“The studio heads were like, ‘It looks nice.’ ‘We shall pass!’: Joel Edgerton and Clint Bentley on the Oscar-winning Woodsman’s Tragedy | film

America was built by men like Robert Grenier, the brave woodsman at the heart of Train Dreams. Grenier cuts down trees, tames the forest, and paves the way for railways and cities. Technically, Train Dreams is a Western. But he never hitched a wheel, shot a bandit, or circled the wagons before the Comanche attacked the plains. The small print tells a different story.

It was a difficult movie to get out, as actor Joel Edgerton admits: It’s an uphill struggle; Lots of studio fear. “You go into a meeting and say, ‘Well, it’s a movie about someone who doesn’t really make his own choices. “It’s kind of driven by life.”

Director Clint Bentley agrees: “He’s not much of a hero.” “Also, there are some supernatural elements.”

“It’s a spiritual film,” Edgerton adds. “You have to be patient.”

Bentley plays the studio head. “It looks beautiful,” he says. “It looks nice. We’ll pass.”

I’m glad they got it over the line. “Train Dreams” is beautiful, soulful, but also tough, merciless and grounded, planted in the soil of the Pacific Northwest and grown lovingly from Dennis Johnson’s 2011 novella. Edgerton plays Grenier, an itinerant 20th-century Idaho logger, dwarfed by towering spruces and white pines. Each job takes him deeper into the boreal woods, far from his wife and infant daughter, Katie. “I feel like I’m missing out on her whole life,” he complains.

I met Edgerton and Bentley at a London hotel, their final stop on an ongoing international press tour. Edgerton explains that he just arrived from Los Angeles and will be leaving for New York in the morning, which means he will be away from his children for the next two weeks. “Despite my privileges, I still cannot reconcile my work life with my family,” he tells me. “I mean, sure I can rule the world. I’m an important actor, I can do whatever I want. But no. I’m a contract worker and the kids have to be in school. If they don’t go to school, I’ll go to jail.”

So what does it say: Hollywood filmmaking is the business-class version of logging? “Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” he laughs. “That’s right. Woe is me.”

Edgerton has been in the ring for 30 years, working mostly as a hired hand but occasionally developing and directing his own film projects. He first read Train Dreams a decade ago, discovered the film rights had been taken, and reluctantly left it behind. By the time Bentley cast him in the lead role, he had settled in London with his journalist partner, Christine Centenara, and had recently welcomed the arrival of the twins. In the middle of the story, Grenier’s life takes a tragic turn. Rereading Johnson’s novella, Edgerton found that it spoke to him more than ever before.

“I don’t have Robert’s tragedy inside me, but I imagined it,” he says. “Once you become a parent, you imagine that and it’s terrifying. In the lead up to our children coming into the world, there was a moment when we thought they wouldn’t make it. And I find that when I think about those days, there’s a pit in my stomach that will live there forever.”

Train Dreams is a joint project between Edgerton and Bentley, but it is also a collaboration between Bentley and his regular creative partner, Greg Kwedar. The two men have a policy of sharing writing duties while taking turns directing. Kuidar filmed their previous outing, the prison drama Sing Sing (2023), while Bentley took the reins on Jockey (2021), which had an aging jockey trailing behind on the final lap of the track. Bentley’s father was a journeyman jockey who lived out of a suitcase and survived from race to race. He admits that Jockey was semi-autobiographical. And perhaps Train Dreams is, on some level.

“As a filmmaker, you’re often the last to know what interests you until someone tells you,” he says. “But certainly both Jockey and Train Dreams are about a man estranged from his family. My father certainly lived that life. I lived some of it alongside him – being pulled from track to track, babysat by trainers. But a lot of it I didn’t; he was gone for long periods of time. And then I was transformed into a version of that myself. That’s a hard thing to reconcile.”

Like Grenier, like his father, Bentley moves from job to job. His wife and young son live in Texas and are waiting for his return.

“I love being with my family,” he says. “But I love being on the road. If I didn’t have a family, I’d be happy living in a Motel 6S for the rest of my life.”

It’s the classic cowboy wobble, the contradiction at the heart of most westerns: the longing for home versus the call of the wild. “I don’t want to get too psychoanalytic here, but being on the dream train made me feel like my father,” Bentley says. “My son was at the age where my absence from home had affected him. He knew I was gone. And one morning, as I was brushing my teeth, it was as if I was communicating with my father at his hotel, brushing his teeth in the mirror. He had died, and I couldn’t talk to him. But suddenly I understood him in a way I had never understood before.”

Men don’t talk – maybe that’s partly the problem. Edgerton has always been good at playing strong, silent characters, whether it was the naval captain in Zero Dark Thirty, the mysterious lord in The Green Knight, or the brutal Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. But I’ve never seen it so exquisitely silent—nor so utterly heartbreaking—as in Train Dreams.

If Grainier had a predecessor, Edgerton believes it might have been his role in Jeff Nichols’ 2016 fact-based drama Loving. Edgerton played Richard Loving, a construction worker in Virginia in the 1950s who is arrested for marrying a local black woman. “At the end of the first week of shooting, I like to reach out to the directors, because I’m paranoid about this actor,” he says. “So I always say to them: ‘Please tell me if I’m doing anything you want to do differently.'” And in “Loving,” Jeff said, “I want to understand you less.” That was a big help. The character was nonverbal. Robert is, too. So he focuses on you in a completely different way.

This all makes perfect sense. However, I’m surprised that he has to take on the responsibility of directing. Shouldn’t a director direct? The job description is in the title. “Yes, well, why I ask that is because there are directors who are too afraid to communicate with their actors,” he says. “I hope I’m not one of those terrible actors. But I know some great actors where the director says, ‘It’s not my place to tell you what to do,’ and doesn’t say anything for the entire movie. That’s something that Hollywood owes a lot to: The actor is the king. Maybe the king is a false analogy. But the director should always be the head of the family. I worry that some directors feel like they’re not allowed to talk to their actors. And I worry that some actors feel like the director doesn’t have to do anything but set up the shots.”

In other words, people need to communicate more. “Sure,” he says. “And what’s the point of being a director if you don’t talk to your actors?”

Having worked so hard to finish Train Dreams, Edgerton and Bentley are free to sit back and drink in the acclaim. The picture is receiving rave reviews and is nominated as an Oscar contender. Veteran director Paul Schrader recently called it a “fantasy” and “a film designed to surround you,” though he also erroneously called it “Traffic Dreams,” suggesting that the propaganda campaign still has some way to go. But if the Dream Train tells us anything, it’s that life is short and success is fleeting. For example, Grenier spends his days chopping down giant 500-year-old spruce trees only to see his wooden bridges replaced with bridges made of steel. Every human achievement is threatened with fading and being forgotten. This applies to railways and families, and to motion pictures as well.

Edgerton nodded. “One of the reasons I love working in cinema is that you think a film will live forever. This was a film shot by real people in the jungle. The liveliness of everything is preserved – the realism of everything. My dream is that it will become like making custom-made shoes or vinyl, and that humans will always want to interact with things made by humans. But who knows, maybe not. Because now you can create the jungle on a laptop. You can make a whole movie out of zeros and ones.”

This is tragic, of course, but it also makes the work seem more valuable. “Maybe one day we’ll see the last analog film,” he says. “We won’t know it happened until it’s already gone.”