat just throw it you know get get stuff off because everything that is attached to you is going to be a hindrance and is going to work against you in trying to get out of the mud [Music] a little bit of acting going on here as far as the reach out to get his passport it's a little bit of acting I mean he could have just sloshed and gotten it good thing he didn't though here's the problem with quicksand every movement you make serves to make you sink down so just making big moves with your legs which you want to do because you're panicking will actually take your neck your head and start to sink you lower into the mud very dangerous and again when it comes to hallucinating remember just moments ago he was hallucinating and now he's in the mud and even though that reality is going to wake him out of it he's so exhausted that he's going to drift back into it I think old Tarzan movies gave the impression that quicksand is like sentient and was working to pull you down no it's just physiologically speaking it works to pull you down the movements you make make force your body to go down deeper but it's not like quicksand is sitting there like some kind of carnivorous plant waiting for a human to happen into it so it can grab it and pull you down that's not what's going on here they don't even tell you how long he was out for and he's probably passed out and slipped in and out of his SaLuSa Nations it's actually a good thing the thing that I push probably most for in a survival situation over many other things is sleep is getting rest without rest without I mean this is how you can be tortured this is how you can be trained in the military go without sleep mostly going without sleep is a mental state of torture that I I don't like it when I have to have been in those situations in the jungle or the desert or somewhere else in a survival situation no sleep it's really torturous but any sleep that you can get will give you that moment of energy to get out of the situation that's what's happening here okay so that's the proverbial all a branch that the jungle is kind of putting out for him to grab on to it's tricky reaching for branches and leaves they break they split they pull out and so getting as you'd say you know it's like getting solid footing but getting a solid grab his stuff and in a situation like this it's almost the only thing that's going to get him out being active and busy will force his body down the idea is to try to get as flat as possible all the time laying there is you're not going to just float to the surface but you're going to stabilize and really at that point it's about your mind and manipulating your muscles your legs your arms your fingers so you can actually picture the way your body is and think about the manoeuvre out you can't at this point he's relaxed enough to notice if he reaches out a little bit he can grab this leaf that's the right way to do it you can't just grab and pull you have to get enough of a hold on that branch that that leaf is not going to rip and so twisting and twisting pulling and twisting as he pulls all of that is giving him stronger and stronger grab as he goes until he can get to the stronger part of the branch branch like that absolutely can be strong enough to use to pull yourself out of a mud hole like that in fact there are very very thin strands in the jungle then thinner than my baby finger that are super strong so not knowing the species of the tree and all of that notwithstanding the reality is that the thickness of the branch is not necessarily going to indicate how strong it is and some of the thinnest vines in the jungle are powerfully strong was that acting was that overdoing it in Hollywood style with him talking to the branch not at all I'm embarrassed as to how many times I've talked to a tree or a branch or a rock and in a desperate situation like this don't you effing break yeah that's exactly what I'd be saying [Music] his body's up a little bit high there because he's in something they've made in this you know they created he's not in a real mud hole they've made this for the sake of the movie so he he's getting his elbow on a perch there it would have been better if he was still sinking low and pulling himself out truth of the matter is in for the sake of the story he's completely exhausted so pulling out inch by inch is a reality they've done a good job of realism of how it looks but this last moment right here you know he's basically already safe and there's a little bit of play here like there's a monster holding his foot that said there is a ton of suction it's like in regular water if you're wearing bigger rubber boots it's hard to get out of the water because the rubber boots fill with water and then that suction kind of holds you in the mud there is a suction there I think they're just over playing it just a little bit so much for the pack best way out of a situation is to back away right you get you go into a yard with a bunch of mean guard dogs the best thing to do is back away slowly because what's behind you you already know about you already know that what is behind you is safe in the situation of a mud pit back away you just walked on solid ground that's where the solid ground is if you go forward you don't know if it's 30 yards away before you see solid ground again but in the Hollywood sense you know they got to play the scene out a little longer a little more dramatic so it looks like he went for me I would have gone backwards here's the thing about Josi Ginsburg and his story in the jungle when I commented on his experience from the perspective of a survival instructor so I was a little cold-hearted about it he gave me the best strongest most powerful story of somebody who survived by pure we'll everything went wrong for him he had no luck and luck is a component of survival it's just there for you sometimes he went through horrifying mental anguish but he kept going forward his will to live was one of the strongest wills that I've ever learned of in any survival situation next up rescued on concept of somebody not eating quote-unquote food in this situation when you're really really hungry that's a hard one for me to accept because generally speaking I find people go just a few days without food and anything if someone says here eat this you just do no matter how squeamish you are I've never seen a survival student maybe people I've taken out in classes and that not eat what is available no matter how much of a creepy-crawly it is it could be alive it could be dead it could have fangs and could have claws that could look real real bad I think that eating creepy crawlies in a survival situation has been played up so so badly in all of the survival shows that are on television it's just become this big melodramatic moment when somebody's got to eat something gross when the truth of a survival situation is that you could eat the wrong but if the impression is out there that well a bug is just a bug it's gross but it's good for survival not so there are plenty of bugs that you can eat that are poisonous and you should not eat well let's take a look at a scorpion scorpions are actually quite tasty but you don't want to eat a scorpion with the stingers attached so there are there are some nuances to eating creepy-crawlies survival has been sensationalized on television that there are bugs that people eat alive and it's you know so gross and and all of that and the reality is most of them are much better dead I've eaten lots of scorpions and I've eaten one live scorpion and that was really more than anything kind of just showmanship is just me say oh you can you can eat it alive but if you can get a fire going almost everything is better roasted it comes down to survival as a group that's something to remember there's a big big difference between solo survival dual survival or group survival and the I will say this much the the disadvantage of being solo survival is you have no help for anything obviously but the advantage is that if you were to find something and you're alone surviving it's all for you to eat but in a group situation you have to share like Lord of the Flies main groups and and their dynamics it just all falls apart as time goes on and the thing about leadership that's really intriguing is it can change and that leaders been established through their group activities long before the survival situation we all know that's the leader however when the survival situation hits oftentimes that leader is not the right person for the job in the new situation and someone else rises to the occasion this is a prisoner-of-war situation nothing I'm familiar with but the laws of survival still apply when it's a group and jaw jockeying for position of leadership is going to happen before long absolutely and that's of course what's happening here they're starting to jockey for leadership warden himself you know one way to have done this would have been to say we all need to eat this we all need to stay alive we need to get our nutrition so divide it the process of doing that of of measuring out the mealy bugs and worms it actually takes it away from being gross and disgusting and turns it into food you ration until you get more and then sometimes you can go great time to pig out and eat a whole bunch of stuff because there's lots but if you ration and you never get any more then you're doing the right thing this is also where it gets real tricky in a survival situation with a group because if someone hoards food and they didn't or they okay hot food and didn't share okay next up Romancing the Stone okay it's makes it tough okay well that's dramatic let's just throw our survival pack over the cliff because that's just a lot better to do that then actually keep it on you yeah no you never part yourself from your gear in a survival situation you should have your own path in a survival situation and you should hold on to it so yeah sorry two seconds into it and the characters already blown it by throwing the pack over the cliff okay I guess it was motivation why she was able to fall that fast well that's called moviemaking nobody falls that quickly without knowing it's coming well first of all could a mudslide go for that fart absolutely there are hillsides in the jungle that go forever and once the rain starts pouring down like that those little mudslides do tend to erupt just about everywhere now not to the point where you just let that fall all of a sudden like these guys did but if you were to slip on one and start going downhill this next part other than some bad camera technique is actually kind of sort of realistic big long mudslides in the middle of the jungle and they're that slippery so was it realistic that they went down like that yeah kind of was now that's actually kind of realistic right there jungle crazies adrenaline junkies you know you get through something that's like was horrifying and they're like Yahoo why they call them Yahoo's it yeah I know guys like that that's probably the only time that I get like that cuz I'm not an adrenaline junkie but at the end of something that could have killed you and you're standing there alive if there's any time to shriek for joy that's it [Music] I said are you hurt that's comment on the rain first of all does it rain like that that hard for that long all the time oh absolutely I've been in the jungle before where I've washed it rain that hard and harder for eight hours without stopping and it can go longer but I'll tell you how they get a downpour like that well behind the scenes moviemaking it is almost impossible to film actual rain you have to have these big huge sprinklers and has to be really pouring hard even if you want to make it look like a light rain it's got to be pouring hard and think about it when was the last time you saw a scene in the movie where it was raining lightly yeah they're almost aren't any because you can't show it how do you show just a gentle rain you can't so every rain scene in every movie I defy you to find me a scene where it's not pouring it's always pouring because that is the only way they can make it work so that the camera can actually film it so that we can actually see it here's another reality in this scene though or lack of reality and that is that everything that he has in his backpack the gun everything is in perfect shape nothing fell out nothing ripped off they went an awfully long way and he managed to throw her pack perfectly down to where it was supposed to go yeah it's Hollywood okay next up Apocalypse Now [Music] that's a nice little scene there in terms of the ecosystem reality you might be surprised to learn that there's actually a lot of sand beaches in the interior of jungles this when you get rivers you you do get sand beaches it's just there in places you wouldn't expect to see them gathering mangoes well when you're on a jungle river those overhanging branches you have to be really careful because that is where you will find it vipers and different snakes spiders poisonous ants you name it that's where they are they're hanging in those clusters of branches you're going to be in the Vietnamese jungle and asking the question if there are poisonous snakes then you clearly miss the memo you aren't paying attention to the briefing it's so hard to find real fruit in a jungle situation most of the time you're looking at big fat green leaves I have been in places where I've been able to gorge on mangos and the only way I could do that was they were the ones that were fallen on the ground because I can't get up to the tree to get them I've heard people say oh you'll be fine you can live off mango or you can live off blueberries yeah if I'm there in the season when they're ripe and I can actually get to them that's the cat's when it comes to finding fruit in any survival situation actually I don't mind this kind of banter I've never been in military service so I can't speak to that but I've been in lots of situations like this walking through a jungle either on my own but also with other people too and your conversation meanders always you just talk about nothing most of the time you start to get to know people because what else is there to do and if you're not looking at something specifically like a big old spider or a snake you're just talking about nothing and walking those fans at the bottom of that tree are so beautiful to see up close indigenous cultures would actually use them for communication you could go up to it and kick it boom boom and wait a bit and you hear someone miles away so they would actually do that for communication I get it in the Amazon jungle for example banging on one of those and then listening to someone reply from miles away it's it's that's pretty cool look at the color on that scene I mean this is all filmmaking and it's beautifully shot but when you're in the middle of a jungle you get to see colors like nowhere else shades of things and there's a rich matte finish most of the time there's Sun in the jungle you can be in places where the Sun comes through but a lot of the times it's a matte finish look to everything big mistake in the jungle you don't just sit on a log if I were to walk outside right now I could go and sit down pretty much anywhere in the jungle you don't do that you come up to somewhere and you look around it you look under it you look on the other side of the tree you brush it a bit and then you like okay what okay good because the chance of there being a snake right underneath his ass or ants that hurt a lot going right by his boot it's pretty high so little sloppy there Martin when you've got a predator lurking about watching for signs is really important when I was in India I was paying attention always to certain monkeys because they would go crazy whenever there was a tiger they'd start going crazy that was my warning sign and you can do that with a lot of different species so if you watch what else is going on you will then begin to notice that something has changed which means something else has entered the picture there's one thing that makes me nervous in different ecosystems it's big cats when I was in India it had to spend the night in a tree because of a big tiger I could hear it growling yeah cats give me the willies sometimes the thing that's wrong with this scene is that the Tigers attacking from the front cats like to attack from the back sharks are the same way in India I wore a mask on the back of my head to ward off a tiger attack because it sees your eyes so in this scene it's a face on facing counter can that happen yes it can happen but 99% of the time a big cat wants to attack you from behind I think the final thought on on the Apocalypse Now film is that they they went for an incredibly intense dramatic presentation overall but but when it comes to the jungle but it was it's warranted it's very dark and and there it has an ambience to it that is not like walking in the forest in Northern California so much more is there to be dealing with than just you know whatever the storyline happens to be in this case it's it's a wartime story thanks for watching the breakdown with me take care

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Keywords: the breakdown, 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, survivorman, survivorman les stroud, movie breakdown, scene breakdown, survivalists, best survival movies, jungle survival, surviving in the jungle, les stroud breaks down, jungle, apocalypse now, rescue dawn, gq, gq magazine

Id: 1xga8en4Z3k

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020