Director Clint Bentley on Adapting ‘Train Dreams’ for the Big Screen

Summary

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

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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.

Transcript

[Podcast Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Gilbert Cruz]

The spirit of the book is, for me, it's hard to grab onto.

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah, me too.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Lots of feelings. Lots of things have made me feel. But what would you say was the inheritance, inherent spirit that you were able to transfer over to the film?

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, I think I would kill it if I tried to put it into like a sentence or two here.

[Gilbert Cruz]

The life of man. Something. Something.

[Clint Bentley]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times. And it's Oscar season. I love the Oscars. I've loved them my entire life. This year I've already seen eight of the ten best picture nominees. On our last episode, I had the chance to speak with Guillermo del Toro about his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And today we have another Oscar nominee on the show, Clint Bentley. Clint is the director and the co writer of Train Dreams, which is a film that he Adapted from the 2011 Denis Johnson novella of the same name. Both tell the story of Robert Kurneer. Robert is a logger, he's a rail worker. He lives in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. And it's basically his life. He works, he falls in love, he has a child, he suffers a tragedy, he grieves that tragedy. Like any of us. He experiences things both grand and trivial. And I was moved greatly by. By both the book and the film, but in very different ways. And the film, for its part, is nominated for four Oscars, including the big one, Best Picture and best Adapted Screenplay. So when I talked with Clint, we went right to the source. So let's start by talking about the man. Let's talk about Dennis Johnson. When the New York Times polled 500 authors and other literary figures to figure out what the great books of this century so far on two of those 100 books were by Dennis Johnson. Tree of Smoke, which is this large, sprawling 700 page book set during the Vietnam War. And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you have Train Dreams, which is this short but extremely powerful book about this man's life. Robert Greiner, when did you first encounter Denis Johnson?

[Clint Bentley]

I first encountered his writing actually through Train Dreams. The year that it Came out. I knew him by name, but I had never read anything. And then Train Dreams came out right around the time or right after I got out of college, and I was like, I was bumming around and Train Dreams was one of the books to read that year, and it was a very, like, good size to slip in a backpack and. And so I picked it up somewhere on the road and just fell in love with the book.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What was it in that book that connected you to it?

[Clint Bentley]

I don't know. There was just something about the story of this little life and how Dennis rendered it in such a way that you felt the epicness and you felt the vastness of this small little life. And it reminded me of so many of the people that I had grown up with and been raised by. I was raised in a ranching family in Florida and very working class, and Grineer and all the people in this book just reminded me of the people I'd been raised around. The book just, like, kind of lived inside me. And I would find myself over the years, like, different scenes would pop up to the surface without really knowing why.

[Gilbert Cruz]

At that point in your life, you're a young man. You read this book for the first time. Were you a writer?

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, yeah, I was. I was making short films with my friends, but just for fun, and didn't think of myself as somebody who would become a filmmaker. I thought I would be a novelist and tried very hard to be one and have a couple of carcasses of novels on my computer that never saw the light of day. And a ton of rejection letters from that time from every literary magazine in the country.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What were you writing about?

[Clint Bentley]

I was making all the mistakes that. That a young writer makes of writing about everything from incredibly, like, autobiographical things from my childhood or from some random party that happened all the way to, you know, some sort of, like. I. I'm embarrassed to say it, but, like, you know, historical fiction. But it was good training in. In terms of just, like, learning how to write.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Do you recall any particular moment from the book Train Dreams on that first reading that really stuck with you the entire time?

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah. One was, like, the way that he talks about their first date and their first kiss, where Grineer ends up proposing to Gladys. That would just always, like, bubble up in my mind for some reason. There was just such a beauty to it. There's, like, a phrase that he used in there of, like, the nodding of the buttercups. That. That just was so heartbreaking. And then there's another one that, like, always stuck with Me as, as being so strange, yet very, very emotional. And it was the one that like when I came back around and read it again, thinking about like making it into a movie, it's one of the scenes I was like, I, I have to make this just to put this scene in there. And it was also my co writer, Greg, when he read it, he was like, oh, you need to do this. This reminds me of you. It's the one where the kid grineer is a 15 year old kid, comes across this man dying in the woods and gives him a drink of water from his own boot. Those are the scenes that, I don't know, just got ahold of me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You just mentioned your collaborator, Greg Khwidar. Train Dreams is the fourth film that you've worked on. You've co written all four with him, you've directed two of them. How did you get the opportunity to make this one in particular? Having read it, you know, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, yeah.

[Clint Bentley]

This one came in a way that I didn't think a film project would come to me. I directed a film called Jockey that Greg and I had written together and Greg produced and that went to Sundance. And a few of our producers on the film had had the rights to Train Dreams for several years and had been trying to find a filmmaker to make it. And they saw Jockey at Sundance and I think just really saw some like kinship of spirit or some kind of artistic kinship there and reached out. And at first I was just so excited at the prospect. And then going back and reading the book again, I was like, oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable. And I was very nervous about it. I went back and forth on it for a while, knowing that I loved it but not wanting to do a bad job of it, not wanting to let the book down or Dennis, even though he was passed on at the time. And so it took me a minute to really like jump into it and a lot of friends talking me off ledges along the way.

[Gilbert Cruz]

What at the time did you think was unadaptable? Like what was giving you pause?

[Clint Bentley]

Well, it's just, I think going back to the construction of the novella itself, it's only 116 or 117 pages and yet it is this entire life, an entire time in the world. And that is a red flag for a movie because when you're trying to cover that much time, a movie can start to feel like a Wikipedia entry. Just a bunch of like, and then this happened and that happened. And then on top of that the book has this really evocative style to it where it's, it's very stream of consciousness and it just like slips all over the place, you know, and in one sentence he's a child, and then the next scene he's dying and then it comes back and he's seeing Elvis on a train. And, and it all worked so well, but I felt if, if there were a situation where we needed to pin that down to more of a traditional three act structure with an inciting incident and blah, blah, blah, you kill the magic of the book. And I really didn't want to do that.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So you get over your concerns, your trepidation, you decide to adapt this book. Walk me through.

[Clint Bentley]

I just ignore them.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, hey, I do it all the time. Walk me through how you start. Are you rereading and rereading? Luckily, this is a fairly short book. Are you ripping out pages, underlining scenes? How do you start to sort of break this story, for lack of a better phrase, into one that you can translate to screen?

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah, I found pretty quickly that I did have like a sense of what the structure could be and that being basically what it turned into, which is like the first half of the film kind of watching him go back and forth between trying to reconcile being away for work and coming back home and trying to spend time with the family. But. And then the fire would come in the middle of the film and just break the narrative in half. And then the last part of the film would be more of a, of a, of a film of searching or longing and trying to find his way back to, to something that he lost and wondering if he could ever do that. And so that, that framework gave us enough confidence to go into it. And then, yeah, Greg and I, each on our own, just read the book multiple times, underlined, you know, anything that felt important. We, we always start with like a shared document that we write in that we're just throwing like any ideas, anything like that. There's like a grab bag at the bottom that's just like random lines of dialogue that don't have a home or images or anything like that simultaneously. There's a lot of research that we're both doing individually and together we're like reading anything I can get my hands on. The image of the, the boots nailed to the tree actually is, is one that came from just reading some random history of logging book and learning that that was something that they had done for the guys who would ride the logs down the rivers and would break apart log jams and when one of them died, wherever they found his body, they would nail his boots to a tree there.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's a striking image.

[Clint Bentley]

Very, very striking. And became something a bit larger than. Than the image itself, which is what you hope for. But, yeah, there's a lot of research that we're doing. And then we're just like. In that document, we're starting with just like, writing a sentence for every scene and that we. That we know is going to be in the film. And sometimes that's as simple as just like, Grineer comes home and it's awkward, you know, or the fire happens, you know, and then we build out each of those sentences into a paragraph, and each paragraph is about a scene. Then we start taking passes at scenes and then passing those scenes back and forth to just try and refine them along the way until we have what we always hope is a better first draft than it is, but a terrible first draft. And then you can start refining a script from there.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So this is your first fiction adaptation. And as someone who's done it now and has seen, I presume, a lot of movies based on books, do you have, for lack of a less fancy word, like a philosophy when it comes to adaptation? What's allowed, what's not allowed? Fidelity versus lack of fidelity.

[Clint Bentley]

I do. And it's funny. It is one that I went into the process with. And so whether it was confirmed or whether I just didn't look at any other evidence, I don't know. But I felt like whenever a book is adapted into film, the film really has to become its own thing, and the filmmaker, slash, screenwriter, has to allow themselves to be free of the source material in terms of what happens while being completely true to the spirit of that book. There are exceptions to that. Like, no country for Old Men is an adaptation that, like, that book kind of already feels like a movie and was written as a screenplay or stage play before that. But that was the thing I felt very strongly, and I still do with this one, that, like, 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. Then you're, what's the point of making this book? But at the same time, you have to free yourself from the book itself in order to let the film become its own.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So you talked about a couple of scenes that stuck with you when you first read it. What else did you want to. Spirit aside, what else did you want to sort of transfer over in terms of tone, character moments, in terms of images? Because it's always fascinating to me to read a book, watch a movie, whatever order it's in, to sort of say, oh, this. Yeah, I remember this from the book, but it feels different, or it looks different, but it's still there. What. What were you most excited about taking from one form and moving over? I.

[Clint Bentley]

The. The biggest thing was more a feeling, like the strangeness, the inherent strangeness of the world that I think we living in, like, modern society, in this city or in the suburbs or wherever, life feels very safe and feels very predictable. And you get outside of that and you're reminded very quickly that it is not the case. That was one thing I wanted to get across is, like, how strange and wonderful and kind of magical the world itself is without embellishing anything. And that's not always in, like, a sweet, cute way. Sometimes that's in a very dangerous and dark way. And then the other thing is, like, this aspect of time and just the way that you can have a year that just drags by and you're like, this is never going to end. And then sometimes you look up and you're like, where did the last five years go? We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we're actually living them. We only start to understand them when it's too late. And, yeah, so there's a lot of that. And I felt like there was something very special about Robert Greinear in terms of taking this person who's just an average, everyday person who is just trying to lead a decent life and trying to make some money for his family and. And build a little life for himself and his family. That I feel like is very special and is very, like, epic without needing to be turned into something that it's not, you know?

[Gilbert Cruz]

After the break, Clint talks about a few characters that he added to the film and the scenes from the book that he had to cut.

[Podcast Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Gilbert Cruz]

Some people think you sort of referenced this before, but like a short story, a novella maybe is more optimal for adaptation because you just have less to adapt. But of course, here you're telling the story of a person. So often it's about, what are we cutting out of the story in order to fit into a film. But you added a couple characters or a couple moments, a couple scenes into this. You added Apostle Frank, the very talkative lager played by Paul Schneider. You added the Forest Service employee played by Kerry Condon, paying respects still to the novella. And Dennis Johnson. How do you make the decision to layer your own storytelling? On top of that, I'm putting new characters. And then what were you trying to say through those characters?

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah, with Apostle Frank, I felt like he. There were several sections of the book that we needed to build out that Dennis had written something about some section of time, but then only writes three sentences about it, you know, and with Apostle Frank in particular, just about building out the characters of that world to show us why Grineer is so connected to these people and to this world that he's living in. And I've worked on a lot of crews, like, in construction and farms, where there's always somebody who talks more than he works. And you're just like, please, just shut up, man.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, you have him, and you have the character played by William H. Macy. He's Arn, who is a little bit older, so maybe it's more understandable that he's not working as much, but he's just. He's just blabbing, blabbing, blabbing that he does his one job, blowing stuff up.

[Clint Bentley]

Exactly, exactly. He had a particular set of skills. That character is larger than life on the page, on people's. And I'd say, like, half of the stuff that he says in the film is just from the book, just lifted directly from the book. And then we were really just trying to expand on that, to fill out that character without ever pushing him in a direction that. That felt unnatural to him. And then Kerry Connor's character, that was one that, like, it took us a while to get there. Claire Thompson is a character in the novella, but she's a widow that he's transporting. And there's not much that's said between them, but it's a really important moment in Grineer's life that culminates in her telling him in the book that the Lord needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. That gives him some measure of, like, understanding of his life a bit. Even though he has the question back of, like, is that what I am? A hermit? Even though we watched him for, like, 70 pages. Be a hermit.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, you don't always understand yourself. One doesn't always understand their own life 100%.

[Clint Bentley]

And so there was, like. There was this amalgamation of things we were trying to do and fit in. One was like, keep that character intact, but expand her a bit. And then the other part that is a bit thematic and a bit historical, which is just like. We really wanted to show these fire towers that had popped up across the Pacific Northwest. There were a ton of really terrible fires in some around, like, 1921 and some, like, 10 years earlier that had gone through and just decimated the area. And so then we have the Forest Service that gets created and all these fire watch towers get put all over the area up there. And a lot of them were operated and run by women. And so that was just something textually that we wanted to put in that also spoke thematically to the fact that if these fire towers had been put up, you know, a decade earlier, his family might still be alive.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Clint Bentley]

And then. And then that character became a vehicle to talk about a lot of, like, some thematic things that I felt that I wanted to talk about in terms of, you know, kind of the. Like, the tragedy of life moving on without you and ecology and our place in the world and our place and time and all of that, ultimately building up to that line that's so powerful in the book itself of the world needing a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I want to ask you about another line that occurs when he's talking to the Kerry Condon character. She says, were you here for the fire? He says, I wasn't. My wife and child were. They didn't make it. And then he describes, possibly for the first time, at least in the film. It's a brief glimmer, but he describes what he's feeling. As a viewer, you have to largely, up until that point, just discern what he is feeling without relying on the character's dialogue. But he says, sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive. And sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else. I am lucky enough where I have not had to experience that sort of grief. I know it's coming. My parents are still around and all that stuff. But how do you. I was just rewatching again that scene this morning, and I almost started crying. It really is affecting. How do you transfer emotion from a page to. To the screen? Because I think you probably watched that scene 20 times and still feel that emotion.

[Clint Bentley]

I mean, that came from a very real place. That line. I Unfortunately, have dealt with that loss that you're speaking of and lost both my folks in a very quick succession. And there was some tragedy to it as time went on, that you do move on from something you don't feel like you can. And sometimes it feels very distant and. And sometimes you wake up and it feels like they just passed on yesterday. I mean, there's a bit of a cheat code with being a filmmaker that if you get a great actor, they can. They do the heavy lifting for you in terms of imbuing something like that. That could be a bit flat. You know, that line could go a lot of different ways, and it could be a bit straightforward. But I think that in particular is just the magic of what Joel does as an actor, is just a testament to his subtlety and nuance as an actor.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Is that a scene? Is that a moment that you, to your recollection, you had to do a couple times? I know you're filming it outside, so you're trying to make sure you do it while the light is good, but what was your recollection of filming that moment?

[Clint Bentley]

That was a really beautiful scene, I think. But that scene we started filming and we did a couple takes, and the sun was too high and it was just too harsh on them, and they were both kind of squinting at each other. And so we all. Adolfo, my cinematographer, and I, and Joel and Carrie, we all kind of decided, like, let's take a break. Like, let's give it an hour. Let the sun get softer. And so we just stepped away and, like, took a moment, had some tea. And then when we got back into it, it all. That scene came together very quickly. And that scene is kind of how our editor, Parker Laramie, first cut it together on the assembly cut. It's largely intact. Yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

And do you feel, as a director, is it part of your job to be. To be vulnerable with your actors as well? Like, are you. When you're talking to Joel, are you referencing your own experiences with grief and stuff like that? Are you sort of trying to convey what's inside of you as a director and the writer to him through that personal connection? Like, you're taking him off to the side and telling him stuff.

[Clint Bentley]

As much as it's helpful, you know, we do. We specifically, with Joel and I, we did a lot of that before we ever got on set. And a lot of our prep would just be like these long phone conversations in the middle of the night, talking about being a parent and losing family and all the. Everything in between. You know, I Think, like, it's such a strange thing where you have to. As a director, I want to be as open with them as possible at all times without making it about me. You know what I mean? So it's. So it's about. So they can ground themselves in their character and what that character is going through emotionally versus thinking about, like, what was Clint thinking at the. Like, when he. When he buried his mother? And so there's a lot of that. That just, like, it's kind of the tragedy of it where, as a director, I found, like, I'm not as emotionally wrapped up in the scenes as they're unfolding and being as emotionally affected by them because I'm having to pay attention to so many technical elements in order to give everybody notes between takes so that we're actually using our time.

[Gilbert Cruz]

That's incredible, that story. You have to sort of bifurcate yourself in a way.

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah. And then you rap and everybody starts breaking down the cameras, and then. And then you cry in a corner because it all hits you all of a sudden.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I. I want to ask you about Will Patton.

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

The audiobook for Train Dreams came out, you know, 15 or so years ago. Will Patton narrated that. He is the narrator of your film, I'm sure. You know, narration can be pretty dicey in films. You can. It can go off the ramps. You can have Morgan Freeman in the Shawshank Redemption. You can have Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, where they're like, this is so bad. We're actually gonna make a new cut of this movie in which there's no narration. What would you say are the pitfalls when it comes to film narration? And how did you make sure to try to avoid that?

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah, I mean, 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. That's what you want to avoid. And it's funny. Blade Runner. From what I've read, Harrison Ford did not want to do that.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Well, I see why.

[Clint Bentley]

Yeah. And so that's part of his performance is just like, I got to get through this. But I love the idea of a narrator. Like, a narrator as a storyteller, and in this particular sense, a narrator. Like if you had found yourself in some little bar in a logging town, and you were there late at night, and this guy comes up to you, he's had too many beers and is like, hey, let me tell you about this guy, Robert Grenier, and somebody really tells you a story. And I always love the narrators from, like, Jules And Jim and E2 Mama Tambien, who kind of takes. Take asides and tell you things that don't have anything to do with the plot but have everything to do with the story. And then the other side of it was just like. One of the integral pieces of why that book works so well is Dennis Johnson's voice, his narrative voice. And so I really felt strongly that that was something that we had to pull into the movie itself.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Your movie has been very well received. The only criticisms I've seen have to do with a change in tone, which is like smoothing a couple things out, making Grineer a little less. Slightly less unlikable. There's the character that you talk about the first time you read, the guy played by Clifton Collins in the film. In the book, not a nice guy, as you come to learn, he sort of sexually abused a family member. Do you see that those things are something that you changed on purpose because you wanted to achieve a kind of different feel in your movie? The idea that Robert Greiner is someone who maybe was a little too enthusiastic about throwing his Chinese colleague off a rail bridge, and the idea that the Clifton Collins character is someone who is not just suffering in the woods, but also is a bad person.

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Were you like, I don't think I need this.

[Clint Bentley]

I mean, it's funny with Clifton's character, There's a whole 10 minute or 8 minute version of that scene.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Really?

[Clint Bentley]

We filmed the whole thing and it just like.

[Gilbert Cruz]

It's like 90 seconds of the very.

[Clint Bentley]

It's. If that. Yeah, it's very short, which I felt terrible about because again, there's something about that. That scene. And what I think Dennis did in his writing in general was to try and look at some people who had done incredibly depraved things and things that are in no world, okay. And try and find some little glimmer of humanity in them and try and find what's. What's human about them so that we all maybe look at each other that way. Right. That's my take as a reader of his work. And I think that scene with Clifton is an example of that from my perspective. But the thing is, like, it just didn't work in the movie. Like, nowhere we put it, even just structurally, like, there was nowhere we put it where it. Where it worked without feeling like it was suddenly coming from a different movie.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah.

[Clint Bentley]

And so yet it was an image and something that was like, so potent that I felt like we couldn't lose it. And so just what remains Is him giving this guy a drink of water from his boot. And then, you know, the narration says that he didn't like to think about that moment from his life to, you know, it's not going to mean anything to anybody who hasn't read the book, but hopefully to pay homage to, to that. The other thing with, like, I mean, Grineer in the movie does help. He helps for a moment. He gets swept up in this violence of helping carry this guy up towards the bridge.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah. Grabs his.

[Clint Bentley]

Grabs his legs to help take him up. Gets kicked off. That scene is not as built out as it is in the book. Partly just because of, again, a different medium. And I've read the criticism. I don't really have any. Any response to it other than, like, there's things I think that, like, again, my viewpoints on this might evolve as I evolve as an artist, but I think 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. But the fire is a good example of that. The fire and the vision of Gladys and how she dies and the kid, like, how they get swept up in the fire. That's a very. In early edits, that was a much longer sequence, but it had to be a calibration of like, okay, how much are we putting people through and what are we giving them in return?

[Gilbert Cruz]

Yeah, I mean, that part is pretty sad without those images already. I have one more question. You have called the ending of Dennis Johnson's novella one of the great endings in literature.

[Clint Bentley]

It's not hyperbole. I do mean that I sort of

[Gilbert Cruz]

want to read the ending and then ask you why you think it's great, but it's quite long.

[Clint Bentley]

Do you disagree that it's great?

[Gilbert Cruz]

I listened to the audiobook version and it was coming to the end. It's Will Patton, and my heart stopped when the book stopped. I thought it was incredible. You know what? I am going to read it.

[Clint Bentley]

You should read it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'm going to read it and then

[Clint Bentley]

you can cut it out if you want.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I'll listen to it and then you're going to tell me why it's so great. So bear with me. This is the ending of Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams. The main character, Robert Greinear, is in a theater watching a performance on stage by someone that is referred to as a wolf boy. But they hushed all at once and quite Abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms strayed out from his shoulders and went rigid and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back and open his throat. And a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor. And it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful. The originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever. He was pretty good.

[Clint Bentley]

He was okay. He knew what he was doing.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Why is that so great?

[Clint Bentley]

I mean, as soon as you like, I came to that, and I was like, that's the end of the movie. That's perfect. That's gonna be fantastic. What an ending. And then we shot that. And then two things happened. One, you realize very quickly, at least for where, for my abilities now as a filmmaker, I could not translate the magic of that. How do you do the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made? Right. What does that sound like? And we tried some versions in sound design to make something like that and couldn't do it. And then simultaneously, like, we had a very early version of the plane sequence. It's in the book as well. And that was going to lead up to this ending. And we were watching the film down, and it was just so clear that after that plane sequence, the film was over, like, that's it. And then the rest of it's just kind of trailing off. And as an artist or a filmmaker, you either listen to that or you don't, at your own peril. And so I listened to it, and we started restructuring the ending around

[Gilbert Cruz]

the

[Clint Bentley]

biplane sequence and letting that be the natural ending of the film.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I mean, it's a very moving ending. 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, the final moments of his life, you go up into the air, and then. And then it's over. It was great.

[Clint Bentley]

Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Coming up, Clint has a few recommendations about what you should read next.

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[Gilbert Cruz]

So, Clint. For more than a decade, every week, the New York Times Book Review has asked authors a recurring set of questions about their reading and their reading lives. It's part of a series that we call by the Book. So, Clint Bentley, I have some extremely specific book questions for you. First, what is your favorite book that no one else has heard of?

[Clint Bentley]

There's one that I have recommended to so many people, and I just recommended to someone like three days ago, and it was one that no one had ever heard of, but I found somebody who's read it. It's called the Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It's by Michael Ondanche. It's. It's so much more than what it sounds like. It's this very strange book that is a collection of short stories, photographs, poetry. It's just like, it's hard to categorize what exactly it is. It's a very magical book where you, like, you don't know what you're going to encounter as you flip each page.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I've never heard of this.

[Clint Bentley]

It's fantastic. He's got another one that he did a similar thing with that I've got, like, Coming from the Library so I can. So I can read it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

But I love that you're a library guy, always. Are there any classic novels that you only just recently read for the first time?

[Clint Bentley]

Well, yeah, that is an ongoing thing. I feel like I'm forever catching up with one that I've got here that I just picked up that I sadly have never read. To the Lighthouse.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Oh, wow.

[Clint Bentley]

I've read like, you know, I've read Virginia Woolf's prose, but I've never read a full book by her. And so I just picked up.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You have a copy there?

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And are there any that you avoid just are not to your liking?

[Clint Bentley]

There are no genres that I avoid. There are ones that I read less. Like, I don't read that much sci fi, but not out of not liking it. Just. Just out of, like, I don't know that I'm as drawn to it. But the books that I love the most and the things that I'm drawn to the most are books that, like, aren't of a specific genre and. And break apart the conventions of whatever genre they're working in. Like that on Dante book or. I've just gotten into John Berger recently and started reading some of his fiction, which is lovely.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Is there a specific title that you would recommend?

[Clint Bentley]

I would, and it's a bit out of order. He did this trilogy that I just, like, stumbled upon. The second one is the one that I started with and that I read called Once in Europa. But it's a collection of. It's like a short story cycle. And I think for fans of Train Dreams might be fans of that as well, because there's very similar themes about life kind of moving on and leaving people behind and some wonderful things coming from modernization and some really tragic things coming from it.

[Gilbert Cruz]

You're a filmmaker who obviously loves books and loves reading. Is there a book about filmmaking that you would recommend that people read?

[Clint Bentley]

Oh, yes. I'll give you a couple, depending on your flavor. There's been a few that have been written by or about filmmakers that are really, I think, special. Tarkovsky has one. Andrei Tarkovsky has one called Sculpting in Time. That is a really phenomenal book. And he was at the end of his life, towards the end of his life, when he wrote it. And it's very much like not only him reflecting on his life, but him reflecting on the form. And so it's got both him speaking biographically about how he became who he is as an artist, while also talking about what he feels like is special about the form and unique about the form. There's another one about David Lean. It's just called David Lean A Biography. And it's just. It's like that thick, but it goes film by film.

[Gilbert Cruz]

Of course. The biography of David Lean is going to be epic, and it's really got

[Clint Bentley]

to be really good. And I think really, like, gives a glimpse not only of that artist, but also of, like, film developing over the. Like, like film as a medium developing over the 20th century. And last one, I'll say, is not film related, but I love it and I recommend it to everybody. It's called Coltrane on Coltrane, and it's a collection of interviews with John Coltrane that I have learned so much as an artist and about life. It's such a special book.

[Gilbert Cruz]

I think that's it. I think I ran out of questions.

[Clint Bentley]

I feel like we could talk for another hour.

[Gilbert Cruz]

So do I. Clint, thank you so much for joining the Book review podcast. This has been a real delight.

[Clint Bentley]

It's been a joy. Thank you for having me.

[Gilbert Cruz]

This show is produced by Amy Pearl and Sarah Diamond. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and Paula Schumann and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Our theme was composed by Elisheba Itu. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening. Oh, no.

[Clint Bentley]

My coffee.

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