'Train Dreams' Director Clint Bentley Wanted To Show a Side of Joel Edgerton We Never See

Train Dreams, which is based on Denis Johnson's 2011 novella of the same name, was perfected for the screen by director Clint Bentley, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Greg Kwedar, whom he shares an Adapted Screenplay nomination with for the Netflix drama, as well as the same nomination for 2023's Sing Sing, a film that's a masterpiece in its own way. What's especially stunning about Train Dreams is its ability to be both incredibly subtle and endlessly ambitious simultaneously. The film, which boasts four Oscar nominations, spans roughly 80 years of the life of a logger in the most intimate, trance-inducing cinematic feat of recent years, serving as a meditation on life then and now, the ways tragedy strikes when we least expect it, and how uncertainty about the ever-evolving world has us white-knuckling what keeps us safe and grounded.

Bentley, too, holds who and what he cares about deeply close to him. In addition to Kwedar, editor Parker Laramie, cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, and composer Bryce Dessner are among the writer-director's frequent collaborators who infused Train Dreams with their immense talent and keen eyes and ears for detail. On the surface, a movie about a quiet, reserved logger working on a railroad to provide for his wise-beyond-her-years wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their baby might not seem as attention-grabbing as some of the flashier titles being recognized at this year's Oscars, yet it might just be the most sincere and wholehearted.

COLLIDER: How's your day going?

CLINT BENTLEY: It's going great. It's a lovely day out in sunny Los Angeles.

I'm thrilled to talk to you for many reasons. I'm trying to make it as a screenwriter, so to talk to you, especially, being so amazed by the movie and the screenplay, is really, really cool.

BENTLEY: Thank you. Thank you. Let's talk shop.

Train Dreams is so breathtaking.

BENTLEY: Thank you.

Conceptually, visually, just everything about it. It's probably one of the most ambitious films I've ever seen as well, in a lot of ways. This is your second Oscar nomination, so I'm sure you're jaded by now, right?

BENTLEY: That's all, yeah, I'm so cynical now at this point. [Laughs] No, the only thing I am is still in shock and still trying to figure out if it actually is real or not, you know?

It's also your second nomination that you share with Greg Kwedar. When did you two meet? What made you be like, "I want to stick with this guy and work with him on everything"?

BENTLEY: We've been working together for like 15 years now. We met in Austin, Texas. It just started with a film. We were both trying to become filmmakers and making our short films and making trade videos for local companies and whatever we could do to make money. Directing regional commercials and whatever. We were just supporting each other, and we were kind of in a group there in Austin, with a lot of other filmmaking friends. You're producing for one person and then holding a boom for another person and 1st ADing for another person. Everybody's helping everybody out.

Greg and I started writing a script together for an idea that Greg wanted to make as a feature that became Transpecos. We just became very good friends and eventually family. We never signed a contract or anything, but we've just gone from one film to the next supporting each other, and it's going well so far, so we'll keep doing it.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

BENTLEY: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly.

Clint Bentley Wanted Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones' Characters To Stay True to Denis Johnson's 'Train Dreams'

It's exciting, but also nerve-wracking to adapt something that's so beloved. What were your biggest changes to Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton's characters?

BENTLEY: The biggest changes, I don't know. I didn't change those characters. Gladys, her character is very… she doesn't occupy much of the novella. She's not in it a lot, and so, in filling her out, I was really trying to be conscious of — with both these characters in filling them out, and Arn Peoples as well, who Bill Macy plays, is an iconic character in that book — trying to expand them without losing touch of who they are in the book and the essence of them.

It's really just a process of… with Gladys, there's something kind of like, I don't know, like an ancient wisdom that she has in the book and I just wanted to put more of that in there and expand that a bit more while keeping her as a human being. Then with Grainier, with Robert, the only thing that I think was added that maybe you wouldn't find in the book is… I met Joel when we were first talking about doing the movie together, and we sat down and chatted, and he just had this boyishness and the sense of humor to him that I was so taken by and felt like I hadn't seen him do in a lot of films. I was just like, "we have to put this side of you in here. I need to see more of this."

Something that you do so well with this movie is make mundane activities, 20th century activities — like sawing a tree — so captivating. You don't want to change the story, obviously, and that's part of the charm of it. But were you ever worried that it was too slow for people, as our attention spans keep shrinking every five seconds?

BENTLEY: No, to be honest, my worry was it wasn't slow enough. I felt like it should be slower, and I was a little worried at points that we were cutting things too tight at times, and I remember sitting down — I'm really grateful for my collaboration with one of our producers, Teddy Schwarzman — and we were talking a lot through the edit, and I was kind of saying this at one point where I was like, "I don't know, I don't want to cut it too fast. I don't want to make it too quick," and he's like, "that is not possible with what you're doing here. Just don't worry." [Laughs] It's a funny thing, you find a rhythm that is sometimes perceived differently by the audience than what it actually is. There's one shot in particular, and a sequence that we did — well, there's two things — one was a long shot, and I cut it shorter, and it had more impact by cutting it shorter when I was testing it and showing it to people, and they felt like it had gotten longer, in a good way. They're like, "I can really sit in that shot now," even though it was shorter. And then another thing is the opening. The opening that was there was an opening that was much quicker and much more frenetic. It was fine, but it wasn't great, and when we found this opening, and I leaned into it, it became a much kind of slower, quieter opening. But then people when they were watching it were like, "oh, the opening just moves so much better now than it did before," and so it was really interesting that you never know… as a director, what I learned on this film was that my intended results do not always come in a way that I think it's going to come. Sometimes you have to go around your elbow to get your thumb.

It's interesting what you said about the beginning. Jumping to the ending, did you always have that montage in mind?

BENTLEY: It was always in mind for the film, but not as the ending. There was a different ending, and we actually — as a screenwriter, you might appreciate this — Netflix printed the script and put it out there, and Greg and I intentionally left the script as it was in production, so that's what's out there. You can see how it evolved from what we shot to then what I kind of shaped in the edit with Parker Laramie, our editor. But yeah, that was a sequence that was leading up to the ending, which was going to end in the theater with the wolf boy performance. The ending was going to match the ending of the book. We were watching it down and saw a very early version of that montage in the plane. It was just so clear, like, oh, that's where the movie wants to end. That's the end of the movie. The rest of this is just kind of like trailing off.

Netflix's 'Train Dreams' Is As Authentically Crafted As It Looks

The cinematography is so beautiful in this movie. Even when you're in near darkness in the cabin, you just feel like you're with them and you want to give them a hug. It's very cozy and beautiful. Was there a challenge with those cabin scenes? Or was it almost better because you were in such a confined setting to direct those?

BENTLEY: No, it was tough because we kind of committed to this thing where we only wanted it to be lit naturally. Everything inside the cabin is lit by candles and by lanterns, and then everything where they're sitting around a fire is lit by a campfire. It definitely was one of those things — especially in the cabin — where we got into it, and I was like, "Oh, shit." It definitely hymns you in in some ways. But it provided such a special feeling to those scenes that you're talking about. I think it just helped the actors slip into it more than if we had had a bunch of lights on stands all around them that are supposed to be mimicking candlelight, so it gave us much more than whatever frustrations it caused me.

How long did you film? How long was the shoot?

BENTLEY: 29 days.

Did you feel rushed at all? Or do you feel like that was enough time?

BENTLEY: Yes and no. We needed more time — I think any independent filmmaker would probably say that — and we did a lot in those 29 days. I think we have over 170 individual slugs from the script that we were trying to get through, and some of them are just, like, a shot of a two-headed calf, but you have to set that up as much as a dialogue scene.

Exactly.

BENTLEY: Where you find a calf, and where do you find a barn, and all that stuff. So, yeah, I wanted a bit more time, but also, we structured the set in such a way and Adolpho and I shot it in such a way and had the support of the whole crew to be able to do this. Because we're shooting with natural light, we were able to be very kind of open and free. Oddly, there were a few scenes that I felt like we had to rush through, but for the most part, I felt like we really got to sink into the scenes and get what we needed to get.

I think you did.

BENTLEY: Aww [Laughs] Thanks.

So much of this film is silent, and it's so deafening emotionally. I'd love to talk about your collaboration with Bryce. How much direction do you give someone like that?

BENTLEY: He's such an amazing artist and we also know each other. We worked on Jockey together. We're friends now. He knows what I like and don't like, and I know what he can do and I trust him a lot. I know it's going to be an iterative process. It just starts by talking about ideas and themes and with him in particular, he read the script early on, he read the book, I talked about what I was kind of thinking about it. The big thing we talked about in terms of ideas early on was just how it could contain these paradoxes in the music where it can be very small — and it needs to be very small and intimate at times — but then it can be very big and Baroque at other times. He can do both of those so incredibly well. So we just started there, and he started composing early on just based on footage that he was getting, and seeing the dailies and me cutting little things together and sending them to him. Then we got into it. There are some cues that we really had to iterate and iterate and iterate to get right. But then there are others that he sent over and it's perfect immediately. The main theme of the song — which repeats itself like four times throughout the film, it's kind of Grainier's theme — was something he wrote before, while we were still in the edit. He just wrote it based on his feelings from our conversations and the script and the footage. He's really a joy to work with. When you have somebody good like that, you just try to guide them and stay out of their way.

Kind of look over their shoulder like, "Oh, what are you doing?"

BENTLEY: Yeah, I know. [Laughs]

There are a lot of scenes where we are just being very present with Joel. Is it harder to direct somebody when there's no dialogue? Or is it just a different beast?

BENTLEY: It's a different beast. It's not more difficult, I think, especially with somebody like him, who's so good. He's got so much feeling and is such an intuitive actor, but then is also incredibly so technically amazing, for lack of a better word. His technical prowess is phenomenal. He's so skilled that I could give him subtle micro adjustments or things like that and he could just get it very quickly. He was communicating so much without using any words. Or if it needed to be a completely different direction, I could tell him and he could take it in a completely different direction. Go very big or go very small. So, I don't know. It's less to pay attention to, because you don't have to pay attention to the words and be like, "Did you get every line in that?"

With 'Train Dreams,' Clint Bentley Embraced the Unpredictable

One of the biggest characters in this is nature. Did nature misbehave in ways that you didn't anticipate while filming?

BENTLEY: Yeah, yeah, nature doesn't… you can't really talk to their agent about what mood it's going to be in that day. But, yes and no. Yes, it's always unpredictable, and you never know what's going to happen one way or the other. You never know what a sunset is going to look like, you never know how cloudy it's going to be. We have weather reports and everything, but the weather is very fickle, especially in eastern Washington. But, that said, Adolpho and I went into it embracing that unpredictability, and so if you're expecting unpredictability, then when unpredictability happens, it's not unpredictable, right? Without making too much of a word salad of that. But we really just went into it embracing whatever it was going to give us, and trying to respond to what was happening in that moment. If it was raining and it wasn't supposed to rain, we were like, "Okay, well, how does this change the scene?" Or if all of a sudden it's overcast, "Okay, how do we approach this now?"

I'm sure you've been asked this a bunch of times, but can you walk me through attaching that camera to that tree or however you captured that scene of the tree falling, because it was just awesome, and I want to nerd out about it.

BENTLEY: Yeah, it was one of those things of taking something that we learned on Jockey, Adolpho and I working together, is taking any limitations you might have and trying to look at them as gifts rather than limitations, and how can you use that limitation to make your film actually feel bigger than smaller and do something interesting. That's always fun to solve. That one in particular, two things. One, we didn't want to cut down a bunch of trees and do the very thing that we were criticizing in the film. Also, we didn't have money to make a big logging scene, even if we had wanted to, because we're an independent film. So with that one, that was a shot that was written into the script, so how can you have one shot that represents much more, right? Also, we wanted the audience to feel things from the point of view of nature at times, and that one is literally the point of view of a tree falling over, and hopefully you're feeling the emotional weight of that. We went into an area where they were logging and had a logging outfit, and just asked them if we could attach a camera to one of the trees that they were going to cut down, and they're like, "Yeah, sure." [Laughs] So it's as simple as that, you just get a camera…

Find a logger.

BENTLEY: And a decent insurance policy, find a logging operation, ask them if you can just bolt the camera to the tree. And the camera survived, luckily.

I know what I'm doing this weekend. I'm going to find a logger. [Laughs]

BENTLEY: [Laughs] Yeah, get out there in the world.

It's very complicated how people used to have to live without technology. But it's also, I found myself wanting to be there because it's simpler, and there's no technology. It just seemed like people existed. Did you feel like it was a more complicated time than people think? How did you approach the time period? What drew you to it?

BENTLEY: I think more like… one, trying to be true to it and the rhythms of it, which at that time, were almost certainly more connected to nature and influenced by nature than we are now, and influenced by the seasons and even the structure of the day. But really, I don't think that we've changed all that much as people in some good ways, and in some terrible ways, since time immemorial. I really just wanted to highlight and show the things that we've always been dealing with. I think what Grainier is going through, an Amazon delivery driver is going through today. And I'm certainly going through it in ways where it's like, how do you make a living? How do you balance work with family and all these things? And certainly, we're going through some really awful things societally, in our treatment of the immigrant populations here that we've kind of always gone through, sadly, and so, more than making it feel distant, I really wanted it to feel as accessible as possible versus feeling like an alien time that we don't have much connection to.

Train Dream is available on Netflix.