From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

My guest is a writer and a director and an actor, and he sometimes even acts in other people's movies.

He's with directors from Jeff Nichols to David Lowry to his new film with Clint Bentley.

All the Texans.

All the Texans who like people who don't talk in their movies and then pick the right guy to not talk for them.

In this case, Joel Edgerton starring in in... He's got two new films, actually.

Both of which played at film festivals this year. The first is the adaptation, the incredible adaptation of Train Dreams and also the film of The Play. First of all, it's a pleasure to see you spend way too long. It has. It's good to say. Way too long. And I wanted to tell you, one of the things that... First of all, getting to see train dreams at Sundance and really getting to see that on the big screen and hearing the audience start to breathe with your character, because as he gets older, his breathing slows. I want to

ask you about that physicalization because you do this thing where it's not just that he moves

slow or anything, but it's just his breathing slows down.

Yeah, I became fascinated by how work and emotional experience sort of, you know, shape the body,

particularly the physical labor, but also emotional experience is how it bears down on you.

And one of the things that, you know, I feel like you

sometimes don't learn about a character until you're in the midst of doing it. One of the

things I really realized about intense physical labour of which I am not in the business of,

except pretending for like the odd few minutes here and there between action and cut

is how much conservation of energy you start to need in between the physical labour.

I realized like how slow some of these guys move when they're not actually in the midst of their work.

That was a really good thing to learn. It's like how to amble and how to relax and when to sit down and how to breathe. We should say it's an adaptation of Dennis Johnson's. I guess it's a novella. I thought of it's being a short story because I read in the Paris Street, I feel like 20 years ago. Yeah. And it's interesting too because it's really a story following a day labor over several decades about guilt, a survivor's guilt.

And that's the one thing that Clinton really brought from the story to the movie is we feel his guilt over the course of the decades.

And part of that, too, is just for me the way he sort of stops holding his head up by the enemy.

He's so bent by not only all these years of work, but what he's gone through.

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