‘Train Dreams’ Clint Bentley And Greg Kwedar

On Sunday at the Sun Valley Film Festival, Train Dreams director and co-writer Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar received Deadline’s Disruptors in Film Award.

The filmmaking duo, who were Oscar-nominated in 2025 for Best Adapted Screenplay for their film Sing Sing, directed by Kwedar, have long been noted by Deadline for their work as disruptors in the industry.

Bentley and Kwedar pioneered Ethos, their equal-pay and equal-equity initiative, with their second film Jockey — a plan that expanded into Sing Sing — and their continuing choices to pursue what Kwedar calls “community-driven filmmaking”, with subjects that defy today’s box office-driven pressures, have earned them the title of Deadline’s Disruptors in Film.

During the Sun Valley Film Festival Coffee Chat session following the award presentation, Bentley and Kwedar revealed they had recently received a call from Steven Spielberg to congratulate them on Train Dreams, the story of an early 20th-century logger starring Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and William H. Macy.

WATCH THE SVFF VIDEO CONVERSATION WITH CLINT BENTLEY AND GREG KWEDAR:

“It is wild,” said Bentley of getting that call. “From early on, we wanted to try and just make films that we liked at the base of it, and that we wanted to share with people, and whatever came from that good or bad was the cherry on top, or the icing on the cake.”

But despite all their accolades for Train Dreams — including their recent five Critics Choice Award nominations — Kwedar also noted that it’s important to always find meaning in the work, outside of what may come once the film is finished.

“For us, I think it begins with the work itself and the process and what it means to you. You’ve got to find that first so you don’t get thrown around in the washing machine of how the rest of this goes.”

Asked about their decision to adapt the very interior novella Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, which eschews a traditional hero-led story or any kind of blockbuster tropes, Bentley joked, “We haven’t cracked the blockbuster film thing yet, for better or for worse.” Then he added, “But knowing that, that’s the thing, I think, with all of these films, they come from a place of just wanting to tell the story or go into a world. And it’s been a bit different on each film in terms of that first driver that has set us on that path.”

Since meeting right out of college, the pair had bonded over their mutual appreciation for documentary film, and then began an investigative journalistic approach, beginning with their first feature Transpecos in 2016, that explored the daily lives of border agents — a subject that came to them organically through a fascination with those agents’ experiences. But when the people they interviewed didn’t want to necessarily tell their truth on camera, Kwedar and Bentley hit on a solution: they would tell these true stories via narrative film.

“There was something that in that time that I think came to shape our process, that that we use even now,” Bentley said. “While everybody is setting up the cameras and you’re chit-chatting with the subject who’s about to be on camera, they’re telling you all these crazy stories and showing you things on their phone and you’re like, wow, this is incredible. This is why we’re making this documentary.’ And then they sit down [on camera] and they’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about that.’”

Their resulting method of putting true testimony into narrative storytelling continued with their second feature, Jockey, which dug into the reality of the horse-racing world, inspired by Bentley’s proximity to that world, since his father was a jockey. “We learned a lot from that film,” he said, “I think for both of us, in terms of taking things that were barriers and trying to figure out, OK, how do you how do this when you hit this brick wall, how does it become something that you actually use to the benefit of the film, rather than something that limits the film?”

Their equal-pay, equal-equity concept was proven with Jockey when they sold the film for seven figures at Sundance. “The investors made a huge profit,” Kwedar said, “but also the cast and crew, too. We issued more than the budget of the film back to the artists who made it. That was done with the ten-person crew. And then that expands with post-production. But we were hearing all these stories of people going back and finishing a degree with this discretionary profit that was outside of the gig mentality of survival. It expands imagination and possibility for stories. Like someone had an unfinished bathroom renovation that had sat for six months, and the check they got was the exact amount they needed to finish that.”

Then came the roaring success of Sing Sing, which did not cater to any traditional ‘prison story’ tropes and which Kwedar and Bentley were told was “unsellable”. Ultimately, it received three Oscar nominations, including Lead Actor for Colman Domingo who was a committed part of the equal-pay structure.

Kwedar also said of their approach to creating a positive working environment: “A great starting place, and it’s hard to do on a 200-person crew, but if you can greet everyone in the morning by name and thank them at the end of each day, that alone, starts to ripple through the crew and ideas surface.”

He added, “As we were rolling Sing Sing out into the world, we were fascinated that A24, one of their main ways of marketing the film was around the pay parity structure, and just to see that ripple effect resonating and filmmakers coming to us and saying, ‘How do we deploy this? Is it possible for us to make a movie in this way?’”

With this year’s Train Dreams, Bentley and Kwedar approached the story of Robert Grainier from a place of pure appreciation for Johnson’s novella. Grainier is an ordinary man, living what is essentially an ordinary life. As Bentley put it, “It felt like an obituary for somebody you’d never read an obituary about.”

There is also very little dialogue. “I was really excited to use the film to treat a simple life as something epic and beautiful and was trying to resist the urge and the temptation to turn it into something bigger than it is,” Bentley said.

Bentley brought in his Jockey DP Adolpho Veloso, and they hit on the idea of shooting Train Dreams using only natural light. Set in Bonners Ferry, Idaho and shot in Washington state, that natural light approach made the environment and nature into a kind of character in itself, he said.

Casting Edgerton in the lead role of Grainier became part of what Bentley calls the “magic” that seemed to be there throughout the process of making Train Dreams. Unbeknownst to the filmmakers, Edgerton had tried to buy the rights years before, such was his love of the novella. And he had originally planned to direct and play Grainier, but when he found the rights were taken, he figured it wasn’t meant to be.

Then came the call from Bentley and Kwedar. “It was completely coincidental, or magic, or whatever,” Bentley said. “We had both always been big fans of his, but I was careful not to think about any one person as we were writing the script. And because it’s such a delicate role not only in terms of who could play it emotionally, but also, who’s the right age that you can age up and down, and can play late 20s, early 30s, but they can also play an 80 year-old man, a 70 year-old man? And no, we had no knowledge that he knew the book at all. And we just went to him in the same way that you do to any other actor.”

Edgerton had also heard they were making the film and had actually DMed Bentley on Instagram too. “I remember I’d gone with the family to have breakfast and we were coming back home, and I just opened up Instagram and I got a note from, Joel Edgerton saying, ‘Hi, it’s Joel,’” Bentley said.

During the SVFF conversation, Bentley also addressed how valuable their filmmaking partnership has been to them both, as they swap out directing duties, while co-writing and co-producing. “You watch somebody else directing and I think both of us have like picked up little things from the other person. And our films have changed by having a front row seat to this [other] person.”

Kwedar agreed, saying of their work together, “If I were on my own, I would not have been involved with a jockey or [horse]trainers just for my artistic sensibility or the things that I could see, or that I see as a film. But my life is so much more enriched because I got to be a part of those. And that served me as a storyteller and provided, just in the work itself and what those movies are about, and what they convey, the deeper change. So the invitation to those things, because I’m in Clint’s orbit, is part of its impact, too.”

On Monday, the Sun Valley Film Festival announced its full list of award winners, including Bentley for Best Narrative Feature for Train Dreams and Joel Edgerton for the Best Performance in a Film for Train Dreams.

Ask E. Jean, directed by Ivy Meeropol took the Best Documentary Feature Award and the Best Short was Go Forward, directed by Peter Cambor. Festival highlights included Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gus Van Sant’s Vision Award, Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Rising Star Award, and Ondi Timoner’s Impact Award. The festival took place from December 3-7, and screened 16 narrative and documentary features and 32 shorts.

To see the full conversation with Train Dreams‘ Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, click on the video above.

Train Dreams is currently streaming on Netflix.