Train Dreams:
An epic tale tracing the roots of the modern age

The movie, an Oscar contender hailed as one of the best films of 2025, centers on one Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker, husband and father, played with humble grace by Joel Edgerton. Viewers follow him from childhood through the full arc of his life, an existence marked by the joy of love and fatherhood and by intense, inescapable grief.

Edgerton had already come across Train Dreams in its book form before and was so taken with it, he actually looked into optioning it himself. The actor says that the adapted screenplay also drew him, partly because of the way it centers nature. “One of my favourite lines in the film is that a dead tree is as important as the living one,” says Edgerton. “[There’s] this idea of replenishment and how the world absorbs things and things grow. I just love the points of view on nature from different characters.”

The film also features stand-out performances by Felicity Jones, who plays Grainier’s wife, Gladys, and Kerry Condon, who appears as Claire, a clear-eyed forest ranger. “In the forest, every least thing’s important,” says Claire, in one scene, adding that, “The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river.”

Indeed, one of the pleasures of the film is the way that nature itself becomes a beautifully realized character in its own right. Reverently capturing trees in both their majesty and their soft filigree, Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso make the natural world a full protagonist. It’s forest bathing given cinematic expression.

One scene – a flashback in which Robert and Gladys share their first kiss – is made all the more moving thanks to its setting in a field profuse with wildflowers. Finding that location at just the right moment was serendipitous, recalls Bentley. When the filmmakers scouted the area two weeks before, it hadn’t seemed “particularly beautiful,” says the director. “Then, I walked out and there was this whole field and in the two weeks since we had seen it, it had just exploded with these beautiful yellow flowers. It was just one of those little gifts that came. We would never have had the budget to, you know, plant 10,000 sunflowers.”

Train Dreams isn’t explicitly a film about climate – yet it feels like one. The loss of habitat – of all those countless trees that were sacrificed to make modernity and industrialization possible – is a leitmotif in the movie, which parallels the personal loss that Grainier feels. (To avoid spoilers, we won’t mention the source of his grief here.) As progress marches on, Bentley interweaves his twin themes: the forests decline and Grainier feels increasingly left behind, a near hermit.

In real life, much of the lush green landscape that’s portrayed in the film actually was wiped out. It’s estimated that in the Pacific Northwest, around 72% of old-growth, original conifer forest has been lost since Europeans arrived, mostly due to logging and development.

“We have this rapacious appetite that we just take and take and take from nature without really thinking of the cost of it, you know?,” says Bentley, expounding on why he finds this theme compelling. “It’s something that we’ve always struggled with. We’ve struggled with it in the Industrial Revolution, in ancient Rome. Humanity is always in a conversation with itself trying to find that balance.”

As a nod to how that balance can be off-kilter, there’s a fleeting scene in the film  that shows two bridges over a gorge. The narrator notes that the second bridge replaced the first one only a few years later, making the original completely obsolete. Grainier had helped build it and men had died completing it. Condon tells Imagine5 that that moment in the movie stayed with her: “Things like that are heartbreaking – all the waste.”

The scene with the two bridges wasn’t in Johnson’s original book. Nor was Macy’s soliloquy about how cutting down a tree affects one’s soul.

Indeed, in adapting the movie from Johnson’s book, Bentley shares that he infused the screenplay (co-written with Greg Kwedar) with more nature-themed scenes and dialogue than is actually found in the original. “I’ve talked to other people who’ve read the book and they’re like, ‘Where did all that nature stuff come from?’ I don’t know. I saw it in there,” says Bentley, adding that, “I was raised on a cattle ranch, and I was raised in nature. And I have a deep love for it and feel like it’s worth protecting and taking care of.”

Nevertheless, Bentley didn’t want to hit viewers over the head with an overly weighty environmental message. “I didn’t want to be as reductive as like, ‘progress is bad’,” says Bentley, who says he took pains to avoid being “preachy”. He adds that, “It’s an important theme to consider our impact on the world and what we are losing by the things that we’re taking from the world. I think it’s important to remember that we’re threaded into [the natural world] in the way that everything else is.”

His cast members had similar reactions to the material. “We are builders. It’s society marching on,” says Macy. “We need lumber. We need the bridges. And I think if there’s a hidden meaning in the film, it’s that it’s inevitable, but we have to give a lot of thought to it. Perhaps because we can, doesn’t mean we should.”

One of the best parts of shooting the movie, according to its stars, was filming on location in Washington state, allowing them to enjoy their own memorable moments of connecting with the natural world. Jones recalls cherishing the area’s “incredible” pink sunsets. “It’s just the peace of being in nature. I live in a very urban area, so it was a real pleasure to be up shooting in that part of the world,” says the actress. She adds that “a huge part of wanting to do the film was how so much of the film is about how reciprocal that relationship with nature is. And how nature, if we look after it properly, it will renew itself. In the same way, human emotion can work like that. There’s a kind of synchronicity between humans and nature when everything is working as it should be.” In the film, one beautiful scene highlights the way that nature renews itself, showing morel mushrooms sprouting up in charred terrain after a fire has ravaged the landscape.

“The film really made me remember how much I believe in protecting the environment and reminded me just how often am I really staying true to that,” Edgerton says. He is also glad that the production had its own sustainability officer. “There’s a really nice culture on set nowadays where there’s usually a point person there to be kind of an environmental protector, as in separating trash and making sure that for the most part people are not just burning through plastic bottles of water.”

And his favorite memory from the shoot? Filming near an enormous tree that had fallen down on its own in a protected forest. “I don’t know how many hundreds of years old it was, but I went around and climbed up on the fallen stump. And it was the size of a small house. You know, the circumference of that tree was huge and there was this big hollowed-out section in the middle of it,” he says. “And you felt like it had been around since dinosaurs walked the earth. You know, it’s so old, this tree… When you see insects living on it, and moss growing on it, it kind of put a lot of things in perspective.”

“I think it’s really humbling – I think that’s what’s so nice about being in nature,” adds Jones. “We want to preserve it so it’s here when we’re long gone.”