‘Train Dreams’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hello, this is Clint Bentley, the co-writer and director of “Train Dreams.” So this is actually the final scene of the movie, spoiler alert. This is Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, and he’s wandered onto an airfield where they’re giving airplane rides. This pilot is Amelia Hilsen, who’s a real pilot and amazing. She’s actually piloting this old plane. Grainier goes up in this plane for what he thinks is just going to be a joyride for $4, and ends up something much bigger happens. The way that we filmed this was actually really exciting. We did it in really three parts. We obviously had a bunch of cameras rigged to the plane, and Amelia took the plane up. We’re also filming the plane from the ground, and then we could not, for insurance reasons, put Joel up in an old antique plane. And so we built a recreation of the plane itself. Alex Schaller, our production designer, and her great team built it. And then we put it on a gimbal like 12 feet off the ground. And then our great VFX supervisor, Ilia Mokhtareizadeh, and his team, painted out and replaced the sky behind Joel’s head. And what happens here is, as he goes through this flight, moments from his life flash before his eyes. Memories of his life come rushing back to him as he goes through this experience. A lot of these moments that we used are either things we didn’t see earlier in the film, or alternate takes of things we saw earlier in the film. Parker Laramie, our editor, did an amazing job at figuring out, how are we coming into and out of these memories in a way where they feel like they’re moving forward and not just a series of random images that are flying at us. “Beautiful ain’t it?” “Just beautiful.” “When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November of 1968 —” This narration that comes in by the ever wonderful Will Patton, he’s been guiding us through the whole movie, and this narration took a long time to figure out. What was the right balance to wrap the movie up with? And then I also just am blown away by what Joel does here, all the myriad of feelings that he gets across on his face in this final shot just say so much more than anything we could have said. “He felt at last connected to it all.”