Train Dreams directed by Clint Bentley and adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella by Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing) is an immense film about a small and unnoticed life. Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) arrives in the Idaho panhandle as an orphan who doesn’t know who his parents were. His life is manual labour, mostly as a sawyer in the Pacific Northwest and as a railway track worker. Born into the largest and fastest moving century, Robert’s simple life interacts with rapid and profound changes through the Twentieth century, but his quiet and gentle demeanour tends to make him an observer.
All Robert wants is to be with the love of his life, Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their very young daughter. But even a simple existence encounters complications as nature itself is unpredictable.
Nadine Whitney spoke with Joel about how he related to an American experience which has connections to the Australian experience in his role as Robert.
Screening or Streaming Availability from JustWatch:
I wanted to talk to you about making Train Dreams which is a very American film, as an Australian. Because I think we have a similar history in terms of the use of the environment, labour, displacing the traditional owners of the land. Both countries have these wide spaces that we've forested (and deforested).
Can you speak to that? How you connected to parts of the film as an Australian?
Joel Edgerton: I do agree with you. I've been asked about this before, and I often reflect on the fact that Australia, modern Australia, our kind of European-settled modern Australia, has moved in a similar timeline and a similar track, and has had similar sort of events and issues that America has.
So, while I am from Australia and I'm playing an American character in an American story, there's lots of connectivity I have to this. And, as America, Australia was colonised by the British and Europeans, and it was kind of about the sense that they were tackling the land. You know, wrestling with a new way of building and exploring.
And of course, America's Manifest Destiny, travelling west and conquering the West. We had our own similar versions of that. And we had our own version of erasure of the traditional owners of the land. It doesn't really deal with it in Train Dreams, but you can feel it in the decades prior to our story the feeling of where are and how is and what is the relationship with the original Indigenous culture of the country. Of course, we have Ignatius Jack (a Native American) in our story in a different sense, and it doesn't deal with that conflict.
But we harvest Australia in the same way America harvests its land. And we tried to find places and spaces that the European settlers could live and settle in and thrive and had their own sort of wrestling with that.
And on a positive side, I think there's a real Australian spirt that has its own pioneering, or homesteader kind of similarities, as in I think when people are moving into faraway places and isolated places and trying to build a life and work out how to grow food and survive, it creates a character. I think the Australian character of those countryfolk, and rural people has a very similar vibe.
We sound different. And we didn't necessarily carry guns on our hips, but I think it bears a lot of similarities. And I found that in the past with other films that I've done like Loving, for example. There was always a connectivity with some version of our Australian modern history with American modern history.