In Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) spends much of his life working as a logger, meeting a variety of people along the way while longing for more time with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and young daughter.
Awards Buzz spoke with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso about his work on the project, which reunites him with Jockey writer-director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar. He had plenty to share about the film’s scope and how it’s meant to capture a large swath of time in one person’s life:
“We really wanted the movie to feel like watching someone’s lost memories somehow, just putting together a few impressions of someone’s life. We always say, almost like finding a box full of pictures, looking at those pictures and trying to piece together their life. You’re not necessarily seeing all parts of it, but somehow when you see those images together, you can make the connections yourself. There is a bit of space for imagination also. Those images are sometimes different from each other, and there are big jumps in time, but somehow you can understand their life. You see it out of order, you see things like not necessarily how they were, just how they were imagined or how they were photographed or how they were remembered. It was about giving that impression. The book is a short book, it’s not that many pages. We really wanted to give time for the film to breathe and to have silence and to have all those moments. It was a combination of knowing that in advance and shooting with that in mind but also a brilliant job done by Clint and the editor Parker Laramie to convey what was important and what could be left behind.”
Watch the video above to hear about the shooting process and how Veloso feels about the possible formats in which people will watch the film.
Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.
