BTS Train Dreams

IBC

Editor Parker Laramie explains how frontier drama Train Dreams walks the line between naturalism and magical realism.

article here

The harsh wilderness and untamed forests of the Pacific Northwest envelopes and shapes the lives of men working to build the American railroad that will ultimately transform the country in melancholic Netflix feature Train Dreams.

Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainer, a stoic logger turned railroad worker, whose tough life on the frontier is tracked from 1917 in rural Idaho on to Washington at the dawn of the space age.

Co-written by Clint Bentley with Greg Kwedar it is edited by Parker Laramie, the creative team behind the Oscar nominated prison drama Sing Sing.

“We wanted Train Dreams to feel like a fable but still a salt of the earth American story,” Laramie tells IBC365. “This mix of naturalism and elevated magical realism was the line that we were walking the whole time.”

Laramie had previously edited Jockey for Bentley and Kwedar, a film about an ageing horse rider which established a form of poetic realism now extended for Train Dreams.

“We felt like we developed a language with Jockey and that was the template we started from,” Laramie explains. “For the most part, we saw Train Dreams as an expansion of a lot of the things we’d been doing in Jockey in terms of mixing a naturalistic tone with a more elevated or elegiac pitch.”

“There are differences. In Jockey we would go into the subjective headspace of the main character while with Trains Dreams we’re telling the story with a little less of a first person subjective experience. The story is nonetheless told from the point of view of the narrator. I think you're still in Robert Granier's head but not in quite the same way.”

The character that Edgerton plays is a man of few words but big feelings. His performance has to say a lot without actually saying much. We understand most of what he is thinking from a voiceover, narrated by Will Patton, though he was a late addition. Throughout the whole offline edit until almost final picture delivery, Laramie himself was the narrator.

“Clint is a director who loves trial and error,” says Laramie. “Clint and I, but mostly Clint, were constantly rewriting the narration, using it to figure out when and where we’d use it to move the story forward. It was a conscious decision from Joel and Clint that Robert Granier would have little agency over his life.

“That presented a problem because the classic way of telling a story is that the main character needs to sort of thrust themselves into the second act. Very specifically we were given a performance that was not that. Clint and Joel were true to the script but main my main notes to them were whether we could just inject a little bit of motivation to get us from A to B?

“Clint was very militant about it and Joel was right there with him. So by the time we got into the edit it was like ‘okay how do we get inside his head?’ The narration is vital for that as well as the footage.”

Virtually the entire film was shot on location using the available light and weather conditions. DP Adolpho Veloso ABC, AIP, who also shot Jockey, shot with Alexa 35, often framing the characters a little below centre, or with corner framing, to get either a sense of their scale amid the space and the sky or to feel hemmed in by their environment. Night scenes were often lit by candle or camp fire and lensed with Zeiss Super Speeds. For day time scene he switched to Kowa Cine Prominar Sphericals.

“The environment becomes its own character,” as Laramie puts it. “Some of the compositions that Adolpho did in this film are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. It can be hard to connect with characters who lived in a different age to you, so we were trying to find a way of immersing the audience in his feelings.”

Shot long before the L.A fires of January this year, there are two major fire scenes in the film, one of which they shot practically in a burnt forest, with the lighting team constructing lights to mimic the glow and movement of the fire. A second dream-like sequence was shot on a volume stage with slow shutter speeds influenced by the work of director Wong Kar-wai.

The obvious reference for Train Dreams is the work of Terrence Malick, and Laramie doesn’t deny his influence. “On Jockey I remember cutting a scene and Clint's wife, said it felt ‘too Malicky.’ She was right, it was too obvious. But he is clearly an influence, particularly for me The New World, but as soon as we started to get too close to it we began to back off as much as we could. It’s unavoidable but we didn't want to have the film feel like it was a love letter. Clint has his own language that he likes to use that I think pushes beyond Malick.”

Bentley sent the crew half a dozen films to watch in prep, none of which were a Malick. They included two from Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror and Stalker) and French new wave classic Jules et Jim which held clues as to how the narrator functions.

“Something I initially wanted to do was only have the narrator in very specific sections, almost like how the narrator operates in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That film has very specific narrator sequences, shot in a completely different style. That wasn't the right language for our film. We knew that the narrator was going to step in at key points and carry us with just a line or two. There were a lot of times right up until the mix where we were pulling out or adding lines.

“Our conversations in the edit were extensive on the narration. Everything revolves around it and it was always a question of ‘do we really need narration here?’”

Laramie says they tested a few actors for the narrator and found them taking the tone in a different direction, away from their vision. Patton had previously narrated the audio book of the novella on which Train Dreams is based so instinctively grasped what was required. “The moment he started recording it was clear he understood it and brought sort of a levity to the role. We wanted to embrace what Will was bringing to the table.”

The filmmaker is adept at cutting documentaries too. André Is An Idiot, a doc about irreverent cancer sufferer André Ricciardi, which Laramie made with director Tony Benna took home two awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

“I prefer to use Adobe Premiere on docs because I really like the speech-to-text workflow and the text-based editing workflow,” he says. “That's huge because they tend to be much more interview based or dialogue oriented on doc. I’m basically the co-writer [of the film] so being able to work with text and have the video moving along with it is indispensable.

“I sometimes look back and wonder how I used to do it. We’d have an assistant doing a lot of the work but now I can have the assistant doing much more interesting work like digging for better footage or working with music.”

He adds that he prefers to use Premiere on the scripted materials because he finds it easier to edit and mix audio than on other platforms. “Especially on Clint’s projects. Clint's style is so meditative and so being able to take a piece of music and stretch it out and slow it down helps to carry all these long meditative moments. It’s a key part of our edit process.”

Laramie would like to alternate between factual and fiction work for the rest of his career. “I think that blending of fiction and documentary, the tension between the spontaneous and the structured is really interesting to me on a formal level.”