Podcast Summary: The Book Review - Director Clint Bentley on Adapting ‘Train Dreams’ for the Big Screen
Host: Gilbert Cruz
Guest: Clint Bentley (director and co-writer of Train Dreams)
Original Air Date: February 24, 2026

Episode Overview

In this Oscar-season episode, Gilbert Cruz talks with Clint Bentley, director and co-writer of the film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella, Train Dreams. The conversation explores the challenges and philosophies behind adapting a subtle, episodic work of fiction to the screen, preserving the story’s spirit, and the new creative elements introduced. Bentley shares his long-standing personal connection to Johnson’s writing, his working process with co-writer Greg Kwedar, and insights into the emotional pivots within both the source material and the film.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Encountering Denis Johnson and Train Dreams

• First Read and Connection
  • Bentley first discovered Johnson through Train Dreams “right around the time or right after I got out of college” [02:39], striking a chord with the story’s portrait of an “epicness and... vastness of this small little life” [03:12].
  • Bentley relates to Grineer’s world as someone raised in a working-class ranching family in Florida.

Early Career & Writing Aspirations

• Bentley initially pursued writing as a novelist:
  • "I have a couple of carcasses of novels on my computer that never saw the light of day, and a ton of rejection letters from every literary magazine in the country." [03:58]
• Writing topics ranged from autobiographical to “embarrassed” attempts at historical fiction, which Bentley calls valuable “training” [04:26].

Standout Scenes in Train Dreams

• Two memorable scenes stuck with Bentley:
  1. The “nodding of the buttercups” during Grineer and Gladys’s first date and proposal as beautifully rendered by Johnson.
  2. The haunting episode where young Grineer gives a dying man water from his boot, a scene that both Bentley and co-writer Greg felt compelled to include on screen [04:59].

Path to the Adaptation

• Producers with the rights to Train Dreams approached Bentley after seeing his previous film, Jockey, at Sundance [06:18].
• Initial hesitation:
  • Bentley considered the book “unadaptable” due to its “entire life, an entire time in the world” fit into 116 pages with a non-linear, stream-of-consciousness style [07:25].
  • Fear of turning the adaptation into a dull sequence: “a movie can start to feel like a Wikipedia entry.” [07:25]

Breaking Down the Structure for Film

• Bentley and Kwedar devised a narrative framework:
  • First half: Grineer balancing work away from home and time with family.
  • Middle: The pivotal fire that “breaks” the narrative.
  • Final act: Grineer’s searching and longing—a film about “trying to find his way back to something that he lost” [08:54].
• Their writing process included multiple readings, underlining key lines, and a shared document full of scene outlines, dialogue fragments, and researched details (like boots nailed to a tree for fallen loggers) [10:35, 08:54].

Philosophy of Adaptation

• Bentley: “The film really has to become its own thing... while being completely true to the spirit of that book.” [11:43]
• He emphasizes the need to avoid overly rigid fidelity to plot while remaining “true to the spirit of the character” [11:43].

Translating Tone, Character, and Strangeness

• Focused on transferring the novella’s sense of the “strangeness of the world”—life’s unpredictability, inherent magic, and sometimes darkness [13:27].
• Reflected on Johnson’s handling of time: “We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment... We only start to understand them when it’s too late.” [13:27]
• Bentley admires the everyday epicness of Robert Grineer: “special and is very, like, epic without needing to be turned into something that it’s not.” [13:27]

Adaptation Choices: Additions & Omissions

Adding and Expanding Characters

• Created Apostle Frank (Paul Schneider)—an archetypal talkative logger—to “build out the characters of that world” and show Grineer’s connection to his environment [16:28].
• Claire Thompson (Forest Service employee, Kerry Condon):
  • Expanded from a brief book appearance, she represents themes of “the tragedy of life moving on without you and ecology and our place in the world” [18:28].
  • Historical detail tied to women-operated fire towers after catastrophic regional fires [18:33].

Omitted or Changed Elements

• Some scenes, such as the bleak backstory of a character (played by Clifton Collins Jr.), were filmed but mostly cut, acknowledging that Johnson’s writing seeks “some little glimmer of humanity in them” even in darkness [27:21].
  • “Nowhere we put it...where it worked without feeling like it was suddenly coming from a different movie.” [28:21]
• Grineer’s involvement in a violent act against a Chinese worker is less pronounced in the film; the scene “is not as built out as it is in the book” due to cinema’s lack of “emotional distance” [28:54].

Handling Grief On Screen

• The powerful line: “Sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive. And sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else.” [20:59]
  • Bentley drew on his own experience losing both parents: “You do move on from something you don’t feel like you can. And sometimes it feels very distant and...like they just passed yesterday.”
  • Bentley credits actor Joel (likely Joel Edgerton) for bringing nuanced emotion to the role [21:01].
• Filming emotionally intense scenes:
  • The team paused filming at times to catch the right light and mood.
  • Bentley describes emotional detachment while directing but admits, “And then you rap...And then you cry in a corner because it all hits you all of a sudden.” [24:20]

On Narration and Voice

• Will Patton, who narrated the Train Dreams audiobook, narrates the film.
  • On pitfalls: “You never want to do the thing where, like, somebody walks through a door and then the narrator says, and then he walked through a door.” [25:07]
  • He wanted narration to feel like “somebody really tells you a story” in a bar—akin to Jules and Jim or Y Tu Mamá También [25:22].
  • Johnson’s voice is considered “one of the integral pieces” to preserve [26:19].

Endings: On Literature vs. Film

• Cruz reads the novella’s renowned ending aloud [30:35–32:10].
• Bentley on cinematic translation:
  • "[Johnson] was okay. He knew what he was doing." [32:10]
  • Matches the power of Johnson’s images and language but acknowledges, “I could not translate the magic of that...How do you do the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made?”
  • The film’s ending was ultimately restructured—ending on the biplane sequence, which gave a sense of “ascendance” fitting the character’s life and death [33:29].
• Cruz: “You have this movie that is so earthbound for so long, and then in its final moments, almost as if he's ascending to heaven…” [33:29]
• Bentley: “Thank you. Thank you very much.” [33:42]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On adaptation spirit:

  • “We had to be completely true to the spirit of the book and the spirit of the character. And you can’t all of a sudden make Grineer this, like, striving guy who wants to, like, create a railroad empire or something like that. Then you’re...what’s the point of making this book?” [11:43]

• On world-building with details:

  • “The image of the boots nailed to the tree...came from just reading some random history of logging book...They would nail his boots to a tree there.” [10:35]

• On grief’s complexity:

  • “Sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive. And sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else.” [20:59]

• On choosing what to keep or cut:

  • “There are things that can work and that you can do in literature. There’s a bit of sometimes a distance you can have from something very tough that you can’t have that emotional distance from it in film in the same way in cinema.” [28:54]

• On endings:

  • “[Johnson] was okay. He knew what he was doing.” [32:10]
  • “How do you do the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made?...As an artist or a filmmaker, you either listen to that or you don’t, at your own peril.” [33:24]

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Introduction & overview: [00:20–02:39]
• Bentley’s first encounter with Johnson: [02:39–04:49]
• Memorable early scenes: [04:49–06:00]
• Journey to adaptation & challenges: [06:00–08:54]
• Philosophy of adaptation: [11:24–13:27]
• On tone, time, and strangeness: [13:27–15:05]
• Addition/expansion of characters: [15:41–19:27]
• Portraying grief & emotion: [19:58–24:28]
• Film narration and pitfalls: [24:32–26:19]
• Controversies and omitted scenes: [26:19–29:59]
• The book’s ending and film’s resolution: [30:11–33:47]
• Recommendations and By the Book interview: [34:26–39:05]

Book Recommendations & Additional Insights (By the Book Segment)

Favorite book nobody knows:

• The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje – “a very magical book...hard to categorize...a collection of short stories, photographs, poetry” [34:50]

Recently read classic:

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf – a recent pickup [35:46]

Favorite genres:

• Drawn to works that “break apart the conventions of whatever genre they’re working in”
• Recently started reading John Berger’s Once in Europa—“for fans of Train Dreams...very similar themes about life moving on and leaving people behind” [36:56]

Book(s) about filmmaking:

• Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky – “a phenomenal book”
• David Lean: A Biography – “gives a glimpse...of film developing over the 20th century”
• Non-film bonus: Coltrane on Coltrane, interviews with John Coltrane [37:32–38:53]

Concluding Remarks

Bentley’s approach to adapting Train Dreams is thoughtful, reverential, and deeply personal. The episode provides listeners with rare insights on the alchemy of adaptation: capturing a book’s “spirit,” making tough decisions on inclusion and omission, and respecting the emotional truths rooted in literature. The conversation is laced with literary enthusiasm, filmmaking craft, and heartfelt reflection on the interplay between art and lived experience.

Notable Quote for Final Impact:
"As a director, I want to be as open with them as possible at all times without making it about me...so they can ground themselves in their character and what that character is going through emotionally..." —Clint Bentley [23:10]

For those interested in adaptation, loss, or the creative process—and for fans of Denis Johnson’s work—this is a must-listen episode that skillfully bridges the literary and cinematic worlds.