Recently in Los Angeles, the Oscar-nominated “Train Dreams” filmmakers had one of their dreams realized in the form of a pop-up gallery highlighting stand out images from the Best Picture contender.
“The way we kind of envisioned the movie and what we wanted the movie to feel like when you’re watching it [is] almost like you found that box full of pictures and you’re figuring out who that person was through those pictures,” said “Train Dreams’ cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, as he gave IndieWire an exclusive tour of the exhibit alongside the film’s director Clint Bentley. “And to now have all those pictures up on the walls, and in a still photography sense have that same feeling, looking at those pictures and trying to figure out what the movie is, and what the life was through those pictures, is a very beautiful and special moment for us.”
Ahead, IndieWire shares some of the stills the pair curated for the exhibit, with commentary below some of their favorites.
To start, Bentley and Veloso go back to beginning with the first image of “Train Dreams” that they released publicly, when the film was selected for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “It’s just so lovely. And you have their whole relationship and their whole dynamic in one frame while the sun’s setting behind it,” said Bentley of the image of stars Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton as married couple Gladys and Robert Grainier. “We just set this up, put them in place, and ran it like 20 times as the sun was going down behind them.”
Practical lighting was a huge part of Veloso’s approach to the cinematography for the film. He points to the photo of Edgerton’s silhouette, saying “the amazing thing about shooting on location is there’s no sky replacements in the movie. It’s all real skies. Of that sky, it’s actually what we had there, and it’s surreal how beautiful it was, and how many beautiful sunsets and sunrises we got.”
Bentley finds another photo of Edgerton and his onscreen daughter that reminds him of one of his favorite scenes in the film. “[In the photo] she’s pointing at her mom because she’s like, ‘Mama.’ She hands Joel a pine cone, but the scene that’s in the movie is she hands him some things that she says are eggs and he’s like, ‘Oh, an egg,’ and he laughs, but it’s really some shit from a deer or something,” says the Best Adapted Screenplay nominee with a laugh. “But I love it. It’s one of the sweetest moments in the film.”
Veloso, who this year became the first ever Brazilian nominated for Best Cinematography, recalls a moment during production where the harsh weather was actually to his benefit. “We got to go on the mountain and we rode on [snowcats]. For a Brazilian, that was a first.” He added, “The amazing thing is that a snowstorm started to come towards us. Everybody was like, ‘Ok, we should go then.’ But then Joel said, ‘Go? No way, we’re going to shoot this.’ And then Clint and I just looked at each other and we were really happy because if Joel is saying it, who’s going to tell him that we shouldn’t?”
For one of the stills that speaks to the title of “Train Dreams,” Bentley explains how “Adolpho had the idea of this, almost like a train light going past. And so we just had this big light on a long dolly track behind them and then set up almost these music video shots.” Veloso said that in order to evoke a sense of the train being present in Grainier’s dream of his late wife, “We put a light on a drone too for those shots passing through them in the middle of the forest.”
For the image they chose of the climactic fire scene, Veloso employed more techniques to achieve that feeling of the film being like the viewer going through a box of pictures. “That whole scene with Gladys point of view of the fire. We shot it with like four frames per second, six frames per second, just a position to really sharp images in other parts of the movie,” said the cinematographer. “That’s very common in still photography, but not necessarily common in films.”
Finally, for one of the closing images in the film, Bentley also gives a shoutout to production designer Alex Schaller. “I had super high hopes for what this plant man could be after Grainier dies, and nature kind of starts to take him back. And it surpassed everything that I thought it would be… just the way it turned out with busting a hole in the roof and having all these flowers come in.”
In the above video, the pair visit another room that is playing clips of their Netflix film. “The shots really wrap around you. I love this room so much. It feels like it’s very moving. It feels like stepping in the movie,” said Bentley. “Yeah, I got really emotional when I first stepped in here,” said Veloso of their vision for the film being realized in the form of the exhibit. Though now he jokes, “I’m getting used to it.”
