I watched Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025) at the theatre when I was a bit more than half-way through reading the source novella of the same name by Denis Johnson. My first thought after the movie ended was whether or not any trees were harmed in the making of the film. I finished reading the short book later that evening and whatever other questions I had about the choices made in the process of adapting (as well as the trees thing) were answered in an interview that Vikram Murthri did with filmmakers Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar for Filmmaker Magazine.
Some of what I learned about the production:
~ No trees were harmed during the making of Train Dreams. There were prop trees enhanced with VFX for visual purposes as well as coordinating with crews that were already going to cut down trees around the filming locations to get some shots.
~ The collaborative style that Clint and Greg have consists of one of them directing even if they both contribute to the ideating and writing.
~ Denis Johnson’s widow, Cindy, gave them her blessing with how they wanted to make the film.
~ Clint’s background in documentary filmmaking inspires him to find ways of making locations usable.
~ Some animals are trained so well and can do what the script calls for, but other animals tend to do behave how they want, and the director must film whatever the animals are doing unprompted.
I liked the book a lot; it reminded me of Stoner by John Williams. Below are excerpts from both books. I think Clint Bentley and Greg Kedwar should adapt the John Williams book if the project with Joe Wright and Casey Affleck attached is still in limbo and won’t be gaining any traction any time soon.
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart” (Williams, 195).
‘When the sun got too hot, they moved under a lone jack pine in the pasture of jeremy grass, he with his back against the bark and she with her cheek on his shoulder. The white daisies dabbed the field so profusely that it seemed to foam. He wanted to ask for her hand now. He was afraid to ask. She must want him to ask, or surely she wouldn’t lie here with him, breathing against his arm, his face against her hair—her hair faintly fragrant of sweat and sop… “Would you care to be my wife, Gladys?” he astonished himself by saying.
“Yes, Bob, I believe I would like it,” she said, and she seemed to hold her breath a minute; then he sighed, and both laughed‘ (Johnson, 39).
The filmmakers talk about the adaptation process for Netflix here.
Pic cred: IMDB
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