"America was built by men like Robert Grainier, the stoical lumberjack at the heart of Train Dreams. Grainier cuts the trees and tames the forest and lays the ground for railroads and towns. Technically, then, Train Dreams is a western. But he never once ropes a steer, shoots a bandit or circles the wagons ahead of a Comanche attack on the plains. The small print tells a different kind of story."
"It was a hard film to pitch, admits the actor Joel Edgerton: an uphill struggle; plenty of studio trepidation. You go into the meeting and say: Well, it's a movie about a guy who's not really making choices for himself. He's kind of pushed around by life.' He's not a big hero, agrees the director, Clint Bentley. Also, there are some supernatural elements. It's a spiritual movie, adds Edgerton."
"I'm delighted they got it across the line. Train Dreams is beautiful, spiritual, but it is also rugged and pitiless and resolutely earthbound, planted in the soil of the Pacific north-west and lovingly grown out of Denis Johnson's 2011 novella. Edgerton plays Grainier, the itinerant logger in 1900s Idaho, dwarfed by towering fir trees and white pine. Each job takes him deeper into the northern woods, further away from his wife and infant daughter, Katy."
Robert Grainier is an itinerant logger in early 1900s Idaho who labors to clear forests for railroads and towns while being separated from his wife and infant daughter. The film emphasizes Grainier's ordinariness and lack of conventional heroic choice, portraying him as pushed along by life. The narrative blends rugged, pitiless realism with spiritual and supernatural elements rooted in the soil of the Pacific north-west. The adaptation draws on Denis Johnson's 2011 novella and foregrounds themes of labor, loss, and solitude. Production encountered studio apprehension because of the protagonist's quietness and the film's tonal mix of earthly detail and subtle mysticism.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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