Clint Bentley's 'Train Dreams' stands as a remarkable meditation on ordinary life, distinguished by its contemplative silences and sweeping Northwest landscapes. The Netflix awards contender, based on Denis Johnson's 2011 novella, follows Robert Grainier, a logger in the early 20th century, from his young adult years through to his final days. For star Joel Edgerton and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, the film's quiet nature represents the true essence of Johnson's literary work, capturing the dignity, terror, humor, and memory that define a man's journey through life.
Edgerton describes the film as showcasing "the majesty of a regular life," offering audiences a different kind of cinema experience from the typical world-saving hero narratives. "We're used to going to the cinema to watch the lives of characters that save the world," Edgerton explains. "This is a different kind of cinema experience. The majesty of ordinariness, I think, and the dignity in living, in life itself." The adaptation had long resonated with Edgerton, who originally attempted to acquire the rights to Johnson's book to adapt and direct himself.
By the time Bentley approached him to star in the project, the material struck Edgerton with renewed force due to personal circumstances. "What changed for me was the fact that I'd sort of in my life become like the central character," he reveals. "I built a family with my wife, I had children that were very young, like the character in the movie. Now my biggest fear is the stuff that happens to Robert in the film." Edgerton notes that had he made the film five or seven years earlier, he would have needed to imagine those anxieties, but now they were experiences he could draw from directly.
Set against classic Western iconography including loggers, railway bosses, migrant laborers, and endless forests, 'Train Dreams' deliberately avoids the genre's familiar tropes. "It's not a Clint Eastwood-style Western," Edgerton clarifies. "It's a Western about life itself and what it means to be here on this planet – the journey of a person's life through love and family and tragedy and the regrowth, or the rebuilding and rejoining of the world after you've been knocked to your knees."
For Veloso, the primary challenge involved adapting Johnson's spare, poetic prose into visual images that felt both intimate and literary without becoming artificial. From the beginning, he and Bentley anchored the film in the concept of memory. "We wanted to make the movie look like you're going through someone's memories," Veloso explains. "Like you found that box full of pictures, and then you try to put those pictures together, and they're out of order – but it's like pictures of someone's life."
This memory-focused approach inspired their choice of a 3:2 aspect ratio. "It's an aspect ratio you find in older pictures, or even your pictures on your phone nowadays," says Veloso. "Whenever you're going through your old albums, this is the aspect ratio you find, so it just felt right [to represent memories]. It also helped a lot with the trees and nature, because it's a taller aspect ratio." The entire production was filmed on location in and around Spokane, Washington, the very landscape Johnson wrote about in his novella.
"Everything was on location," Veloso notes. "The cabin was built from scratch, the fire tower, everything. Having the sets built on location allowed us to move around a lot and also to give them space to do whatever they wanted." Veloso developed specific visual rules for different periods of Robert's life. Childhood memories remain static, resembling still photographs, with completely stationary camera work. Adulthood becomes more fluid through long handheld shots and moments glimpsed through windows, while later life settles into a calmer, more stable visual approach.
For Edgerton, Grainier's near-wordlessness presented a unique acting challenge. "It becomes a real focusing exercise to go, OK, well, I don't have many words to express myself here," he says, "but the story looks after so much of that." Two specific lines in the script served as emotional anchors for his performance. The first comes as Robert plays with his infant daughter: "Do you think she knows that I'm her daddy?" Edgerton explains this line captured "this sort of anxiety. Are you a good father? What does it mean to be connected to each other?"
The second pivotal line arrives when Robert finally breaks down emotionally: "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me." Edgerton found this moment particularly meaningful, saying it "said so much about the men that I've known in Australia [who] just keep it all inside, and when they show emotion, they feel embarrassed. It has to stop. This movie is an intervention. Men need to show emotions." However, Edgerton's task in 'Train Dreams' involved less accessing emotion than containing it, asking himself, "How do I be the stoic version of myself? Robert's not a guy who wants to show you his feelings."
The role also demanded significant physical preparation, requiring Edgerton to inhabit a body shaped by decades of manual labor. "What is an old logger walking around a town? How does he walk? I really love the physical aspects of movie [because] the whole performance has to live everywhere in your body in every part of it." Despite his hardships, Grainier retains moments of humor and warmth. "He's not life of the party, he's a listener and an observer, but he's got a few dad jokes, and he thinks he's pretty funny," says Edgerton.
Fire serves as a crucial visual and thematic element throughout 'Train Dreams,' from the gentle glow of cabin candles to a devastating forest blaze. Veloso insisted on using real flames whenever possible, explaining, "Whenever you see a fire, it's a real fire." The one exception was the film's major set piece – the massive forest fire – which required a wall of lights designed to mimic flame, shot in a landscape that had actually burned months earlier during production.
One of Edgerton's favorite moments from the shoot emerged spontaneously during a scene where he and his onscreen daughter released chickens from a coop. "Katie just started saying 'chicken' – and this chicken runs back, and Adolpho follows the chicken. It's like one of my favorite moments in the film [and shows] the beauty of what Clint allowed him to do and us to do." These organic moments exemplify the film's approach to capturing authentic life experiences.
Director Bentley weaves themes of ecological strain, displacement, and technological change throughout the narrative, including the mechanization of logging, the abuse and expulsion of Chinese migrant workers, and the uneasy relationship between humanity and the natural world. Edgerton views the film as open to multiple interpretations, depending on what viewers bring to the experience. "I think some people reach into the movie and go, this movie reminds me of my grief. Some people [say] this movie resonates for me in a way that I connect to the environment."
The film's impact on audiences has been notably diverse and profound. "I've heard someone say they came out of the cinema, and it's like I could hear every bird, and I was listening to every sound," Edgerton shares. "And some people come out and they said, [I] want to go home and hug all the people that I love the most. It's kind of a mirror for you to reach and look at yourself, or look at the world you live in. Look at your place in it and wonder about things." This reflective quality positions 'Train Dreams' as both an intimate character study and a broader meditation on human existence, memory, and the quiet dignity found in ordinary lives.
