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- [00:08]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Happy Friday, everybody. Do you know what? It's about to be Oscars weekend, baby. Are you ready for the star power? Are you ready for the speeches, the red carpet looks, team? All that is here to get you ready for the 2026 Academy Awards. All week we've been revisiting conversations I've had with some of the nominees. Check our website and our podcast feed to hear those conversations about Hamnet the secret agent. If I had legs, I'd kick you and sinners. Since the awards are this Sunday, for the first hour of today's show, we wanted to share three more Oscar conversations. In a bit, we'll hear about a film called the Voice of hin Rajab, which dramatizes the rescue of a young girl in Gaza. We'll also talk about the bizarre conspiracy thriller Begonia. But first, we'll hear about one of the best picture nominees from its director and one of its stars. Train Dreams is a meditative, lushly shot story about an ordinary man living in a world that is changing rapidly around him. Robert Granger is a man of few words, even fewer friends and no family. When we first meet him, he spends most of his time on manual labor, jobs that take him far away from home but still out in nature, which is where he seems to feel the most comfortable. He witnesses things that are shocking but a part of life for people trying to live in the early 20th century. Set in the Pacific Northwest, the tall trees, endless vistas, and rugged terrain make the setting a character in itself. Train Dreams is based on a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson. It's nominated for best adapted screenplay at this year's Academy Awards, as well as best cinematography, best original song by Nick Cave and Bryce Desner. And oh yeah, it's also one of the contenders for best picture. When actor Joel Edgerton and director Clint Bentley joined me to talk about the film, I started by asking Clint when he first read Dennis Johnson's novella and what was in it that made him want to turn it into a movie.
- [02:27]
B
I first read it when it came out, the year that it came out, and I'm blanking on what that year is.
- [02:32]
A
2011, 2012.
- [02:34]
B
2011 or something like that. Yeah, and it was just, I didn't know Dennis's work. It was just one of the books to read that year. And I was on the road a lot and it was very slim. It's only 116 pages. And I read it and just blew my mind. And it sent Me down a rabbit trail of reading most of Dennis Johnson's work and becoming a big fan. But I honestly didn't think about it as a filmmaker. It was before I was even a filmmaker at the time. But it's a. It's a book that you wouldn't necessarily think about adapting. I think a lot of people wouldn't. It's. It's told in a stream of consciousness style. It's kind of all over the place. It's got a lot of things you shouldn't or you're told not to do as a filmmaker, you know, with a quiet protagonist and. And a period piece and stuff like that. But some. Some lovely producers had the rights to the book and came back to me after I made my first film, Jockey, and they were looking for a filmmaker to adapt it. Marissa McMahon and Ashley Schlafer and Will Janowitz, who are producers on the project. And then when I went back and looked at it again as a filmmaker, it just really felt like a.
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A
Really.
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B
Like it could be a special piece. A lot like, came to life.
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A
What were you doing when you first read it? You weren't a filmmaker yet?
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B
Oh, I was. I was a already failed musician and trying to write a novel that I also ended up failing at that. But I was just on the road. I was living in Montreal. I was kind of hitchhiking around and. Yeah, just kind of like living on the road.
- [04:05]
A
On the Pulitzer Prize site, the novel is described as a novella about a day laborer in the old American west, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm. Joel, why did you think that would make a good character?
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C
By the way, Clint, you're not a failure in my mind in any form. I think I found the celebration of an ordinary life a very dignified thing to put on screen. As Clint said, it's not a typical thing that we. A typical protagonist for a film. You know, the. The film, like the book, you know, it spans 80 years of one person's life. I feel like 99.9% of any audience in a cinema views their own lives as relatively ordinary. We go to the cinema to dream, but I also think that we want to sit in that seat and see something of ourselves reflected. And I think we. What is really profound about Dennis Novella and the film and the character is that the experiences that Robert goes through are, I think, the great big things in life. Falling in love, the joys and the fears around becoming a parent. And of course, some of the bigger, more devastating blows that we might be hit with in life. And I think that audiences and myself, when reading the material, could see a reflection of my own life. Even though we're looking back into another period of somebody else's life, it's a mirror to ourselves. And I think there's something really dignified about that. And I just felt I could really connect with it. I felt like more than any other character I've played in years, it felt like one of the most personal things I could do, given my life has somewhat intersected with who Robert is.
- [06:10]
A
I wanted to go on a picnic after watching this film just with a loved one, Someone that you love. Just sit in a field.
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B
That sounds really nice.
- [06:19]
A
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. And it's a very special moment in the film, which I think was interesting, stringing together all of these sort of special moments, which aren't particularly special, actually.
- [06:30]
B
I know. And that was kind of the conceit, and Joel was just speaking to it a bit of. We. A lot of times don't think about that moment of going on a picnic with a friend or having a beer in the afternoon with a friend, or just, like, waking up and having a lazy morning with your family. Those little small moments, we don't often think about those as the big things. We're thinking about our next vacation, or we're thinking about this, like, big Christmas party we're gonna have or something like that. And yet, when you look back, those moments, the little quiet moments in the afternoon with a loved one or something like that, those are the things that end up giving our life depth along the way. And being the things that when you lose somebody, or just as we grow old and grow apart with people, as we naturally do, that you look back and you really remember those times of, like, something that felt very mundane at the time, but has so much depth and beauty to it and are the things that end up defining our lives.
- [07:32]
A
Najul, you originally wanted to adapt this. How did you hook up with Clint?
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C
Well, it was a completely separate and serendipitous kind of thing. I mean, so I had read the novella, had been given to me as a gift. And, you know, I think when people gift you a novella or a book, it means something more than if you just randomly go into a bookstore and select something. I read it, immediately fell in love with it, had tried to option it my. Myself immediately found out the rights were taken, and I, you know, grumbled a little bit, and then I. I put it at the back of my mind and. And life, you know, way Life got in the way and I went on to other things. And then out of the blue I was working in Chicago on an Apple series. I'd since become a father, which, which, you know, if you've seen the film meant, means that playing the character meant so much more to me. So much more wrapped up in all my biggest fears. And Clint had reached out about would I like to play Robert in the film. And I remember thinking, had somebody tipped him off that I'm such a big fan of this material and it was a completely separate situation. And then I, I started to get really nervous because I knew it was a difficult adaptation. I'm glad I didn't have to do it. And I thought he'd just done such a marvelous job. And now, you know, here we are. People are listening. But I'm now sitting next to one of my newest dearest friends. Clint is such a special, honest, decent, apart from all his wonderful creative, you know, attributes and virtues. He, like the character in the film, is reliable and decent. And I immediately was drawn to him and it was very easy to say yes.
- [09:27]
A
Is that unusual for you to become friends with the folks that you work with?
- [09:31]
C
I feel like, you know, like Robert in the film, you know, just to. One of the other connective tissue aspects of the character for me is Robert is a contract worker and you know, I have slightly less calloused hands than Robert. I'm an actor, but I go away from people I love to work for large stretches of time and I can really relate to that. And along the way, like just a shout out to the wonderful William H. Macy, who plays a character I meet on the road. You know, on the contract, you occasionally collect people that you are magnetized towards and you know, will be in your life forever and there's a whole bunch that won't, but they could be also a pleasure to be around. Clint, you're not getting rid of me that easy. I'm already like Clint. Alright, let's do it again. This was such a great experience making the film. The process and the result, which is quite rare, that both line up to be top shelf experiences. So, you know, why not continue the process of working with people that you adore?
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A
Clint, what was important to you when you were adapting the film from the novella? Things that you. That were hard yeses and hard nos.
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B
That's a good question. A big, I mean, you know, thinking about what makes a good adaptation and what doesn't. I'd spend a lot of time thinking about that just as a film lover and A film student. And I think the best ones, with exceptions to this rule, but the best ones are very loyal to the spirit of the book, but then kind of let the rest go, and they let themselves become. You know, it's translating a piece of work and an idea and a story into a new medium. And so that was from the very beginning where I felt like we needed to be. And along with my co writer, Greg Kuidar, we needed to be completely loyal to the spirit of the book and to the spirit of this main character. And there's certain things like that that you just. You don't touch, you don't change, you know, but the rest of it, it's interesting. You learn it by doing it, and you learn it through trial and error of what can be translated and what can't. There are some of the. There's some amazing sequences in the book that are some of the most affecting things I've read in literature. And some of them it feels impossible to translate. And some of them that became clear even in trying to translate it into a screenplay format. And then some of them we tried very hard to translate it and couldn't translate it, you know, even in making it. And it didn't make it into the final cut. And so there was that. The other thing is, like, there is a wooliness to the book that in the storytelling itself, that is an integral aspect of it. The story kind of goes wherever it wants. It takes its tangents, it kind of moves around. And I really wanted to bring that into it as well and translate the book into a narrative structure that works for cinema and this type of film specifically, without losing that kind of shagginess of the story that's so integral to the feeling of it.
- [13:03]
A
I'm speaking with actor Joel Edgerton and director Clint Bentley about their film Train Dreams, a film about a man and how he deals with the ever changing world around him. It's currently streaming on Netflix. I should say, Joel, when you're presented with a character who doesn't speak a lot, no external monologues, no huge fight scenes, what do you do first?
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C
As an actor, I find the challenge of that really extraordinary. You know, I had had the pleasure of being in a movie directed by Jeff Nix called Loving. It was a great movie with Ruth Nagger, and in a similar but different way, played a character who had a lot of feelings, a lot of impact from the world around him and didn't really know how or didn't think he was allowed to express himself. So, you know, I'd had an experience with a relatively non verbal performance before. I was saying earlier that, you know, my life in many ways has intersected with what Robert is like. What Robert's experience in the film is in that, you know, I'm a father of two young children. I wrestle with my qualities as dad daily. The joys and the guilts and everything that swirl around with parenthood. My greatest fears are wrapped up in this film. And again, the work aspects of trying to kind of find a better union of work and family life. So I could also really trust that this is one of the most personal performances for me and that if I gave more of myself than I usually do in any performance, I like to, as I call it, sort of dive into the dress up box and funny walks and, you know, but in honesty, like a lot of characters I play, I'm trying to stretch my imagination to play people that I'm not. With rhythms that aren't really my own and voices that are not really my own. This was a different thing. So the non verbal aspect of it felt like the thoughts are all in my mind, the feelings are all just really under a very thin skin. And I could trust Clint to capture them with his incredible cinematographer, Dolphin Velocir, who just, you know, pictures this world in such a divine way.
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A
Clint, directors have to make decisions repeatedly from the minute they hit the ground. What was a decision that was hard for you to make?
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B
Oh, man, that's a great question. I'm trying to sift through the thousands of difficult conversations or difficult decisions. You know, I think there were. There were times where it was tough to decide. We found a lot of moments where, you know, we shot this film in 29 days. We moved very quickly and we found ourselves in moments where, okay, we were going to cover this scene in like four takes or four setups and four shots. And now we've only got time to do it in two. And that always we got into a rhythm, as Joel said, and shout out to our lovely cinematographer Adolfo Veloso, where we could kind of operate almost more on an intuitive level and find our way through those things. One of the more difficult things was really just what to cut out from performances. There's so much. We kind of like let scenes breathe and anytime we had a moment after we wrapped a scene, if we had 10 more minutes before we broke for lunch or something like that, we would just take Joel and Felicity and just kind of go off with some chickens or something like that and make a little scene. And there's so much like there could be a whole movie just of their life around the cabin. Like we've got enough material for that. And so I think that was the hardest. The most difficult decisions were in the edit of just like cutting out beautiful things and thinking about that.
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A
It's subtle in the film, but the film shows how manual labor became automated fairly quickly. And we see this with your character and Robert has to adapt and it feels sort of topical given the AI of it. All. Right, now was that on your mind when you were adapting this or did it just was a happenstance?
- [17:45]
B
No, it was. I mean the AI specifically when we started working on this and Greg and I started adapting this, it was back in 2021, I think. And so AI was just like, it's insane to think about how quickly it has developed. But like they were. We were just starting to talk about it at that point. But it is no new thing in the past 200 some odd years to talk about how labor and how working people are ground up in capitalist societies. Right. And not just capitalist societies, but the way that economies have grown in the past 200 years. Whether you talk about coal miners or whalers or Amazon delivery drivers. I saw this with my, my parents who were, who were, who went through this in their various ways and, and so that was top of mind in, in the adaptation to just show, hopefully in not a heavy handed way, but to show, not only to show how our little lives, a lot of times are defined by these systems that we have no control over. They might as well be tornadoes or Greek gods or something like that that can upset our lives in ways that we have no impact over. And so Greiner and Gladys, Robert and Gladys, all they want to do is be together and have their little house. And yet they've got to try and figure out like, well, how do we make a living? Is it better for me to be gone and make more money or to be in town and be present, but we can barely get by. They've got their dreams that they can get upset by natural disasters. And that's as big of an impact on his life along the way as the fact that as technology progresses it leaves him as a relic in his own time, which I think, you know, a lot of us are feeling younger and younger, you know, unfortunately.
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C
It's incredible how the film, but then the novella and therefore the film kind of reflects so many things. Again we're looking, you know, the early 20th century. These other things that occur within the life of Robert, the kind of his observation and awareness of the kind of use and mistreatment of immigrant workers is a thing that has not changed and in fact it obviously is intensifying our relationship with harvesting the planet and the naivety around some of the characters point of view and as we evolve towards the end of the film, Kerry Condon's character conservationist and her expression around the interconnectivity of all of us with all things and our connection with the planet. You know, there's these things that we think we wouldn't see in historical documents and pieces of writing. And of course they're very, very relevant as they swirl around in Robert's life as he observes them with this sort of like I said before, almost like childlike kind of naivety. Yeah, naivete.
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A
That was actor Joel Edgerton and director Clint Bentley talking about their film Train Dreams. It's nominated for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best best cinematography and best original Song at this year's Oscars.
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