At the Toronto International Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter honored the filmmakers behind Train Dreams with the inaugural Trailblazer Award for Excellence in Sustainable Storytelling. The award, which recognizes visionary creators who illuminate our changing world, was presented to Bentley and Edgerton by Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.
Train Dreams, based on the Pulitzer finalist from author Denis Johnson, follows Robert Grainier (played onscreen by Joel Edgerton), a laborer in Idaho and Washington State, as he quietly works on the area’s burgeoning train system and later its logging operations. The film, which takes place from the end of Westward expansion through the 1960s, takes a look at the human toll on the natural world.
Bentley directed and co-wrote the film, noting the story’s relevance to present-day circumstances: “The world seems to be falling apart more rapidly than it was before we showed the movie. And there was something that felt very timeless and resonant about Grenier’s story and the story of this man. For me, it feels more resonant and timely now as we’re slipping into something very unknown, worldwide, not just locally in the United States.”
For a film with a strong environmental message to be heard by the right people requires storytelling strategy, according to Edgerton, who also executive produces. “This idea within the film, which is sort of tons of messages about our relationship to the environment that we live in,” he says, adding that the characters “give a sense that we’re all interwoven, we’re all connected to each other. Whether it’s about friendship or kinship or humanity. There’s something there about that in the world we live in that isn’t all the movie’s about but it sort of resonates on another level throughout the story.”
As for how filming on location in nature affected his performance, Edgerton notes, “Whenever I get to shoot a movie that’s out of the city, I always feel better.” Edgerton adds that the film touches on “our ability to regrow beyond the more challenging aspects of our lives — the way we take from the world and think of ourselves as the most important organisms on the planet.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s review of the film, which first screened at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released by Netflix on Nov. 21, made note of Train Dreams’ “key theme, now more relevant than ever — the cost to nature of man’s progress.”
“Train Dreams is a film that manages to explore the cost to a man’s soul of cutting down a 500-year-old tree, but also the lives that would be saved by forthcoming progress,” Read when presenting the award to Bentley and Edgerton. Read continued, “Train Dreams does a beautiful job of exploring that balance between progress and preservation.”
This feature was created in partnership with Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.