Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” follows the Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker living in the Pacific NorthWest.
Set in the late 1960s, “Train Dreams” is directed by “Sing Sing” co-writer Clint Bentley who called on Adolpho Veloso to be the film’s cinematographer.
The images are lush. The tall green trees pop against the clear blue sky, until a wildfire ravages the forest and changes Grainger’s life. Suddenly, the palette is ash and grey reflecting the aftermath.
Veloso’s imagery is one that lingers long after the film credits have rolled. In one scene, it’s a grand moment, as the tall trees get sawed down all in the name of progress.
Veloso sat down with Variety for Inside the Frame and said, “For 99% of the movie, we used natural light.”
With Bentley shooting in real-life locations, the idea was to simulate the audience looking through memories and putting a life together where those the images were being shown. In this case, those memories belong to Edgerton’s character, Robert.
For research, Veloso looked through a lot of old pictures from the era and even as far back as 1920. As he was going through them, it dawned on him that they looked like the 3:20 aspect ratio. Says Veloso, “We just kept going back to this memory feeling. We were like, ‘Why we just don’t use that aspect ratio?’”
Once they had that, Veloso knew this would be an intimate film, and also tried to capture the beauty of the natural setting. To properly film in natural light and capture the beauty of the landscape, Veloso says, “We knew we needed a smaller camera and because of the natural light…we just decided to go with the Alexa 35 to have a lot of dynamic range.”
Similarly, for the scenes at night, natural was key, so he used real fire and candles to light those. He says, “We wanted to keep it that way to feel a bit more grounded.”
The lush imagery in the film was captured using Kowa Spherical lenses. At night, he switched to Zeiss Super Speeds lenses.
After the forest fire devastates much of the landscape, and Grainger’s home, the earthy tones disappear with very little pops of green. That was all natural, Veloso says.
Watch the video above.
variety.com
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