Director Clint Bentley on Adapting ‘Train Dreams’ for the Big Screen

The Book Review

The New York Times

Arts, Books

4.0 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

The latest film from the writer and director Clint Bentley, “Train Dreams,” is nominated for four Oscars, including best adapted screenplay. The movie is based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name and tells the story of Robert Grainier, a logger in the Pacific Northwest, in stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear prose. This week, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bentley, who wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar, his longtime collaborator, about how he went about translating Johnson’s work into a visual medium. Bentley first read “Train Dreams” just after college, long before he ever thought of making it into a movie. When producers with rights to the book approached Bentley, he was suddenly worried. “Going back and reading the book again,” Bentley said, “I was like, Oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable.” Set on capturing the spirit of the book, Bentley and Kwedar focused on “the vastness of this small little life,” he said. “We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we’re actually living them,” Bentley said. “We only start to understand them when it’s too late.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	The spirit of the book is, for me, it's hard to grab onto.
0:07.6	Yeah, me too.
0:08.4	Lots of feelings, lots of things that made me feel.
0:11.0	Yeah.
0:11.2	But what would you say was the inherent spirit that you were able to transfer over to the film?
0:16.7	Oh, I think I would kill it if I tried to put it into like a sentence or two here.
0:22.0	The life of man, something, something.
0:23.8	Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
0:26.3	I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times, and it's Oscar season.
0:34.2	I love the Oscars. I've loved that my entire life.
0:40.9	This year, I've already seen eight of the 10 Best Picture nominees.
0:49.1	On our last episode, I had the chance to speak with Guillermo D'Otoro about his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
0:54.2	And today we have another Oscar nominee on the show, Clint Bentley. Clint is the director and the co-writer of Train Dreams, which is a film that he adapted from the 2011 Dennis Johnson novella of the same name.
1:03.9	Both tell the story of Robert Grenier.
1:06.8	Robert is a logger.
1:09.2	He's a rail worker.
1:10.1	He lives in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century.
1:14.7	And it's basically his life. He works. He falls in love. He has a child. He suffers a tragedy. He grieves that tragedy. Like any of us, he experiences things both grand and trivial.
1:30.4	And I was moved greatly by both the book and the film, but in very different ways.
1:35.7	And the film, for its part, is nominated for four Oscars, including the big one,
1:40.8	Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
1:43.6	So when I talked with Clint, we went right to the source.
	...

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