How Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso Brought a Robert Grainier’s Life to the Screen

Train Dreams is a life-affirming heart-breaker. Based on Denis Johnson’s novella, the spiritually rich drama shows a man’s life. It’s the extraordinary yet ordinary life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a logger, a builder, and, first and foremost, a family man married to Gladys (Felicity Jones) and father to one.

Filmmaker Clint Bentley (Jockey) and his regular collaborator, cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, capture beauty and pain — and everything in between — in Grainier’s story. Every living and dread tree Grainier encounters is as tangible as all the people who come and go from his life.

It’s an intimate yet towering vision painted by Veloso, who recently spoke with What’s On Netflix about shooting the Best Picture contender.

You’re showing a man’s entire life. The scale is massive because every image holds such weight. When you’re depicting a story of this scale, where do you begin with the bigger picture? Is it brick by brick?

Brick by brick. There’s something about trying to understand what the bigger picture is, of course. But if you connect to the story and if you connect to what the characters are feeling, there’s always a guidebook to what you’re supposed to do. That’s what you need to be open to every day. When you go to those scenes, it’s basically: Okay, what is this scene about? What are we supposed to be feeling here? What is this character supposed to be feeling here? And then come the technical aspects — stunts, fire, etc. And then you’re translating everything into images somehow. You’re just trying to solve all the problems one by one and figure out how to do it.

When the narrator (Will Patton) says that this is maybe the happiest time in Robert’s life, when he’s trying to balance work and family, how did you want light to evoke his happiest period?

We wanted it to feel very magical and almost like a good, beautiful memory, sweet memories where everything was beautiful. Even the bad moments, even the arguments — we wanted everything to have a kind of magical aspect to it. That’s the part of the movie, for example, that we shot the most during golden hour. The light inside the cabin feels very warm and golden.

We wanted the movie to feel like memories all the time. As the narrator said, those were probably the sweetest, happiest memories. When we remember sweet things in our lives, we remember them with a certain glow that might not even have been there when they happened; we might remember it with better lighting than we were actually seeing at the time.

TRAIN DREAMS – (Pictured) Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier. Cr: Netflix © 2025

When it comes to capturing a performance, what can’t you plan for? What does Joel Edgerton give you on a day that makes you adjust?

Every day. We had everything planned in a lot of ways, but we were always, always open to whatever Joel or whoever else was giving and adapting every single time. That’s the best mindset to have: be open to whatever happens. I battled that before in my life, and it’s been frustrating at times and still is sometimes, but honestly, a lot of the things that I like the most, including in this movie, are the things that happened differently from what I was expecting. Those little moments that came from pivoting are the things I end up loving the most.

You wanted nature as a character in Train Dreams. What sort of character?

Well, it’s a character full of different wheels — always changing — and unpredictable and amazing, and at the same time, scary. Nature gives us everything and takes everything back. It’s a very eccentric character.

What did you shoot on day one?

Day one was Joel and Felicity at the cabin. Scene one was just a moment of them lying in bed where she’s touching his back. It was just supposed to be her touching his back while he’s sleeping, something like that. And then it became a bigger moment, and they had a conversation, etc. But it was such a beautiful moment. 

What were some of the lessons from day one?

Oh my God. The lesson was that whatever they would bring our way, we could manage, and we would just roll with the punches. In any production, there are a lot of challenges and things go wrong. I think day one especially was the day things went wrong. We started, I think, three hours later than we were supposed to. Instead of 12 hours, we had nine, and we still finished the day and got everything we were supposed to shoot. So I thought, Okay, if we can make this one happen, we can probably make everything else happen too.

When you and Clint talked through your vision for the movie, how did you land on the ARRI Alexa 35, and why did you feel this camera would best tell this whole life story?

First of all, I think it’s the best digital camera ever made. Because we wanted to work with natural light, having that dynamic range was amazing. We didn’t have to worry about a lot of things we would have had to worry about with other cameras. There’s also a great thing about the camera’s size. We had a lot of handheld work, and often we did really long takes for the improvisation in the cabin. They would go for half an hour nonstop, and I would just be following with the camera.

Having a smaller camera that was easy to operate handheld was good, but it’s also a camera that works for anything, no matter the scale. It has the right texture, dynamic range, size — everything.

But most of all, those aspects gave us the flexibility to be as naturalistic as possible: to actually use fire, to actually use natural light, to have a smaller footprint that allowed the actors to inhabit the space and move around without worrying about the camera.

Train Dreams. (L-R) Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier and Kerry Condon as Claire Thompson in Train Dreams. Cr. BBP Train Dreams. LLC. © 2025.

Was that a big deal for you and Clint, having a small carbon footprint?

Totally. I mean, it would be ironic not to do that with this movie. But also, coming from Jockey, which was the first movie we did, we had a crew of basically 10 people. It gave us so much freedom to move the camera, to pivot, to allow the actors to come in and out and move around without worrying about a bunch of things. We love that aspect of Jockey.

We wanted to keep the same flexibility, the same smaller footprint, to be able to capture those same magical moments. It’s definitely a challenge, because Train Dreams is a much bigger movie with a much bigger crew. It’s a period piece, not the same as shooting a movie with just 10 people on an operating horse track.

The movie really does just wash over you as a viewer. It’s so technical, but at the same time a very pure experience. What effect did you want the bigger picture to create?

Period pieces especially are always a trap. How can you make them relatable to the audience? How can you make them as grounded as possible? For me, it’s hard. It’s hard to watch a movie where everybody talks, dresses, and behaves in different ways. The movies that accomplish this are the ones that ground themselves. They’re really about the characters, not necessarily about the historical event, even though some great movies have great characters within great historical moments. There’s something about grounding it and letting it be what it is that helps it feel relatable somehow. It’s funny, because it’s a movie about a guy living in the 1920s, yet it feels so contemporary. The story is basically the same as any story today.