The director Clint Bentley (Jockey, Sing Sing) was chatting about his film Train Dreams that’s been playing at the BFI London Film Festival. It’s based on a novella by Denis Johnson that first appeared in The Paris Review in 2002, and stars Joel Edgerton as fictional character Robert Grainier, one of the men and women who helped fire up America and ushered it into the industrial age.
Grainier‘s an itinerant lumber man who worked the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century, felling timber and building railroads. The story felt, Bentley suggests, “like an elegy for a lost world and a lost time.”
I know exactly what he means. Interestingly, people at Netflix weren’t kind of herding me to see it. Every now and again there would be an email gently reminding me of screenings. I liked the fact that I wasn’t being hit over the head with it. People have to discover Train Dreams for themselves.
Then, Ashley Schlaifer, one of the producers, approached me during Deadline’s recent Contenders London, and quietly mentioned the film.
I went to a screening and it caught me totally unawares. As the closing credits rolled, Finola Dwyer (Brooklyn, An Education), who happened to be seated next to me, looked over, but neither of us could speak. Although, a little later, I was able to mumble, this is a great movie.
TRAIN DREAMS – (Pictured) Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier. Cr: Netflix © 2025
The film also stars Felicity Jones, as Gladys, the woman who proposes to Grainier when she meets him at church. William H. Macy, Kerry Condon, Clifton Collins Jr. and Alfred Hsing are also in the film.
Bentley read the short story when it was published in book form in 2014. “It started my love of Denis Johnson and I read all of his stuff after that, but I never would’ve thought to make it into a movie. It wasn’t one that I thought, ‘One day I’ll make it.’ And then I made Jockey, my first film, and some producers had the rights of this book, Marissa McMahon and her team, and they saw Jockey and were like, ‘Oh, we’ve been looking for a filmmaker.’ So they asked me to adapt it [with Greg Kwedar], and I read it again with that in mind and just fell in love all over again.”
Earlier, during a conversation with Josie Rourke, the film and stage director, Bentley marveled that for such a slim book, “it’s so capacious.”
Plus, Bentley and others have been struck by the universality of the story. Adolpho Veloso, the film’s cinematographer who was raised in Brazil and now resides in Portugal, was sent the script and connected to it immediately. “That really surprised me,” says Bentley. “He found something in the story that spoke to him.”
We both agreed that we humans have screwed the planet, to our own detriment.
Bentley observes that every part of our life makes us feel very apart from nature. The filmmaker says that the wood cabin the production design team built was such that “you could have moved in and lived there.”
When it was cold outside, “we all had to put on jackets and start a little fire. When it was hot outside, we opened the doors and windows; and when I got back home, and if I’m hot or cold, I just press a button on the wall.”
And it’s not as if we’re bad people or anything, Bentley insists, “but just our disconnection from nature” and how technology has “spoiled us.”
Perhaps, he adds, if we can just remember how interconnected we are to nature, then “the better off we’ll all be.”
Clint Bentley. Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
It was tough to find a lead actor who could age convincingly — up and down — be very stoic, who can do physical heavy lifting and know his way around a saw and know what to do with a bag of nails and a hammer “and also be very sweet” and look as if he knew how to get his hands dirty.
It was good to have a conversation with Edgerton. He and I met over 20 years ago when he was on location with Chiwetel Ejiofor filming Kinky Boots for director Julian Jarrold at the end of the pier in Clacton on Sea, on the Essex coast.
He says that so many of the movies he reads — and that we watch — are about an active protagonist racing against time to save the world or rescue somebody or get their family back.
(L/R) Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, Joel Edgerton and composer Bryce Dessner. Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
“We go to the cinema to sit in the passenger seat of a life we wish we might have, or a heroism we wish we might possess. We also know that we also like to see ourselves reflected on the screen. And most of us, I think, lead lives where we’re not in control, not the rescuers of things, we’re not saving the planet. We feel like the planet is pushing us around and we’re at the behest of events around us, and we’re lucky if we fall in love and all these wonderful things. And we know that the cost of that is that we might lose things if we care about them. And so I think through Robert, my character, there’s a chance for audiences to see something of themselves. I think more than 90 percent of us are not holding the reins of life, but what Clint has done… through this sort of series of snapshot shots of an entire life, is to then ask these bigger questions too about what does it all mean and is it all worth it. And I think it is.”
Coming from Australia, as Edgerton does, is not dissimilar to those characters in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a durability to the modern Australian character as well, he notes.
Edgerton’s forebears, his grandfather and great-grandfather, hail from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales and they used to be sheep farmers. Once electric trains became a thing, his grandfather became a train driver. “I have this sort of feeling like my family line, they’re all working men until my father, and then I went into a more kind of cerebral space. But I love this kind of movie. I always want to feel like I’m doing something more capable and it feels comfortable to me.”
In fact, as I watched the movie, I got the sense that Edgerton was perfectly at home working the earth; the role, I thought, was in his blood. It’s rare that I’ve seen an artist appear so suited to a part, where they’re not even, seemingly, acting.
TRAIN DREAMS – (L-R) Felicity Jones as Gladys and Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier. Cr: Netflix © 2025
Edgerton chuckles and says that he’d much rather shoot a movie like Train Dreams “than be a corporate guy in a New York office or something. And it does feel in an esoteric sense for me, I belong in a different time period sometimes, and I’m quite a cynical, basic thinking human being, but I do wonder about those things and wonder if I belong somewhere else. These kind of movies allow me to plug into that feeling,” he says.
And thank God for “these kind of movies,” say I.
“Even though we’re watching Robert’s life, I do think anyone in the audience can reach in and pull out a sense of meaning for their own life from it.”
Jones had a similar feeling when she read the script. “I just connected to it,” she tells us. After reading, she was moved to tears.
Then she embarked to find a way to play Gladys, the woman who melts Grainier’s heart and lights up his life.
At that time, she and her family were living in a very urban area of London so she jumped at the opportunity of, as she put it, “going on an adventure and being in that big open space and being away from noise… and this over-saturation that I think we’re all feeling.”
Jones read tomes that featured accounts of pioneering women and of their attempts to survive and make it through.
Those times resonate, she says. “We are living in these complex times. How do we make our relationships work? How do we make our families work? How do we get from the day to day? And the film, even though it’s set in the past, it feels very contemporary.”
Even down to the struggle to make money to have a quality of life “that can ensure we flourish. And in some ways it is very hard for them to get that balance,” Jones adds.
The actress says that she’s keen to see what people make of the film and “what the conversations are that it started. Because it’s not trying to bash you on the head. It’s not trying to shock you or scare you. It’s strong and it’s impactful, but it’s doing it in a very human way.”
Jones also appears in the London Film Festival’s closing night film, director Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero, with Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Charli XCX and Amir El-Masry.
“Again, a very different film, completely idiosyncratic,” Jones says of 100 Nights of Hero. “I feel like cinema at the moment has to be really distinctive. You have to be very true to something and unwrap it and unpack it. So 100 Nights of Hero, is a completely different direction, but really entertaining and hopefully impactful.”
Felicity Jones. Baz bamigboye/Deadline
Not to put too much weight on Train Dreams, but it’s very much about us, and how we got here.
“It’s a bit of a mirror,” says Jones, nodding.
“The world feels like it’s going so fast. I think we all feel, to use the pun, we just need to get off the train. How do we get off the train? And this film almost just gives us a little moment of, ‘Okay, let’s take a pause and just reflect and realize we do have choices and we are not just at the mercy of bigger forces.’”
Her comments remind me of a conversation the actor Steve Zahn and I had recently, where we both felt that we wanted, now and again, to see movies that allowed us to take a breath.
I somehow feel that they’re the kind of films that last longest. And once again I return to James Stewart’s comment about how some pictures give you little bits of time that you never forget.
Train Dreams does that. It’s such a beautifully crafted gem of a movie. The film is in select cinemas in the U.S. and UK November 7 and screens on Netflix from November 21.