The film “Train Dreams,” directed by Clint Bentley and based on the beloved novella by Denis Johnson, is a profoundly moving portrait of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an everyman logger whose life unfolds against the seismic industrial and ecological changes of early 20th century America. Now streaming on Netflix , the film has emerged as a major awards contender, praised for its beautiful story and powerful acting performances, including those of Academy Award nominee Felicity Jones and Academy Award nominee William H. Macy. The narrative, co-written by Bentley and Greg Kwedar, centers on Grainier’s journey of love, loss, and endurance, but its true visual weight is carried by Director of Photography Adolpho Veloso, who collaborated with Bentley on the visually striking film “Jockey”.
Veloso’s work anchors the film in a powerful sense of memory and emotional reality. The aesthetic challenge, as he discusses, was balancing the historical distance of a period piece where the settings and clothing are unfamiliar with the need for the audience to feel the story could be their own. Veloso and Bentley countered this distance by embracing a rigorous naturalistic approach, relying on natural light, staying close to the characters, and utilizing a 3:2 aspect ratio, which Veloso notes is commonly associated with old family photos and memories. The goal was to preserve the spirit of the text and translate it into visuals that connect on an emotional level.
Crucially, the narrative of a man who travels for work and returns to a life that has moved on resonated deeply with the DP’s own experience. Veloso recognized that the protagonist’s constant cycle of leaving and returning, and the resulting “sense of, What has changed while I was gone?”, mirrored the life of a cinematographer who spends months away on set. This personal connection informed his cinematic choices, driving him to ensure the audience could feel Grainier’s recurring sense of disorientation every time he returns home.
The film, shot primarily in Washington state, is a visual triumph of scale. Veloso approached the natural world as a character, simultaneously showcasing its “beauty and its danger”. This dichotomy is achieved through powerful contrast: cutting from moments of extreme intimacy with the characters to vast, majestic wide shots where the scale of nature reminds the viewer of human “insignificance”. This tension between intimacy and scale, vulnerability and destruction is, Veloso argues, “at the heart of the film”.
A major technical and thematic challenge was capturing the scenes of natural destruction, particularly the fire sequences. Fire is central to the story, serving as a layer of meaning: a light source, a source of warmth, and a force of devastating destruction. Veloso’s team achieved the terrifying realism by studying actual wildfire footage and using real fire (candles, campfires) whenever possible, noting that “real flame has texture, movement, and unpredictability”. This approach ensured the actors could feel and react to the palpable danger, anchoring the scenes in realism.
The intimacy captured on screen is a direct result of the creative environment fostered by Bentley and Veloso. Veloso highlights the need for a “smaller footprint,” removing stands and artificial lights to allow actors to move freely and inhabit the space authentically. This collaborative freedom allowed beautiful, unscripted moments and improvisations to be captured, fulfilling Bentley’s mandate of “letting the actors interpret and inhabit the story with honesty and spontaneity”. The voice of Robert Grainier is provided by Will Patton, who also narrated the original audiobook.
Adolpho Veloso spoke to Awards Focus about the process of defining the film’s memorable 3:2 aspect ratio, the subtle techniques used to frame violence and convey deep emotion, the rewarding technical work of translating the devastation of fire to the screen, and how his own peripatetic life as a cinematographer made him the right visual storyteller for Robert Grainier’s epic journey of endurance.
Awards Focus: Adolfo, it’s nice to meet you. I really loved the film. The film has a complex visual identity, incorporating flashbacks and dreams. How did you and the director conceive the central look of the film, and how would you describe it?
Veloso: Well, I think there’s a few things. We really wanted the movie to feel like watching someone’s lost memories. Almost like you find this box full of pictures, and you’re trying to piece those pictures together to go through that person’s life. With memories, it’s not often that you remember them the same way that things actually happened. You usually remember things different ways. Some things you might remember really well where you can see how you were moving through that space and how people interacted. Sometimes you would just have a feeling about it, or you just remember how you saw things through a door or through a window.
We really wanted to have that mixed feeling of, okay, some things you remember well, some things we are immersed, moving with those characters, and some things we are just seeing from a distance, and the camera is just seeing them through the window. From that, we arrived on the aspect ratio we used, which is basically a 3:2 aspect ratio. We landed on that because that’s the aspect ratio you’ll probably find on your old family photos, or even your pictures you take on your phone nowadays. People tend to associate that aspect ratio with memories.
And because at the same time, we didn’t want it to feel detached, we wanted to make it as approachable as possible. That can be hard sometimes on a period piece, because everything you’re seeing is very different from your life. We thought that being as grounded as possible could help to have a better, approachable movie. Natural lighting and being as organic as possible was part of that. I tend to think that nothing can beat natural lighting when you can plan well and schedule accordingly and really get the best out of it. And in this movie, especially because it is a movie that talks a lot about nature, it was really important to keep as naturalistic as possible.
AF: The original novella focuses on creating an emotional interior space, which you captured through the lens of memory. Since the story is set in the Pacific Northwest, did you also shoot there?
Veloso: Yeah, we shot everything in Washington state and all over the state. We just drove all around the state to find the perfect locations, to find a different landscape, to find older forests, to find some more devastated areas so we could show how everything changed during those years and decades, and how we as humans affected nature.
AF: The film contains violent scenes—a man being thrown off a bridge, another being shot—yet they are never close up or center frame. What approach and dynamic were you establishing with that specific framing choice?
Veloso: It is interesting because those memories, especially the first one with the guy being thrown from the bridge, are something that haunts his life up until the end. I feel like overdramatizing it and almost having a classic Hollywood approach to it, seeing the height of the fall and all the emotions, would kind of overdramatize something that is already impactful enough. The actions themselves can be impactful enough. So we decided that seeing those things through someone’s perspective that is just witnessing what’s happening felt like the right call.
Basically that’s what you have on those scenes. On that first one, you are basically just moving around that scene with Robert, played by Joe, and then you see almost through his perspective. On the other one, the guy being shot, you are basically just there, watching from a distance, like you are one of those guys, just watching what’s happening. So it was a bit of that, just trying to make the viewer feel like he is just another person watching those things happen.
AF: The fire sequence is both terrifying and artistically beautiful. What was the artistic choice and collaborative decision with Clint to achieve that dichotomy on screen?
Veloso: Yeah, it’s interesting what you said, how fire can be terrifying and beautiful at the same time. I feel like it is such a magical, hypnotic thing. We need fire; fire gave us light, gave us warmth, and it still does. But at the same time, it can be very destructive. And I feel like those two things are so interesting: how we as humans have a relationship with things that can be very helpful but very harmful at the same time. It’s the same thing that we do to nature also. We need it for everything, basically, but we also destroy it and we just prejudice it.
The main challenge was to recreate a big fire, especially because everything else in the movie is made with real fire. All the candles you see, all the campfires, everything is actual fire. But then for that big fire, obviously we didn’t burn the forest down, so for that one, we had to use lights. The main challenge was to make that match everything else we had on the movie in terms of real fire. For that, we did a lot of tests, and we had an amazing crew that put together a huge rig that was basically a wall of lights that mimicked the fire. I feel like those images are super scary, especially for people that experienced real fire. So we wanted to be as faithful as possible to that, and we watched a bunch of real fire footage to chase that instead of chasing a glamorized version of a fire.
AF: Given the film’s reliance on observation and quiet, emotional moments from Joe Edgerton’s character, how did you use proximity to the actors to capture his absorbing, listening, and remembering?
Veloso: I feel like a big part of that is creating a relationship with the cast and making sure there is a trust. That goes to things like having a smaller footprint to allow them the space and allow them to inhabit that place instead of constraining them so much. One of the good things about using natural light, for example, is that you don’t have a lot of stands around. You don’t have a lot of LED lights around someone who is trying to portray someone who lived in the 1920s, dressed in a weird way and talking in a different way. So I think the more you can do to make them feel comfortable and free in those spaces, and to capture whatever they’re giving and to allow them to move in and out and not keep trying to hit marks or whatever, allows a bit of that dimension to come out.
All those moments, because you don’t have much dialogue in this movie, a lot of it came from Joe and his amazing ability to just give so much just with his face and the way he would behave. So it is a collaboration, and I feel like Clint is such an amazing director. One of the greatest things to work with him is that he’s always allowing those moments to happen, and he’s always embracing things that happen that weren’t planned for the best. A lot of those little moments came out of improvisations and other things that were not necessarily scripted or were scripted in a different way.
AF: How did you come to be part of this project?
Veloso: I shot Clint’s first movie, called Jockey, and it was great to work with him. We really connected and felt like the start of a good relationship, also on building a language. I was really hoping to work with him again, and for my happiness, he was also happy to work with me again. When he got the book to adapt, he told me and was sending me the first drafts. We were talking from the beginning on how to do it. That started early on when he got the project, and it was just great to work with him again and be able to evolve a relationship and a language we started on Jockey. We could look back to everything we liked about what we did on Jockey, everything that we didn’t like, and everything that we felt that we could have done better, and kind of also understand that this was a new story, but bring back all the experience we had on Jockey to kind of keep building a language together.
AF: This is more of a prestige art film than a box office record-breaker. When deciding on projects, what do you consider a good outcome for a film like this when it is made?
Veloso: I think maybe that’s the wrong person to ask as a DP. I feel like there’s probably a lot of people that think a lot about the reasons to do a movie and what outcome you can have out of them. But for me, it’s a lot about just connecting with the story. The reason I do what I do is just because when I was a kid, I fell in love with filmmaking and cinema, and then I decided to do that. I basically just want to work, but work on movies that somehow remind me of the movies I like as a viewer. That doesn’t necessarily mean a box office movie. So for me, it’s all about the script and the story and the vision. I feel like it’s important also to see what the vision behind it is, because sometimes a simple story can be told in such a beautiful way. So I feel like those two aspects are the most important thing. And that doesn’t mean that it can be a huge movie or a movie that is focusing on box office. If I connect to it, it doesn’t matter.
AF: Box office doesn’t equate to whether the film is great or not. Regarding the final flying scene, I observed a change in the color tones. What were you trying to convey with the brightening of the light and the different expressions from Joe?
Veloso: I think what was done beautifully in the edit on that scene was that we are basically seeing a montage of his whole life. What he used on that montage was different takes from the ones that were previously used on the movie. A lot of the images you see are either somehow brighter because of the time of the day they were shot, or because whatever is happening on screen is just a better version somehow of what actually happened.
There’s this scene where he’s, in the beginning of the movie, going to go for the cut, and he’s saying goodbye to his family, but the daughter doesn’t really give a damn about it. He just shows her a flower and she just goes away. That’s what actually happened when we were shooting it. And then we had the chance to shoot another take where she actually reacted well to it. Those are the two different takes. So the way he remembers it is that she was actually caring about it, but in reality, not necessarily. I feel like that whole montage was built beautifully, put together by Clint and Parker, the editor, with making a different version of those memories by simply just choosing different moments or different takes or scenes that we haven’t necessarily seen before. That contrasted with the images of the plane and the different perspective. We don’t have any drone shots in the movie. We’re not seeing the world from above ever on the movie until that moment. So everything kind of is just about showing a different perspective on everything.
AF: Is there a specific interpretation of Joe’s journey that you most connect with, or that you hope audiences take away?
Veloso: For me, it’s funny because I keep saying that I really connected with the script the first time I read it, just because of how that character’s life is. He’s going to work away from home for several months with a bunch of people that he doesn’t know. A few of them are weirdos, and he might see them again, he might not see them again. And then whenever he goes back home, it’s really hard to reconnect with his family. He missed a lot of things that changed while he was away, so it’s hard to feel like he belongs back to that place.
That’s basically what I feel with my life. I go away, I stay several months away from home, shooting a movie with a bunch of people I never saw before in a different country, sometimes different places I’ve never been before. Some people I might see again in 20 years from now, some I might not. And then whenever I go back home, it’s really hard to feel like I belong to that place again, really hard to reconnect to my family or even just the place itself.
I remember saying that to Clint, and he was like, “Oh my God, that’s amazing. I never expected that you, coming from Brazil, will relate to this story about this guy in the Pacific Northwest that is a logger that lived 100 years before you.” I feel like there’s something in this movie, and talking to people, people always connect with something different. I feel like there is, because it is a story of a regular person that didn’t do anything special besides life itself, which is already special, and all the struggles. They didn’t discover anything, they were not a superhero or whatever. I feel like there’s something relatable for everybody to connect somehow.
AF: Do you think people will connect to this period piece as a reflection of what people are going through in today’s world?
Veloso: Yeah, I hope so. There are so many themes in the movie that are so contemporary, from the fires to what’s happening with nature and the way we are treating it and all the consequences we’re facing, through the human themes and emotions and loss and grief and the fact that life can be very challenging, even though you’re not fighting crime or doing anything crazy. I feel like there are a lot of things that make it approachable and connectable. I just hope that actually happens.
AF: After seeing the final version, is there a favorite scene or shot that you’re most proud of?
Veloso: I think all those little moments that came from just improvisation. We planned so many things, and we shot so many really well-planned shots, but sometimes we’d have 15 minutes to spare, and we would just grab something at the moment, and they would do something. We just grabbed those moments. Sometimes they are in the movie for like ten seconds, sometimes they became something bigger. But watching those moments felt so special already back then, and watching them in the movie, it feels even more special.
AF: I really appreciate the time. I hope this is not the only time we’ll get to talk, and we’ll get to see you throughout the award season.
Veloso: Thank you very much for talking.