How the ‘Train Dreams’ Writers Adapted an ‘Unadaptable’ Book: Goodbye, Elvis!

The screenwriting rule of thumb is that one page of a script is equivalent to one minute of a movie. For “Train Dreams,” the Best Picture nominee starring Joel Edgerton, it almost worked out that one page of the Denis Johnson novella equaled one page of the script and one minute of the film: The novella is 113 pages of text, the screenplay is 98 pages and the movie is 102 minutes. So the adaptation must have been easy, right?

Wrong. “Train Dreams” is a moody, evanescent book that slides from one time period to another from one paragraph to the next; the writing is spare and elegant, but the story has a power that derives not from what happens — a quiet man, Robert Grainier, lives his life in the woods of Idaho in the first part of the 20th century — but from how it’s presented.

“I loved the book when it came out, but I thought it might be unadaptable,” said Clint Bentley, who directed “Train Dreams” and co-wrote it with Greg Kwedar, the writing partner with whom he’d previously collaborated on “Jockey” (directed by Bentley) and “Sing Sing” (directed by Kwedar). “It has a very stream-of-consciousness style that slips all over the place, and then it settles into a 12-page conversation about a man who gets shot by his dog. That’s the magic of it.”

The biggest challenge he and Kwedar faced, Bentley said, was finding a structure that worked on film “but didn’t lose the wooliness of the book.” The solution lay in moving a catastrophic wildfire that takes place on page 40 of the book closer to the halfway point of the film — cutting an act out of the usual three-act structure.

“Basically, the front half of the movie is watching this person trying to make it work with a small family while also working very far away,” Bentley said. “The fire coming in the middle of the film rips the narrative in half, and you’ve got a more open second half where it’s a person trying to come back to life from a very, very deep grief. It took us a year and a half to work out the details of how you could actually do that.”

From the start, they knew that narration would be needed to capture Johnson’s voice and to make up for a lead character who doesn’t say much. But they had to figure out how much narration was enough and how much was too much. They thought an early scene with 6-year-old Robert on a train would speak for itself until they watched it and determined that it needed a voice-over; they wrote extensive narration for a scene of Grainier sitting by a lake, then threw it all out.

“What Joel was doing and what the audience was picking up from him was so much better than what we were explaining,” he said. “It’s very easy to have the narrator pop in and explain something without fully working out what you’re actually doing with the scene. That was a constant back and forth.”

Some of their favorite moments from the book also had to go: A brief scene in which an older Grainier sees Elvis Presley passing through town on a train would have strained the small budget for a few seconds of screen time, and the conversation about the man who was shot by his dog just didn’t fit no matter how hard they tried to find a place for it (songwriter Nick Cave, a huge fan of the book, did incorporate Elvis and some other book-only images into his end-credits song).

For the second half of the film, the writers took the novella’s character of Claire Thompson, a widow whose belongings Grainier is transporting, and turned her into a forest ranger of the same name (Kerry Condon), who plays a much more crucial role.

“The only thing that made it from the book was her spirit, and her line that the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit,” Bentley said. “We knew she was an important character, but we really struggled with what to do with her, because we wanted more out of her. I wanted to talk about some of the bigger ecological aspects of the story. So we built to that powerful line from the book, which kind of helps him figure out himself and his place in the world while also marrying it to this other aspect that we were trying to put in the movie.”

Another significant change came at the very end. In the final scene of the book, Grainier sees a “wolf boy” on stage in a local theater. That scene appears briefly in the film, but not at its conclusion; that’s occupied by an earlier moment in the book, when Grainier pays $4 for a ride in an open-cockpit airplane and reflects on moments throughout his life.

“We shot the wolf-boy scene, and I thought that would be the ending of the film,” Bentley said. “But we were watching [a rough cut] that had a very early version of the plane sequence. We got through that and it was like, ‘Oh, the movie’s over.’”

The finale is both different from the book and true to the book, which was the idea all along. “When a filmmaker lets a film be its own thing separate from the novel, it tends to work better as long as it retains the spirit,” Bentley said. “That was our North Star: Be completely loyal to the spirit of the book, but then let the movie become its own thing.” 

Below, three scenes from the novella and the screenplay:

Opening scene: book and film

“Claire Thompson” scene: book and film

Airplane scene: book and film

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

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