Production designer Alexandra Schaller approaches world-building with the eye of an installation artist and the instinct of a sculptor, shaping the land itself.
Her background, which spans the textured futurism of “After Yang” and the sprawling musical world of “The Get Down”, has made her one of the most quietly transformative visual storytellers working today. As she explains, “Land art looks as though it’s been there forever, but also that it could disappear back into the earth at any moment. And that’s really the feeling we wanted to emulate… We built vast amounts of sets for this movie.” That philosophy is fully realized in Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams”, a film where nearly every object, log, and structure was crafted with intention.
Adapted from Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella, “Train Dreams” follows laborer Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in the early 20th-century American West, charting a life shaped by love, loss, and the violent collision between wilderness and industrial progress. As Grainier builds railroads through old-growth forests, he finds tenderness in building a home with his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their young daughter. Shot across Washington and Idaho, the film leans heavily into natural light, interior textures, and a sense of spiritual grounding.
That ethos is found in Schaller’s remarkable log cabin, constructed entirely from real timber and positioned with meticulous attention to the movement of the sun throughout the day. Working closely with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, sometimes over FaceTime with a compass in hand, Schaller ensured every corner would harvest natural light as a fully functioning structure built to withstand fire, weather, and a shooting style that demanded freedom of movement and documentary-style observation.
Equally ambitious was the train and its trestle bridge, both of which Schaller’s team ultimately built after months of failed searches for period-accurate locations or equipment. Rescuing pieces of a dilapidated former bridge near the Canadian border, she created a functioning construction site and designed a locomotive from scratch when no museum-owned trains could reach the remote location. The result is a set piece that feels entirely convincing and authentic.
Alexandra Schaller spoke with Awards Focus about shaping a world that appears untouched by time, the collaboration and problem-solving behind each major build, and why the most “invisible” production design is often the hardest to achieve.
AF: What was it like for you watching the final cut of the film?
Alexandra Schaller: I have a very close relationship with the filmmaker Clint Bentley, and he was very inclusive of me in his editorial process. I’ve seen the movie a lot of times on the tiny screen. I will say that it actually didn’t take any of the magic away from seeing it for the first time on the big screen, which was at Sundance. There’s so much to be said for the energy in the room, and it’s really why we make this artwork, right? The artwork comes alive when people see it.
AF: I was lucky to be at a screening with Clint giving a Q&A afterwards, and he was talking a lot about how production was halted during the writers’ and actors’ strikes and that he was living on location for months at a time.
What was your relationship to the project during that period, and were you able to be on location and start to scout for the color design and palette?
Schaller: I went to Scout twice, actually, before we ended up going back to shoot the movie for real. I did have some time on the ground to take in the landscape, and Clint, Adolpho, and I were all there on the second time. We identified key looks of those places that didn’t end up ultimately being where we shot, but we identified the looks of the different places that Clint was able to really hone in on when he was up there on his own for months
AF: The film feels very of the earth, and it also takes place during the turn of the century. When you were reading the script, what kind of challenges did you identify?
Schaller: The most challenging part of this movie was figuring out how to recreate a world that doesn’t exist anymore, especially on such a modest budget. You mentioned the movie’s feeling of the Earth, and that was really one of our guiding principles for the design of the movie. Our approach was that we wanted it to be a very immersive experience. We wanted the production design to be invisible, almost so the audience could be transported back to another time. We didn’t want a museum diorama feeling where we’re recreating the past telegraphing. We wanted to evoke a feeling.
One of the first things we connected over was the work of the land artists, like Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, and James Turrell. They make these monumental artworks off the land and use the natural landscape as both the material and the canvas. Land art looks as though it’s been there forever, but also that it could disappear back into the earth at any moment. And that’s really the feeling we wanted to emulate and how we wanted to approach the design of the film, because it doesn’t look like that now. We built vast amounts of sets for this movie. Almost everything you see is built, including some of the trees, because those trees don’t exist anymore. But rather than using a sound stage, we built all of our sets and environments on location so that we were always immersed in this grand nature and beautiful landscape.
AF: I’m thinking about the scene where Paul Schneider’s character and the other men are approached by a man looking for someone specific, and everyone’s scattered around, sitting amongst logs.
Was that part of the land art that was placed there to look like it is of the natural world, but is actually something that’s constructed?
Schaller: That was a section of the film that we actually scouted and shot on the west side of Washington state. Most of it we shot on the eastern side, on the Idaho border. Very little there could be altered, but the placement of the logs was very specific. That was an environment where we couldn’t bring anything from outside the park into it. But there are lots of other sets where we did place everything in a curated way.
AF: How big were the constructed pieces, and did they require weight to ground them for realism?
Schaller: We made a lot of them out of foam because one person can move a foam log. A lot of those big, 12-foot-diameter trees that you see are all constructed by us. Any trees that you see being pulled by horses are all trees constructed by us. I mean, we built the log cabin out of real logs, and we had heavy machinery and an excavator and the workmen, putting it together for us and moving them around.
AF: The film is mostly lit using natural light, and in the evening, it was candlelight. How did that influence the way you were designing the interiors of the cabin and the textures that we would be able to see with that lighting?
Schaller: That was a key part of the way that we wanted the movie to look. I built the cabin, and I built the plane at the end for the last scene of the movie. I built the fire tower. I built the train that goes over the bridge. We built tons and tons of stuff, and at every point, I was in conversation with Adolpho, and sometimes, in the cases where I had to scout on my own, I had my phone compass, and I was FaceTiming him, saying, “Okay, we’re this many degrees south, southeast, can I put the corner here?” Everything was really in the right space to harvest the light, and the cabin was the same.
We were looking for a spiritual plot of land, and we scouted so many pieces of property, but none of them worked. We were really down to the wire when we found the one we ultimately went with. However, we chose it because of its tremendous natural beauty, and also because we could position the cabin in a way that caught the light nicely, allowing us to do a practical fire burn, which we had wanted to do. The texture of the materials was important for the lighting, but it was also important for the world to feel really immersive and real.
We could have built the cabin out of fake logs and aged it, but there was something about everything being made of natural materials, super textural, and very lived-in. Tactile was important for the actors, but also for the way that it would catch the light. It was a fully immersive, complete, fully functioning cabin because of the way Clint and Adolpho wanted to shoot it. They wanted a sort of documentary-like style of observation and camera work. So, I prepped the cabin in my mind for any possible scenario to make sure that the actors had the perfect playground.
AF: I have a list of questions, and now I have a thousand more.
Schaller: [laughs] I have a lot of time.
AF: I have to back track because I’m amazed that you built the tracks and the train. Can you talk a bit about that? I just assumed that that was something you would find on a location would be able to use, but how did you construct that?
Schaller: Originally, we were going to build, and we went through so many different scenarios of how we were going to build the train. My excavator, who was helping us build the cabin, Butch, said that he knew a guy. We worked with a lot of local people, and he knew a guy with a piece of property way up by the Canadian border. He said there’s a dilapidated former trestle bridge there that we should see, and we were desperate at this point. We were about to start breaking ground to build a piece of bridge that jotted out and talking to a VFX supervisor and everything. So, for the bridge itself, we were able to sort of rescue pieces of this old trestle bridge, but we had to make it look like it was under construction.
We had to set up a whole logging camp for the train construction operation. Then we needed to train a locomotive to go across the bridge because they wanted to see if the bridge is going to hold. It’s this big moment in the movie, and we called all the railway museums looking for historically accurate machinery and locomotives. Firstly, they’re not operational anymore. And secondly, we were way up on the Canadian border, so how were we gonna get it there? So we were like, okay, we’re just going to have to build it. And so we did. That was kind of the approach to everything. We couldn’t find, in the most beautiful state in the US, fire towers; we couldn’t find one to shoot in that wasn’t under snow or wasn’t completely inaccessible, or wasn’t this or wasn’t that. And so we ended up building it
AF: Was the fire tower a set on the ground, or were you building it upwards?
Schaller: That was a set on the ground. We found a beautiful piece of property. Again, it was a very last-minute situation. Like, we thought we had access to this one perfect fire tower, and we didn’t have access to it at the very last minute because it was under a bunch of snow. So, that was a location that I scouted alone because Clint and Adolpho were already shooting. That’s the famous compass story with me facing the right direction. I found this beautiful piece of property that was at a very high elevation, where I thought if I put the fire tower on the ground here, it’s still gonna look like it’s way, way high up.
I worked really closely with the VFX supervisor. I did a lot of concept art about how high the fire tower should be and what materials it should be made of. I worked really closely with him, making it look like it was up on stilts. One thing that was really important to me for that fire tower was for the structure to be made of logs as opposed to a metal structure. We come to the fire tower in the 1940s, by which point everything was beginning to be converted to metal, and it was very important to me to feel the presence of the trees and the logs throughout the movie.
AF: The scene where Robert takes flight is so beautiful. Can you talk about constructing the plane?
Schaller: We thought, “Oh, silly us, we’re gonna get a period plane, and we’re gonna put the actor in the plane and shoot the scene.” Little did we know that the insurance company didn’t agree with that. Adolpho’s and Clint’s reference was an epic plane scene from a Christopher Nolan movie. So, we found an airfield and a plane collector who had vintage planes, which is the plane that you see from a distance in the movie. We built a copy of it essentially on a gimbal so that Joel and the pilot could get in there and move around.
AF: It’s just so seamless watching the film that everything feels of the land and it feels of the air, and it all feels authentic, but thinking about the cabin and hearing how deliberate the construction was in terms of the lighting, I keep thinking how for an Assistant director that could be a logistical, scheduling nightmare. How much do those factors impact the designing and shooting schedules?
Schaller: The scheduling of the whole movie was a logistical situation because of the very specific hours. The morning that we shot the scene of the cabin overgrown and Grainier turning into a plant and being reclaimed by the land was a morning where we got up before dawn, and it was five of us in the cabin. It was me, Adolpho, Clint, the gaffer, and the focus puller. And that’s it, because we had to catch the light at dawn or at magic hour in the evening. Figuring out the order in which we would shoot the cabin was also really particular because it was really important to us to burn the cabin for real. It’s not a VFX fire. It’s a real fire. You feel that when you watch the movie. The inspiration for that was Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” because the burn in that movie is so visceral. We wanted to try to recreate that feeling.
AF: I remember watching the film and feeling the heat of the fire. Robert also spends a lot of time in that area with the remnants of the cabin. How much of the cabin was left from the fire that you created?
Schaller: We actually shot that on a different piece of property that we had to make look like the same piece of property. That was a challenge because we needed a cabin in relation to a body of water, in relation to trees. I think it’s a miracle. We can pat ourselves on the back for that. One of the times we were in Spokane before we ended up shooting, we ended up being stuck there because there was a terrible forest fire. I have a screenshot on my phone of us being surrounded by fires that we couldn’t leave. We ended up shooting the piece of property that we used for the burn site, where that forest fire was.
But then, the site where the cabin was, we had to practically burn ourselves, and the thing is about land that’s devastated by fire is that the soil becomes very fertile, so we had to get rid of all of this lush greenery that was springing up. When we transformed the cabin to the rebuilt version of the cabin, we wanted to make sure to char the logs to make it look like he had rebuilt the cabin using remnants of the forest that hadn’t been completely destroyed.
AF: What is it like for you seeing actors as their characters in the environments you’ve created, and to see the performances that utilize what is around them?
Schaller: It was actually really beautiful. My background is in fine art, installation art, and immersive theater design. We joked that we could Airbnb the cabin if we hadn’t burned it. There was nothing fake about it. It was all real. I think it really transported the actors to another place. And look, they’re wonderful actors. They could have acted against a sheet on the wall and been able to be convincing. But there is a magic that I feel when I see them in that environment.
AF: If I was going to Airbnb any place, it would be the fire tower.
Schaller: I know, right? In Washington state, it’s not Airbnb, but you can book the fire tower and sleep there. It’s very cool.
AF: Send me for two weeks off the grid in that fire tower. It’s got everything I need.
Schaller: I feel like invisible production design is almost the hardest. Just making sure that you’re not drawing attention to yourself at all is quite hard to do. I’m happy that everybody is so convinced that they feel like everything we shot was just as we found it.
