Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar are having a particularly good week.
The filmmaking team behind Jockey and Sing Sing are debuting their latest project, Train Dreams, at the Sundance Film Festival days after receiving their first Oscar nominations for best adapted screenplay. “It’s a great problem to have,” says Bentley of his already packed year and crush of good news. “It’s been nice to have something to work on so you don’t get too caught up in the awards race of it all.”
Train Dreams, based on the Pulitzer finalist from author Dennis Johnson, follows Robert Grainier, a laborer in Idaho and Washington State as he quietly works on the area’s burgeoning train system and later its logging operations. Despite being only a slight 117 pages long, the novella is expansive, taking Grainier through the end of Westward Expansion, the loss of his beloved wife and daughter and into the 1960s. The star heavy cast includes Joel Edgerton, Kerry Condon, Felicity Jones, William H. Macy and Clifton Collins Jr.
As they continue to earn accolades for Sing Sing, Train Dreams, which will debut in Park City on Sunday, Jan. 26, is the biggest swing to date for the filmmakers, who co-write their projects but trade off on directing duties. The melodic film guides audiences through the moments that populate some three decades of one man’s life and expands the scope of Bentley and Kwedar’s filmmaking without sacrificing the grounded style that makes them two of the current bellwethers of practical, independent filmmaking.
“I wanted to represent people of a time, and specifically men of a time,” explains Bentley of his hope for Train Dreams. The director grew up in northeastern Florida on a working cattle ranch. “My grandfather’s generation, or even my dad’s generation, didn’t even have the words to say even when they were happy, much less when they were going through grief. And yet they felt big things.” For Grainier still waters run deep and Edgerton, says the filmmakers, was the right performer to handle the mixture of masculinity and vulnerability.
“I’m really conflict-averse, and sometimes I feel like I let my life drift along,” says Edgerton of relating to the character’s apparent passivity. “One thing always struck me about Grainier is that he wished for certain things, or he had certain ideas, but maybe never felt like the ceiling of possibilities for himself was low, that he didn’t have a right to choose his own path in life.”
Like Bentley, Edgerton, whose grandfather was a bullock driver in Australia, was interested in portraying the life of a would-be-forgotten everyman. Edgerton says, “You’re one or two questions away from finding out somebody’s life is actually deeply fascinating.”
Typically, period movies are focused on titans of industry or a figure that cuts a particularly imposing image. “I wanted to celebrate a life, even in just a quiet way,” says the director. “The history books talk about big movements like Westward Expansion. But we don’t talk about the random Joe or Chen or Amy who was there in that moment and lived a very rich and beautiful life, and yet was completely forgotten.”
Before they started to write, Bentley and Kwedar decamped to Bonners Ferry, Idaho the area where the book is set. They drove around dense forests listening to the audiobook of Train Dreams and hired a naturalist to teach them about the land. Says Kwedar, “Then we kind of talked our way into logging camps and hung out with some loggers.” How does someone talk their way onto logging camps? “Usually, you find someone at a bar.”
Unlike past projects, where the filmmakers were by each other’s side on set, Kwedar had to promote Sing Sing during production. When he did make his way to the Spokane set, he remembers, “I was like, ‘Whoa.’” They had generators, trucks, trailers, and exceptional craft services, all the trappings of a bigger [comparatively] budgeted film.
And yet, says Kwedar, “It still felt like he was just sneaking away with a camera and a couple actors. It felt like a continuation of the type of magic he found on Jockey with the 10-person crew.”
“We have less than $400,000 to make Jockey with. It feels a lot more expansive because you’re filming in this world that already exists,” explains Bentley. Their 2021 feature was shot on a working Arizona racetrack with lead Collins Jr. surrounded by real racehorse jockeys, while Sing Sing shot with a cast of formerly incarcerated performers in a decommissioned prison.
For Train Dreams, they filmed in forests that were actively being logged and worked with Washington State University as it undertook general forest management. The result is expansive shots on clearcut hillsides and stunning images of towering trees crashing to the forest floor. The production shot at an old trestle bridge from the early 1900s, one of the few left, found on someone’s private property. Elsewhere, the crew also built an entire log cabin on a riverbank. Says Bentley, “That’s something we maybe could have done on a stage somewhere with an LED screen, and maybe a bigger project would have done that.”
Train Dreams, which is seeking distribution out of the festival, also touches on our relationship, often fraught, with nature. Says Bentley, “We feel very much in control of things. We can push a button and change the temperature in our homes. We are untouchable until something happens and we realize how delicate we are.”
In the film, a wildfire rips through the forest surrounding Grainier’s home, his cabin is destroyed and his wife and daughter end up missing. Production was initially meant to shoot in 2023 but the writers and actors strike shut down production. As everyone was readying to head back home, a wildfire ignited outside of Spokane.
“It was very surreal to watch,” says the director, noting that Train Dreams draws from historical fires in the region from 1921 to 1923. The film premieres in Park City as Los Angeles is reeling from devastating wildfires that have destroyed over 14,00 structures and caused multiple fatalities.
Says Bentley, “There was so much about this story that felt, even though it was set in the past, so relevant to our world.”
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