Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar are the two brilliant minds behind Train Dreams, the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella. Their film is emotionally devastating in ways that stay with you long after the credits roll. In this interview, I wanted to understand how that kind of film actually gets made.
We talk about how they taught themselves filmmaking by building a mental archive of films, how a single frame can unlock an entire scene, and why adapting a book spirit often requires stepping away from its words. This How I Write episode is an exploration into how two directors think together, and how a deeply human story becomes something monumental.
Transcript
00:00:00 Building a reference bank
00:05:10 Borrowing ideas from other films
00:08:32 Why write a mission statement
00:13:14 Adapting the book into film
00:20:19 How they do research
00:30:22 Refining the writing
00:38:44 Real life, but cinematic
00:45:46 The mindset of filmmakers
00:52:07 How to get feedback
00:56:02 Beware of too much dialogue
01:00:23 Let the story guide you
01:09:13 What makes a great soundtrack
01:12:13 Mantras they return to
David (00:00-00:13):
Tell me about the process of consumption over the years, watching films, watching movies, and how that builds a kind of mental bank that you can pull from as you’re writing, as you’re shooting films.
Clint (00:15-01:30):
It’s really interesting. When we started out, we were just trying to catch up on everything. We met in Austin when we were young and trying to figure out how to become filmmakers and write screenplays. We hadn’t seen Wong Kar Wai or other important films. We had consumed films as viewers and lovers of film, but once you think of yourself as a practitioner, you start trying to educate yourself.
Now, I’m trying to find pockets of film history that I haven’t seen before. It’s fascinating to go back and look at silent films and films from the 20s and 30s that are almost more interesting and take more risks than a lot of things coming out today. It’s counterintuitive because we think of art as always moving forward, and it is.
Greg (01:31-01:53):
Clint has introduced me to so much classic cinema that I missed growing up. I was always a hunting dog sniffing out contemporary cinema. I always had a good grip on what was current.
Clint (01:53-01:54):
Yeah, who’s worth watching now?
Greg (01:54-02:46):
Right. We would share these tastes, sensibilities, and notes. I’ve discovered so many movies that became formative because of my friendship with Clint.
Growing up, like most kids, I saw the blockbuster movies and major releases in Fort Worth, Texas. I would try to get to Blockbuster in time when a new movie came out to be the one that got one of the three tapes of the hot movie.
My awakening, finding more personal cinema, came when I saw “Y Tu Mamá También” as I was starting in film.
David (02:46-02:47):
Oh, yeah.
Greg (02:47-03:34):
That movie really hit me like a shockwave. I thought, “Oh, you can do a movie like that.”
I took from it that it was a film that allowed the world to breathe into it. It’s about the simplest things, like a road trip to some mystical beach, and they’re trying to get laid and things like that, but it’s also about the deepest things. That was very foundational in terms of opening up something that felt in line with my natural taste or my ambitions of what I hoped to do, which was really just go on adventures. It felt like a movie that was an adventure.
David (03:34-04:04):
I love that point about, “Whoa, you can do a movie like that.” I think sometimes the aperture of creative possibilities that we have in whatever medium you’re working—painting, writing, filmmaking—is artificially narrow. Sometimes you just need someone to give you permission or show you the vista that was there the entire time that you just hadn’t seen. All of a sudden, it just unlocks this expansive realm of possibility.
Clint (04:04-05:09):
Yeah. It even goes back to how you remain a student. We were talking before we started recording about different art exhibitions and things like that.
I remember seeing a Picasso exhibition, and it was in a less famous museum, so they didn’t have a lot of his famous work. It was just an exhibition of all this stuff that he made from construction paper, things that he glued together, doodles, and all the stuff that he was just making over coffee in the morning or at the breakfast table. Maybe he never thought it was going to see the light of day, but he was always trying things and always creating.
I think there’s something to that of keeping yourself childlike as an artist and not getting too rigid. That can open up new avenues for you in whatever medium you work in.
David (05:10-05:23):
Can you tell me the story that you shared right before recording of thinking through that shot with the log on the ground with the lens flare and thinking of a scene from a movie that you had seen?
Clint (05:23-05:29):
Yeah, we had Adolfo Veloso, cinematographer, who...
David (05:29-05:30):
Did such a good job.
Clint (05:32-05:45):
He’s a cinematographer on Train Dreams also. We shot Jockey together. He’s a genius. He’s a sweet guy. I don’t want him to get too big of a head, but he is a genius.
David (05:45-05:47):
Didn’t do that well.
Clint (05:48-08:32):
Early on, we knew we were going into the film, shooting “Train Dreams,” without a lot of money. It was an independent film, and we knew there would be many cases where we wouldn’t have enough extras in the backgrounds or things like that to fill out a frame.
So, we were constantly thinking of ways to construct a frame that doesn’t feel busy but feels considered and feels empty when it should be.
We were out on location, and without spoiling it, there’s a time when Joel Edgerton’s character, Grineer, is rebuilding something. He’s out on this burnt acre. We were shooting in an actual forest that had been destroyed by a forest fire. It was just this ashen pit with a bunch of dead trees.
We were setting up this frame. Joel is chopping on a tree on the ground. It’s already beautiful because of the way Adolfo’s shooting, backlit with the sun, and all this ash and dust is kicking up, but it just felt a bit empty.
One of the frames we had looked at was a fairly famous shot from Tarkovsky’s first film, “Ivan’s Childhood,” where the boy, Ivan, is surrounded by all these ruined structures. It’s just this very jagged, all these jagged boards kind of framing him out.
We thought about that shot, and then Adolfo just found a long, burnt stick on the ground that had a curve in it and set it on the ground between the camera and Joel, and then put the camera down low.
There was something about the shape of that stick within the frame that just made the whole thing click together and somehow spoke to what the character is going through in that moment and how he’s hemmed in by his grief and by the literal aspect of this burnt forest.
It’s one of those things that you don’t think is funny because you brought it up. You’re like, oh, I love that frame. I would never pull that frame if I was like, oh, let’s talk about this. But you never know. It’s something that we were inventing on the fly to solve a problem that we felt, which was this frame doesn’t feel good enough. That’s a really beautiful part of the whole creative process, I think.
David (08:32-08:43):
Tell me about you guys’ work together, and we’ll talk about the mission statement that you guys wrote early on. Let’s start there. Let’s talk about the mission statement. I never heard of something like that.
Greg (08:43-10:02):
I was a business major in college. I studied accounting and then became an accounting dropout when I discovered filmmaking.
As we were setting out into this career of making films, we met right at the beginning of our journeys. I was like, we need a business plan for our careers, because that’s what you do in business school if you’re going to start a new company. You have this charting document.
There was a bunch of nonsense in there—market research and this and that. But within it, there was this notion of a mission statement for a career we hoped to have and what it could stand for, which was to tell stories of human connection in impossible places.
It’s funny how ageless it was. That was over 15 years ago. I don’t know exactly how long, so we’ll just say over 15 years ago we wrote that down. It was an instinct then, and it becomes more vital with time, the longer we’ve worked.
David (10:02-10:16):
As you’re thinking through “Train Dreams” and the story and the sense of possibility of what it can be, and then, no, that’s not what it’s going to be, how does that mission statement inform what you write and the shape and structure of the movie?
Clint (10:17-10:30):
It’s not a conscious thing. To me, at least, it’s more of just if your mission as a human is like, I want to be a good person.
David (10:30-10:31):
Right.
Clint (10:31-11:09):
And I want to make other people’s lives better when I can. Then when you go to a coffee shop, even in that moment when you’re interacting with this person, you’re probably not going to be a jerk.
It’s maybe not a conscious thing that’s limiting that. I think stories of human connection in impossible places—those impossible places can be, in the case of “Sing Sing,” a maximum security prison. This clearly very awful place.
In this situation, it’s more just time and the heaviness of time.
David (11:09-11:09):
Yeah.
Clint (11:11-11:35):
A rapidly industrializing capitalist society grinds out its workers into nothing. I think those things glancingly come together. But I’m not thinking about it like, okay, does this scene fit that or not in the writing? Once you get into that space, it’s just, how do you tell the story?
Greg (11:35-11:52):
I would apply it in thinking about this project of want and filter. As work comes to you and as you gain some success, more and more comes. It’s hard to discern in what form different opportunities, projects, scripts.
Clint (11:54-11:54):
And.
Greg (11:54-13:13):
Even with your own ideas that you’re generating, as you gain success, you have opportunity. The challenge becomes, what’s me? What’s the right film? What’s the right choice?
What should Clint’s next movie be? Having a vision, and more specifically, an applicable mission in terms of the work, helps you see the forest through the trees in terms of what to do and what choices to make. So it’s very helpful to engage on a project, and as you’re doing it, it’s just a great reminder.
The world of logging in that period of time is very brutal, and people were brutal to each other. How do you fight against cynicism as you’re writing? We always talk about where’s the light? If there is light, even if it’s a glimmer at times, you can endure really hard stuff in storytelling. That counterbalance and finding that optimism within the work is always a great signpost to look to.
Clint (13:13-13:14):
Yeah.
David (13:14-13:47):
As you’re thinking through what the film’s going to be, you read the book. How do you go from finding this novella to writing a script?
How do you choose what to include and what not to include? I watched the movie, I read the book, then I watched the movie again. The ending’s different, the relationship with the daughter is different. There are a lot of things that change. How do you think about what to keep, what to take away, when to be faithful to the original text, and when not to be faithful?
Clint (13:48-14:42):
I felt that with this one particularly, we had to follow the rule of being very true to the spirit of the book, but then letting the rest go and just being open with it. There’s no point in adapting this novella if you’re going to make it into a thriller or something, take it in a completely different tonal direction, or change Greiner as a person.
I think this is about translating—translating to another medium that has a completely different set of rules and how things work, what can work and how. It’s a bit like going swimming; we operate very differently in how we move through the world—walking around here versus jumping in the water all of a sudden.
David (14:42-14:42):
Yeah.
Clint (14:42-14:58):
There were things, again, it was just trial and error. There’s a great story in the book where Greiner’s taking this guy to town who’s been shot, and he says he’s been shot by his dog, right?
Greg (14:58-14:58):
Oh, yeah.
David (14:58-14:59):
Yeah.
Clint (15:00-15:04):
That was immediately in the movie.
Greg (15:04-15:04):
No.
Clint (15:04-15:34):
No questions asked. We transcribed it from the book, threw it in there, and thought it was perfect. Then slowly it needed to be cut down a little bit because it didn’t make sense to how the narrative had developed in the movie. All of a sudden, it didn’t fit anymore. Putting this translated version didn’t work anymore, and it lost the point from the book.
It’s just about listening to the work and what it wants to be.
David (15:34-15:50):
I think that’s a key point. You listen to the work, and if you’re not a creator, you’re like, what are you talking about? But if you are a creator, the work just comes to you. First it whispers, then it talks, then it screams. It has its own sense of what it wants.
Greg (15:50-17:07):
I think to make departures at a certain point, you have to earn your credibility in the storytelling. Particularly with this work, adapting this novella that’s very beloved and a very important book to Clint, you start with care, really caring to try and honor it.
Then you have to really try to understand it in its essence. You have to go on your own journey with it and get what’s underneath the words, what’s in between them, what’s beyond it. We set out, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it at some point, on a journey to where it’s set, and had our own adventures in that world.
With that steady process of first, a deep investigation in the text itself, and then our own inquiries into the place and time and the history books of loggers and journals from U.S. Forest Service rangers, and then being out in the field ourselves, you finally feel equipped to chart how this translates to the screen in all the ways that Clinton was just saying.
David (17:09-17:37):
You’re talking about a sense of place. You can’t divorce Harry and Hermione from Hogwarts, or Lord of the Rings from the Shire. A sense of place is such a character in all these great stories. You guys seem like you were so conscious and deliberate about building a relationship with that place, maybe even before the story itself began to unfold. Is that right?
Clint (17:38-17:48):
Yeah. Part of that is what Greg always has a great way of phrasing things that I’ll take a paragraph to say.
David (17:48-17:49):
It’s happened, like, four times already.
Clint (17:49-17:51):
These little nuggets are like, I’m gonna.
David (17:51-17:52):
Throw that right back in.
Clint (17:52-19:12):
It’s a good catchphrase. As an artist, you’re trying to give something fresh, to present this world or story from your unique perspective.
Dennis Johnson, whom we never had the honor to meet, clearly showcases deep research in his book, even though it’s only 117 pages. You can feel that he knows this world of logging. He provides specific details, like the use of sap to repair wounds. Those kinds of things come from deep research.
If you’re making a movie adapting this, you want to give something fresh to it. We want to give something fresh to it as writers. So, we delved into logging books, researched the location, and read journals from people who lived in that time. But nothing replaces on-the-ground research.
Greg (19:12-20:18):
We never heard this directly, but perhaps a reason this material was such a match for Clint as a filmmaker is because Dennis lived in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, for much of his later life with his wife on the Moye River, which is featured in the novella. The place was the seed, and the story emerged from it, driven by a love of place.
Many writers have an idea and then look for a place to transplant it. But a big driver for us as filmmakers is building stories from the ground up. We come into a place, listen to the people and the location, and allow the story to emerge from those experiences. I suspect Dennis may have operated that way, too. Who knows? We never got to hear it ourselves, but that’s probably part of why the story feels so lived-in.
David (20:19-20:21):
So how do you guys do that? You go out there, obviously.
Greg (20:21-20:22):
What do you?
David (20:22-20:23):
You walk around.
Clint (20:24-20:53):
We always try. Specifically, for this project, we found a cabin to stay in that was on the river close to where Dennis had lived and where the story’s set. We also found a naturalist from the area who had written books about the natural history of the region.
David (20:53-20:54):
Oh, cool.
Clint (20:54-21:50):
We paid him to take us out for a day, show us different trees, talk about glaciation, and explain its impact on the area. At night, we would go to bars in these logging towns and just hang out, hoping to strike up a conversation. Sometimes it goes nowhere, just a nice chat.
Other times, like in this case, you meet someone from the Kootenai tribe who is working at a fish hatchery trying to reintroduce sturgeon to the area. These fish had been there for 350,000 years but were overfished to near extinction. Now, they’re trying to restore the population in the river. You can never find that in a book. You also can’t just decide to go to a bar to meet that specific person.
David (21:50-21:50):
Right.
Clint (21:50-22:03):
That person wound up influencing the character of Ignatius Jack in the film and inspired the image of a 10-foot-long fish hanging from a pole at the beginning of the film.
David (22:03-22:13):
Yeah, the word that comes to mind for me is texture. When something feels alive and real, it has a texture of reality that can only come through doing something like that.
Greg (22:13-22:27):
Given that we were adapting this work, we listened to the audiobook of Train Dreams, narrated by Will Patton, anytime we were driving in that area. He now narrates the film, and it would recontextualize everything.
Clint (22:27-22:29):
What a voice.
Greg (22:29-23:22):
It would open up and recontextualize things we had read over and over in the text. We’d go up on a mountain range covered in snow, among a stand of old-growth trees, and feel the air shift and sense that we were in a deeply spiritual place. Or we’d be driving at night and see a giant control burn, feeling its immense power even in its contained setting. That could transport you to imagine what the fire in the novella could have looked and felt like.
All of this collected together became so much. We actually finished the first draft there while we were there.
Clint (23:23-23:23):
Oh, wow.
Greg (23:24-23:37):
We finished looking out over that river. We had a big snowfall, and trains were running through at night. We were riding high on finishing the draft, but then we read it as we left.
David (23:39-23:40):
We got work to do, boys.
Greg (23:40-23:42):
Deeply depressed.
David (23:42-23:43):
We got a lot of work to do.
Clint (23:43-23:48):
Nice weekend.
David (23:50-23:53):
So then what do you do? You go from a shitty first draft to then...
Clint (23:53-23:56):
You’ve got to get that shitty first draft. You’ve got to get the clay on the table.
Greg (23:56-23:56):
Yeah.
Clint (23:56-24:07):
You have to get the shape of the face. I learned the most about screenwriting at one point from building some cabinets in my house.
David (24:07-24:07):
Really?
Clint (24:08-24:49):
During the pandemic, we all started doing our little hobbies. My wife and I were in this rental place, and we always wanted built-in bookshelves, so we decided to do it. We found this method where you buy IKEA shelves and then frame them out.
You build this frame, and it looks terrible, but you get them in there and up on their frames. Then you put some molding around it, paint it, and it still looks bad. You put trim around it, and it still looks bad. You keep working at it until it gets to a place where it looks good. There’s always a little bit of, you know, you can always use little hacks like putting trim on the outside or crown molding on something.
David (24:50-25:27):
The founder of Rolls Royce was once asked how he made Rolls Royce, and he said something to the effect of, “I just looked at a normal car and said, how do I make every single thing better?” And you just do it over and over again.
There’s something to that. There’s a version of something being great where you have this grand vision and wake up from a dream. Then there’s another version where you take that scene, find 74 ways to improve it, and it’s the 74th one that finally brings it all together, or it’s just the culmination of those 74 things that gives it that sense of quality.
Greg (25:27-26:18):
It’s a corollary to professional athletes, too, with the consistency of showing up and being able to deliver at a high level through an insane amount of preparation.
With respect to writing, it’s a thing that makes Clint a world-class artist and has taught me a lot—the not settling and the belief that there is a better moment or a line and to keep digging and questioning it. Literally, for Clint’s sake, it was like a couple days before Sundance, but just until you have to put the pencil down. I think you would probably still be editing Train Dreams if you were allowed to.
Clint (26:19-26:53):
I watched it the other night because we did a live score event, and the tragedy of it is that there was this scene or this thing that I wanted to put in there that I never knew how, and we were never able to figure it out. I was watching it the other night, and I understand how to do it now, and we have the material.
But it’s fine; you have to leave it. Somebody talked about how once the painting’s up in the museum, you don’t want to go back and start touching it up. Let it be.
Greg (26:54-27:19):
It is a thing that has shaped our partnership. I would probably shoot something I wrote on a napkin today, and Clint helps me see beyond and see how great it could be. It’s a good idea, but it could be a great moment if you worked on it.
With Clint, I can help him push it and actually get it out.
David (27:20-27:53):
I’m exactly like you. I’m like, “Come on, here’s the idea. Let’s do it. Let’s shoot it. Come on, let’s go.”
I work with a creative director named Tommy who’s just like you, who’s like, “Dude, we gotta push. We gotta stop it. We gotta push.” He just has this unbelievable patience. Then you get to the end, and you’re like, “Dang it, you are so right about this.” This patience, this deliberate patience, and to insist on better and better and better. I need a partner to do that. I can’t do that on my own.
Clint (27:53-29:17):
I never thought about this on the flip side. I started as a fiction writer, studying that, and being very enamored with the words on the page and the sound of the words and where you break a paragraph.
What I never thought of until I met Greg was, “Are you telling a story or not?” This more structural thing that I now think is actually the foundational element, and the rest is how you’re getting that out there. That thing that connects Train Dreams to Sing Sing to a cave painting or an oral poem from ancient times is: what is that thing that you’re trying to communicate?
There’s all the fun stuff, which is how, and how do we get that shot, and how does this edit get us from this shot to the next? Oh, wasn’t it beautiful that we seeded this idea earlier with an image? That’s great. But getting back to that foundational element, that’s what I learned very deeply from Greg: telling a story, and then it all kind of comes out from there. That story can be as simple as a guy’s driving a taxi and eventually goes nuts.
David (29:18-29:43):
My sense is that if you looked at the number of words in various screenplays, Train Dreams would be all the way to the left side. There are not that many words in the film. But then there are these moments when you really try to say something, like, what’s the preacher in the pulpit line in the movie? A hermit in the woods.
Clint (29:43-29:46):
The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.
Greg (29:46-29:46):
Yeah.
David (29:46-29:49):
Like, you hear that, okay, boom. But this one really stuck with.
Clint (29:49-29:52):
That’s straight from the words of Dennis Johnson.
David (29:52-29:57):
And I think this one is, too. You’ll let me know. This world is intricately stitched together, boys.
Clint (29:59-30:09):
Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We are but children on this earth pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.
Greg (30:09-30:10):
That’s Clint.
David (30:10-30:12):
You wrote that? Hell, yeah, dude.
Clint (30:12-30:13):
There we go.
Greg (30:15-30:34):
That’s part of earning the credibility. He’s such a brilliant writer, and you’re so deeply channeled into the essence that you wouldn’t necessarily know the difference between Dennis and Clint’s words.
Clint (30:34-31:05):
The idea, even in our work, is that we’re trying to get to this place. This was a big thing on Jockey. This is a big thing, I think, for Greg as well on Sing Sing. There’s a lot of care put into the writing, making sure we have a line, like, that took 45 times of going through. If they’re pulling bolts out of something, what kind of machine would they say at that time that would make sense, but also kind of make sense for us?
David (31:05-31:06):
Right, right.
Clint (31:06-31:30):
Or what metaphor do you use to get across this sense of what we are, which is a bunch of idiots having this system that we have no idea how it works. We’re just, like, why don’t we just straighten out this river and put a dam in it? Who knows what’ll happen?
So how do you find a metaphor that Arn Peoples would say that Joel’s character, Grineer, would never be able to say?
Greg (31:30-31:30):
Right.
Clint (31:30-31:48):
He would never be able to construct that sentence, or maybe he would have the idea. All that to say, we’re trying to get to this place where there have been other things about the film that people think. There’s a lot of improv that we do, and a lot of times we’ll throw the scene out.
David (31:48-31:49):
What do you mean improv?
Clint (31:49-32:32):
We let the actors go. In this film, there are multiple times where it’s just like, all right, we’ve got some chickens, and Joel and Felicity are now gonna feed the chickens. Let’s see what happens. Giving them that comes from a documentary background of setting up a space and then kind of adjusting it into something that feels considered.
Then you always have the edit. You get a bunch of stuff, and then you have the edit to actually shape something that feels considered. But you want to get to a space where, when the viewer’s watching it or when they’re reading something as a screenplay or a piece of fiction, they don’t know what was made up on the day, and they don’t know what was written six years earlier.
Greg (32:32-32:33):
Right.
Clint (32:33-33:00):
Or two years earlier, whatever it is. There’s no difference in feeling between something that was very considered, like this kid throwing a cup into a river. There was an image that I wanted from very early on that we put in the script. Now, how do you get it to feel like the kid just threw the cup in the river kind of on accident? And then Joel’s like, oh, what are you doing?
David (33:00-33:12):
I love the way he responds to it. That really moved me when I watched it last night. It was a very fatherly thing to do. It was very loving, but also just, like, what’d you do that for? Both.
Clint (33:12-34:04):
It’s so sweet. And that was very considered, too. Something that a line that people love and have really connected to is when the pilot, when they’re about to start, all the stuff of going up and down, the pilot’s like, you better hold on to something. People really glommed onto that line as some sort of thematic cipher for the film.
That’s something that the pilot said on the day. She’s a real pilot. Her name’s Amelia. She’s never acted before. There was a different line in there for that moment, and it was kind of awkward.
I was like, how would you, if you were about to do this, take this guy up and give him a fun time, what would you say? She’s like, I would say this. You don’t want the viewer to feel any difference when they’re, or the reader, if it’s a screenplay or whatever.
Greg (34:05-34:09):
The best part of improv, too, is that as writers, we get to take credit for it.
Clint (34:13-34:14):
Wow, that was a great idea.
David (34:15-34:50):
When you think about a main character and giving that main character, establishing the sense of connection, making us want to root for the main character. There’s a few differences between the book and the movie in terms of almost the morals of the main character that kind of go back to a killing that’s early in the movie.
How do you think about whether you want the main character to be loved? Do you want us to root for the main character? When don’t you? What if we don’t like the main character? What really matters as you’re shaping that?
Clint (34:51-35:19):
With this one in particular, I think it’s funny what you’re referring to with the guy getting thrown off the bridge. The intention of that was that he helps for a moment. He gets swept up in helping do this thing.
Then he gets kicked away, but he gets swept up in this violence, in a thing that he doesn’t condone and feels very sickened by, and then that haunts him.
Greg (35:19-35:19):
Right.
David (35:19-35:20):
Yeah.
Clint (35:20-36:10):
That’s something that, like in Screenwriting 101, you would never do that. You’re told to never have a character try and murder somebody who’s innocent in the beginning of the film, try and help other people murder somebody in the beginning of a film for no reason at all, and just get swept up in something like that. You are told to do the opposite.
You also are told to not have a passive main character who’s just kind of like life’s just kind of happening to him. You’re told probably not to have a quiet main character who doesn’t say a lot over the course of the film and all these things. That was the character in the book where he’s feeling a lot of things, he’s thinking a lot of things, but not in ways he can necessarily understand.
David (36:14-36:34):
A lot of times in the movie I noticed that he’ll, whenever he learned something, other people are like, yeah. And he’ll be like, oh, really? I think there’s three times in the movie where he kind of didn’t know this thing, and it wasn’t like everyone should have known that you get the sense that he just doesn’t know that much, but also is very deep.
Greg (36:35-37:38):
There’s also an aspect with a lot of movies we’ve done. They become known because of their central performances. If I’ve tried to analyze it, I would say it’s because we try to fuse work to the artist and allow them to empty the tank.
We want them to bring all that they have as a person. The way Joel moves through the world and his spirit fused into this character. It’s something we’re always listening to, refining, and sharpening in a script so that it becomes the clothes that they can put on to be most truthful. It’s part “Grineer,” but it’s also trying to listen to things that we can surface from his essence.
David (37:38-38:08):
You talk about the spirit. I had just left the theater, and I walked over to a bar down the street. It was a bar/coffee shop type of thing. It was probably 9:30, snow in the streets, and these two very good-looking girls walked up to me. They were like, “Hey, how’s your night going?”
Usually, I’d be like, “Alright, what’s going on?” But I was like, “Can you guys just stay over there and just watch this movie?”
Clint (38:09-38:11):
It was like, oh, man.
David (38:11-38:48):
I was very melancholy. I had this very gloomy spirit for the next few days. It was wonderful, feeling the weight of what he went through.
Someone said something to me: there’s a scene later on where Graener meets a girl, and in a very Hollywood movie, maybe they fall in love or something. No, that’s the movie. That’s what it’s about.
Clint (38:49-39:26):
That’s life. Just like the story you just told. If I were telling that in a very Hollywood movie, it wouldn’t have gone that way.
That went back to the central premise of the movie, treating real life as cinematically as any movie plot normally is.
David (39:26-39:26):
Right.
Clint (39:26-39:57):
It’s really exciting to see a heist in a movie or a battle. But we were trying to treat something monumental for us, like falling in love or just feeling peaceful with family or with a friend. Or this very resonant feeling of when you walk out of a movie or read a book that changes you, and you just want to sit in that feeling. We were translating that to film without overdoing it.
David (39:57-40:00):
Without overdoing it. That’s a key point.
Clint (40:00-40:25):
Not schmaltzy. Trying to give it the resonance, the depth, and the respect that that moment deserves.
Greg (40:27-40:37):
Going back to you at the bar, maybe they were more into you because you were brooding. Train Dreams maybe put this glow on you.
David (40:37-42:19):
It gave me a spirit of attraction. I said this to you the first time I watched it. I had small tears as I watched the movie, especially early on with the sweetness. I remember gripping the side of my chair. Little did he know that he would remember these moments, these years, as some of the best of his life.
I watched it last night on Netflix, so I could stop it. That was about minute 36, and then the payoff of what comes from that’s about 8 to 12 minutes later. Last night, I didn’t have any tears until the end.
Then we got the Nick Cave song in the credits, and it was as if the Hoover Dam had collapsed. It was one in the morning, and I was bawling like a little girl, feeling this melancholy, a certain kind of sadness, gloominess.
It was wonderful; it felt therapeutic and peaceful. I want to get back to that point about not overdoing it, because the tears last night were these subtle feelings of sadness and gloominess, not this intense despair. Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of life, you skip over those more subtle emotions.
Clint (42:21-44:20):
It’s easy to skip over them even when you’re making a film and constructing it, trying to think about a way to lead the audience to a place and communicate something without manipulating them.
We are inherently manipulating them, whether you’re writing a book or painting something and trying to show them this landscape through your eyes or through editing. There is inherent manipulation, but trying not to be dishonest about it.
There’s something very interesting about this medium. I feel like there are still infinite possibilities where you do all this stuff, put this thing together, and something else is created. We talked about it a lot at the end, through the edit, and trying to figure out the ending. I thought this just wouldn’t be a film that really affects people deeply, emotionally. It’ll be an interesting film, but they probably won’t be crying from it.
That’s fine, maybe that’s just what it needs to be. It’s been very interesting that that’s not the case. Even with you, I’ve heard this from a couple of different people: they see it one way, then they see it again later and get something very different from it.
I haven’t changed the film in the two times that you saw it. But you’ve changed, and then something changes in between you and this piece of work that you’re interacting with. It’s hard to talk about it without getting into a woo-woo, mystical kind of place.
David (44:21-44:23):
That door is open if we want to go there.
Clint (44:23-44:40):
Well, no, you can’t. Words break down. It’s like having a religious experience, and then what do you say? We create a metaphor for it, like, “It is like this.” You can’t really articulate what it is. You just have to experience it.
David (44:41-45:19):
To your point, I was at a film screening recently, and the director got up at the beginning and was joking, but I thought was joking in the most true way. She said, “It has been my dream to get a bunch of friends and family in a room and make them all sit and watch the thing I’ve made, like locking them in their chairs.”
I think directors and architects are very similar in this way. With directing, you are creating a world. You’ve got the writing, the visuals, the sound, and 363 other things. It is this consilience of different art forms that comes together.
Greg (45:19-46:27):
I do think it is the greatest artistic collaboration that exists. It takes the visual medium, the written medium, music, art in terms of design, and brings it all together to tell one story.
One of the things we’ve always talked about as we’ve grown up as artists is, how do you define success as a director? Personally speaking, there are times when something only meets your vision, and you are harnessing this whole group of artists together that have sensibilities and their own tastes. If it just meets the vision, I don’t really see that as successful.
Can it expand beyond the vision and show us something that surprises you, that still feels true to the intention, but is revelatory? I’m always after that in my collaborations with actors or cinematographers. Here’s the idea I’m starting with, but what else is there? What’s underneath it? What’s beyond it?
David (46:27-46:30):
Does the word ambition ring a bell in what you’re saying, or is it something different?
Greg (46:32-46:34):
Sure, because I’m a very ambitious person.
David (46:35-46:46):
I thought I saw something from your first film. You guys were talking about ambition in your first film, to really go for it. What was that?
Greg (46:46-47:47):
I do think there’s an inclination, especially with first films, to work within your means. Basically, “I have this house for free, so we’re going to make a movie in the house because we have it for free,” versus having an idea that feels like you’re reaching. That scares you a little bit. It’s like, “I don’t know how the fuck we’re going to pull this off.” And yet we still only have this finite amount of money, but with this money, we have to do this thing.
Something about the reach of it can push something to break through the noise. I do think locations can do that for you. A lot of our films have been set in places that are priceless. You feel scale, and it allows you to do more intimate work within something because you’re operating in such a grand environment.
David (47:47-48:05):
When you’re writing, thinking through the early stages of a love story, what matters in order to make that story feel real? This comes back to that theme of not having it be so over the top, having it feel pure and true.
Clint (48:07-48:58):
With a love story, I think it’s the same as any friendship or anything. What is the love story you’re telling? Am I showing you a couple that’s been together 40 years? Or am I showing you a couple who’s meeting, young love? The whole film is about the first three months, which is the most chaotic, beautiful, and wonderful, but doesn’t have some of that resonance that comes later. With Gladys and Greiner, it was really important to make it feel their love, but also feel the depth of their connection to each other.
David (48:58-48:59):
Yeah.
Clint (48:59-49:19):
To get those two things across: that they are totally enamored with each other, like you see that time early on where you just can’t keep your hands off of each other, but then you also see the time later where you’re arguing over money over the dinner table. That doesn’t mean you don’t love each other, of course. That’s like all the varieties of a relationship.
David (49:19-49:25):
Even that had this sort of loving sharpness.
Clint (49:25-51:03):
Of course, because they’re not... It’s a bummer to see. I was thinking about this when I saw Bardo that came out a few years ago, and that relationship between this married couple just feels so deep and resonant. I was like, “Oh, I’ve been craving this. I haven’t seen something like this in a long time in modern film,” because most things about relationships are kind of cynical, like they hate each other, and their marriage is falling apart.
My wife and I argue over money and things like that, but it doesn’t mean we don’t like each other. We still like each other and love each other very much, but we’re human beings. We get in arguments and disagreements over things.
This one was about calibrating it to where it didn’t feel too much one way or the other. There were things in the edit that we shot that were in the early cuts of the film that made it feel like there were too many barbs between them. There was one too many arguments, given the real estate that we don’t have a lot of time with them right before what happens. At first, when I was getting feedback along the way, people were like, “Well, they don’t even like each other.” Then it went the other direction where it was too light and airy and too sweet, and it didn’t feel like a real relationship.
I don’t know if I even answered your question, but it’s about calibration along the way if you want to make something feel real.
David (51:04-51:10):
Feedback. How do you go about getting feedback at different stages of making a film? Like feedback in the scripting?
Clint (51:10-51:11):
We have different answers on this.
Greg (51:12-51:59):
I’ve evolved. At the beginning, I was admittedly very emotional and defensive. I’m a heart-on-my-sleeve type of person. When that’s working well, it’s like your heart is forward, and there’s a lot of passion. The negative side is you can take things too personally when people are really there in service of the thing you’re trying to do and want to help you.
Now I think we’re probably somewhat in a similar place. You get notes, and it’s like, just try it and see what’s there.
David (51:59-52:02):
And who are you getting notes from? Friends, family, collaborators?
Greg (52:02-53:11):
It depends on the writing process. We have a pretty small think tank. There’s one friend, Linda Hallbert, who we’ve known for over a decade. We’ve made a lot of movies together. She’s read almost every draft of everything we’ve ever written.
Then it’s just expanding that field slightly. And then it’s like, who has to read it? Financiers or producers. Then you’re navigating a somewhat delicate power dynamic with feedback of like, do I have to take this note?
The person delivering it, especially to artists, there’s a way to do that, that if they have the same spirit of just try it, and we may be wrong, then we’re okay with it. We’ll try it, and maybe you’re right. Cool things can happen in that type of dynamic. But I think sometimes it can go sideways when there’s a lack of trust, or whoever’s giving the note, it’s like a mandate to an artist. Then that gets kind of, you know, then the porcupine things come up.
Clint (53:11-54:04):
It’s good to get a combination along the way of people who, especially with the film speaking specifically to that, but people who know what you’re going for and getting their notes, where they’re like, I know from talking to you, or from knowing the book, or from being on set, what you’re trying to do, and this is not coming across.
Alongside people who have no idea what any of it is. You know, like friends who are just like, what’d you make your movie about? And they can. Getting their feedback in different ways is really helpful too.
It’s the closest to an audience you’re going to get, of what’s working, what’s not. What do you think is really not working that you need to be much more clear about that is totally coming across? And you’re like, great, then we can pull this back a little bit.
Greg (54:05-54:09):
Sometimes they don’t even need to say a word either. You can just watch them watch it.
Clint (54:09-54:09):
Feeling, knowing.
Greg (54:09-54:30):
Yeah. Where it is a lean forward, you know that they’re feeling it, and they’re plugged in. When they’re retreating, you can feel the energy in the room.
But I think at a certain point, you get whether it’s an editor in the writing process, where you don’t have perspective anymore.
David (54:31-54:32):
Yeah, ain’t that right?
Greg (54:32-54:57):
Feedback just shakes the tree. Oftentimes, someone may be raising their hand and pointing at something that is wrong or feels wrong, and it is. Maybe the problem is actually much earlier in the script or the film. So the what and how to address it is not always directly aligned, but it can surface where the work needs to go.
David (54:57-55:06):
Tell me about the piece of advice you guys got early on, to beware of having too much dialogue and not to lean on that. What was the thinking behind that?
Clint (55:06-55:53):
A mentor of ours and a good friend, a screenwriter, gave us the advice to only use dialogue as a last resort.
It didn’t make any sense early on. It was something I think we learned by doing. I remember a scene in Trans Pecos, the first film we wrote together that Greg directed, where Johnny Simmons and Gabriel Luna are in a truck. There’s a whole long dialogue sequence about what’s going to happen next, what this one’s worried about, and what that one’s trying to convince him to do. There was a lot of good dialogue in there. I don’t remember if this happened in the shooting of it or in the edit.
Greg (55:53-55:54):
It was in the shoot.
Clint (55:54-55:54):
Yeah.
Greg (55:54-55:54):
On set.
Clint (55:55-56:30):
That scene became one line and some looks between them. It was so much better than all this stuff we had written. That was a real lesson for both of us of just trying to get to that place where your film is operating in a way where you’re not having to say everything. Going back to what we started talking about with silent cinema, what’s the least you can do that’s going to give the most to the audience?
David (56:30-56:54):
It’s so funny as you say this, so obviously Train Dreams embodies this. But then there’s the scene where Art is just talking and talking. It’s kind of hard to follow him. I realized I’m actually not supposed to listen. He’s actually just spewing energy into the world, which is exactly the opposite.
Clint (56:54-57:00):
Yeah. And that line that you quoted earlier, those will stick with you.
David (57:00-57:06):
Well, later on he says it’s all beautiful, ain’t it? It’s just that one line.
Clint (57:06-57:18):
If you’ve got that silence, the audience can do their work. Now, there are films, like very dialogue-heavy films or plays, like His Girl Friday, this doesn’t apply to that.
David (57:18-57:20):
Right. I just watched Before Sunrise, the whole thing.
Clint (57:20-58:35):
Before Sunrise is a different beast and should be full of dialogue. That’s the whole point of it, and there’s a musicality and rhythm to it that works. You’re locking into its own thing. But this isn’t that; this is a different kind of approach. I think the more you can get it to the place where the film is doing the talking, the better.
There was a great piece of voiceover that we wrote. There’s a scene where Grineer is sitting by a lakeside after he’s left logging, and I was so proud of this voiceover that we had written about the deep history of the land and the glaciers and all this. We got to the edit room, and the scene wasn’t working very well. Our sound designer, Lee Salivan, suggested pulling the voiceover out because it wasn’t really connecting the way I hoped. He said it was very good writing, but not a good scene. He asked whether we wanted good writing or a good scene, and I chose the good scene.
Greg (58:35-59:16):
I think in the iterative process of filmmaking, it’s important to us to write it, to override it sometimes. That’s in black and white; it’s one dimension. Now you have performance, camera, setting, all these other things that can then speak into what the scene’s about. Then you can have the fluidity to throw it out or put it all into a look. We won’t know what we’re reaching for unless you put it there first and actually write the whole thing in all of its excess.
David (59:17-59:38):
Tell me about how you let the story guide you. At what point do you start with an idea for a story, and then at some point, as we were talking about earlier, the story takes on its own form and maybe it surprises you? Is that what happens?
Clint (59:40-63:01):
Yeah, there’s a good example of this. You’re trying to get to that place where you’re listening to the story, and it’s moving of its own accord. It’s almost like you’re finding it rather than creating it.
I’m sure many poets and writers have said this more eloquently than we will, but there’s a good example of this from the ending. You mentioned the ending earlier of this film. The ending of the book is one of the great endings that I’ve ever read in literature. It’s so fantastic and perfect, almost like a Gravity’s Rainbow-level ending. We totally thought that would be the ending of the movie, and we wrote that in the script as the ending, kind of verbatim. This wolf boy, this performance by this wolf boy, and then it ends in the book where he says, “And it all went to black, and that time was gone forever.”
We shot that whole thing, shot the plane sequence, which is currently the ending. It was a much smaller thing. Then we started watching it with our editor, Parker Laramie, and it was very clear that the airplane sequence was the ending; the film just ended. We had ten more minutes of stuff. So then we had to lean into it and say, “Okay, this is the ending. How does that other stuff work into building up to that ending?”
Then there were 35 different versions of editing that plane sequence to get it to what it is now. It was an aspect of just listening to that feeling, and it was clear what the movie wanted. You can either listen to that or not, to your own detriment. Everything became so much more rich and deeper by building up into that.
Even the thing of him looking at himself in the mirror, that was not originally in there. We found that. Our production designer, Alex Schaller, went to the bathroom in the basement and came back up to Adolfo. He said, “You’ve got to shoot something. I don’t care what it is. Shoot something in this bathroom. It’s amazing.” That opened up this thing where he’s not seeing himself in the mirror; he can now see the toll of the years.
I think that’s an example to take it out of the clouds. It was a very iterative process of listening to what the film wanted and then responding to that. Then that opened up its own set of problems to solve and questions, like, how does a wolf boy sequence even fit into that? How does seeing John Glenn in space fit into that?
David (63:01-63:22):
So, simple question: with your original script, let’s say we’re done with it, we’re ready to move to the next stage of development. What percentage of that script ends up in the final movie? Or maybe ask it the other way. What percentage of the final movie do you think is in the original script?
Greg (63:22-64:29):
One interesting data point is that, of the four films we’ve released, all four have a different ending than what we started shooting. I don’t know what to make of that, but we know the importance of endings. That is what you walk out with is that feeling. Sticking that landing is one of, if not the most, important thing you do. It’s setting up this world, having memorable scenes, and going on the ride. But then it’s that ending.
Thinking about the novella, I also agree, I remember the sensation I had when I finished reading it. A whole paragraph is dedicated to the sound that the wolf boy makes. It’s like the imagination and what it can conjure versus actually having to execute that and translate it to film. I don’t know that our medium would suffice the potency of it.
Clint (64:29-64:29):
I think that’s right.
Greg (64:29-64:55):
It’s the idea and what’s being expressed. That would be its fatal flaw if that’s what you actually tried in the film. And yet, the plane sequence—I don’t know that the plane sequence in the novella could conjure what a movie could use in its medium to express a similar feeling.
And so, there’s a unique trade-off there.
Clint (64:55-65:36):
There’s something Greg said earlier about overwriting, and that’s a lesson we learned early on from Trans Pecos as well by making some mistakes. It’s like, put it all in there. At the very least, your actors, your production designer, your DP, they’re all going to internalize that, and it’s going to come out even if it’s not articulated in some way.
As for what percentage of the script makes it into the movie, it depends on the film. With Jockey, we wrote at least 50% while we were filming that movie, and then a lot of it didn’t end up in there every night.
Greg (65:36-65:36):
That was hilarious.
Clint (65:36-65:38):
Yeah, Sing Sing.
David (65:38-65:39):
Do you guys write in Google Docs?
Clint (65:40-66:18):
No, we outline in Google Docs as kind of a prose document, but then we’re writing in Final Draft. It’s just the easiest one to use.
All of those things end up in the movie that you shoot, even if they don’t end up in the movie. Sometimes actors get a little bothered when their favorite line gets taken out, and you feel bad as a filmmaker. But at the same time, it’s in there even if it’s not in there.
David (66:18-66:29):
You were a musician, and you feel that in the movie soundtracks. What matters in a soundtrack?
Clint (66:31-68:07):
I think making it all of a piece goes back to what we were saying about not wanting the viewer or the audience to know what is improv and what is written.
I can’t speak for every film. It’s different on every film. I just watched a film last night that had the best needle drop ever, and it totally didn’t fit. But it fit because it didn’t fit. Train Dreams is not that.
I find, just speaking very personally, that I learned on Jockey and then came into this with the idea that you’re almost trying to find a story rather than build it. There’s some rhythm that I’m trying to find in the edit, rather than making that rhythm. There’s a rhythm at which point the film locks into itself, and you can feel that.
When you’re editing, you’ll hit moments where it’s like, that stretch of 10 minutes is great, and that one’s locked in, and this one’s terrible. You’re just trying to get into that. The music is a big part of that. Bryce Desner did the score. He’s worked with us on all of our films, and, yeah, that was perfect. It’s just getting into that emotional rhythm almost, and then the rest can come out of it.
David (68:07-69:24):
People don’t realize how hard it is to match the music to the mood. We just made this short film, and I spent a little bit of time looking for music. The two guys who I worked with spent a bunch of time, and you just flip through hundreds, thousands of songs, and you’re like, ah, it’s not quite right.
That was actually the biggest argument that we had. There was this one song, and you said earlier it fit because it didn’t fit. It was the same thing in this. I said, I know it fits because it doesn’t fit, but we spent too long in that energy, so that it no longer fits if we play it for more than 25 seconds. I was like, guys, trust me.
Even with the sound leveling, you’re kind of in Adobe Premiere and you’re bringing the little cue thing down and up and then trying to have like the little flip of a mustache at the end. Until you’ve done it, you don’t realize the complexity and the subtlety to it. It’s also one of the more subjective, hard-to-pin-down-into-language things. But when the soundtrack is off, it really just hurts everything.
Greg (69:24-69:34):
Process-wise, a big thing we both do is develop a playlist, and it usually starts in the writing process.
David (69:33-69:34):
During the writing process of a film?
Greg (69:34-71:08):
Yeah. The sources of that can be very wide-ranging, whether they’re songs, other pieces of music, or other scores. Something that we both do, whether beforehand using different source material, is making these mood reels with early production dailies as the edit starts. If we were to do it after production, we’d take some of the key select shots and put together almost like a tone poem with a piece of music that can become a guiding light for the feeling that we’re going for with the ultimate work.
Then you’re often editing with temp music, so you’re grabbing from other scores. It’s an imperfect system because it’s not cohesive, and yet it can still at least start to touch the feeling that you’re going for in the scenes.
The big thing you have to do when we ultimately work with Bryce—and we like Bryce to see our stuff as early as possible and not when it’s fully baked—is allow him to sort of get a sense of where some of the starting ideas were. But then you have to just push it all aside, pull all that temp out, and allow it to be as much a blank slate as possible. But you have some of these guiding principles along the way that can help at least have a common language.
David (71:08-71:16):
Let’s close here. Do you have mantras that you come back to in your work together?
Clint (71:17-71:46):
My dad used to always say something that was very annoying when I was a kid, but it just rings in my head now. If I were to pass anything along that works for any writer or artist, it would be what he always said: “Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.”
Sometimes that was because I was doing something very stupid, but sometimes it was just because we lived in the woods and I was being too loud.
David (71:46-71:47):
Yeah.
Clint (71:47-72:11):
You grew up in Florida, on a cattle ranch. That’s right. I think paying attention applies whether you’re in the writing, the edit, production, or a meeting with an actor. I think everything can be solved from that.
Greg (72:11-73:16):
The mantra of the program that was the center of our movie Sing Sing was “trust the process.” It has many meanings to the men inside that program. One of them is that it’s a shit show until opening night, and then somehow it just works.
The process is where the life is. Make the process good and healthy and do it with great intention.
Go on an adventure into the world that you’re writing in. Imbue the work with the values that you try to live with. Really thoughtful and granular time spent in that can yield really interesting work, I think.
Clint (73:16-73:44):
It’s that thing of, by focusing on the details, the bigger picture will take care of itself. You might not know how you’re going to pull off this big sequence of whatever it is, or how you’re going to make a love story happen. But you focus on the little details of that thing, whatever it is, in the writing or in the editor, focus on your shot list, and then the sequence will play out. Trust the process is a good one.
David (73:45-73:50):
Cue the end credits. Good to meet you guys.
Clint (73:50-73:50):
Thanks, man.
Greg (73:50-73:53):
It was cool.
David (73:53-74:20):
Really cool to meet you guys. You guys are so thoughtful. You’re not overdoing it, but it’s true. You can feel the care, the cycles of thought and revision, and the depth that only comes from deep consideration in your work and from this conversation.
Clint (74:21-74:22):
Thanks, man. That means a lot.
Greg (74:22-74:23):
Yeah.
Clint (74:23-74:32):
This is a great podcast you have. The variety of authors that you speak to, the artists, and what they talk about is always great. It’s really fun.
David (74:33-74:36):
Watch Train Dreams. Thank you very much.
