Joel Edgerton has wanted to make “Train Dreams” for a very long time.
The actor, joined by director Clint Bentley and co-stars Felicity Jones, William H. Macy and Kerry Condon, spoke with TheWrap at TIFF 50 on Sunday. Here, Edgerton shared that he first read Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” over 10 years ago and immediately inquired about the rights. Unfortunately, they were tied up.
But this has always been a story about patience for Edgerton.
“I kind of sulked a little bit for a few minutes and then put it out of my mind,” Edgerton said. “Then (Bentley) had reached out to me all those years later, and it felt to me like somebody must know my obsession with this story. It was a bit serendipitous.”
It’s not hard to see where this obsession came from. “Train Dreams” follows Robert Grainier, a logger who begins developing railroads in the fast-changing world of the early 1900s, drawing him further from his wife (Jones) and child. The film premiered at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival, opening to rave reviews. Netflix quickly picked up the distribution rights, with the film releasing on the streamer Nov. 21.
“Train Dreams” reunites Bentley with Greg Kwedar, the team behind behind TIFF favorite and 2025 Oscar nominee “Sing Sing.” While Bentley only co-wrote “Sing Sing” with Kwedar in the director’s chair, their roles are this time reversed, with Bentley at the helm as Kwedar serving as co-writer (the same way they tackled 2021’s “Jockey”). Bentley read “Train Dreams” himself when it released as a book in the early 2010s.
“I fell in love with his work and read pretty much everything that he had written. When the producers who had the rights asked me to adapt it, I don’t know that I would have had the courage otherwise,” Bentley said. “I just got so excited, not only for the cinematic possibilities that were there in terms of the imagery and what you could start to do with dreams and memories and things like that that you can’t always do, not every story supports that. But then it also just felt incredibly relevant to today without trying. It just seemed like that story that his character’s going through, and that all of these characters are contending with, felt as real today as it would’ve in 3500 BC.”
Edgerton finds himself in an interesting position as the logger protagonist Robert. While much of the screen time rests squarely on the actor’s shoulders, he takes on a part that has relatively little dialogue. Edgerton said he saw this as both a challenge and a gift, tapping into the simultaneous intensity and stillness he so often displays.
“There’s such a patience to this film,” he said. “We’re going through these crazy changes about technology, and life is so fast, and people’s attention spans are so quick. One of the challenges of this film is that it asks you to remember a time when you could be patient and still. And yet, I guess even the characters within the film are thinking that life is going through a seismic change.”
“I kept reminding myself that Robert was a different kind of film character or story character,” he continued. “We watch characters who constantly have agency and are moving through the world and kind of trying to pull strings and activate change and fight against things. Robert is one of these people that I think 90-something percent of us are on the planet, which people that are not at the reins of life.”
Catch up on all of TheWrap’s TIFF coverage here.
