‘Train Dreams’ Production Design Interview — Craft Roundtable

Clint Bentley’s latest film, “Train Dreams,” has a hard balance to strike between the meditative, almost shy, and quite heartbreaking interiority of its protagonist, logger and lumberman Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), and the harsh, cyclical world in which he lives. The look of the film needs to support both a grounded sense of the period and a slightly lyrical quality, where a thin curtain blowing in the wind or the shine of an axe can mean more, emotionally, than simply what we see. Every choice production designer Alexandra Schaller made needed to support both worlds that the film moves effortlessly between.

 ”We wanted a very documentary-like quality to the movie. We wanted the design to feel invisible,” Schaller told IndieWire as part of our recent craft roundtable. “I did a lot of research at the outset — and we’re talking about a very specific world, which is the niche world of logging in the early 20th century. I learned everything about it. We listened to a lot of oral histories from the time.”

It was these stories of men building cabins and drifting from job to job and fishing from the river that inspired Schaller to make choices that would speak to what it would actually be like to live in the Pacific Northwest of that time — not just the right items from a Sears catalogue, but a lived-in sense of what it would be like to live that particular life. “What we wanted to focus on was, ‘How do we want to feel?’ A lot of the movie is from one person’s point of view, and it’s really like his interior landscape. And there’s a lot in Dennis Johnson’s novella, and in (Clint Bentley’s and Greg Kwedar’s) script. There’s a dreamlike quality woven through the narrative.”

It’s the more dreamlike movements of “Train Dreams” that inspired Schaller and her art team to elevate the period details slightly, to go a little bit further in terms of how colors match or create depth, to set off Grainier’s memories and imagination. “We want it to be completely, completely immersive,” Schaller said.

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This conversation is presented in partnership with Netflix.