Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” is the story of a quiet frontiersman named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) living in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. The film is lyrical and impressionistic but grounded in realism as it explores how industrialization transformed the natural world and its people.
“Even though it’s a period movie, we didn’t want that museum diorama feeling,” production designer Alexandra Schaller said. “Everything felt very tactile and real.”
One of her most important tasks was creating the humble cabin in which Robert builds a life with his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and baby daughter, Katie. When he experiences tragedy, the cabin takes on even greater significance and becomes, Schaller said, “the anchor for his memories.” (Spoilers ahead!)
Film sets are often modular structures made with movable walls, but Schaller wanted Robert and Gladys’ home to be a functional living space. So in a forest near Spokane, Washington, the team built a cozy 36-by-27-foot cabin made primarily from local Douglas fir trees and designed with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso’s camera movements in mind. In the center of the walls that separate the kitchen and bedroom areas, for instance, she put a wide opening that was used to frame Edgerton and Jones.
Because Veloso worked largely with natural light, Schaller placed windows strategically. During night shoots, the interior was filled with lanterns and candles chosen by set decorator Melisa Jusufi, who “excavated Washington State for period-appropriate items” like pitchers, baskets and stoneware to populate shelves and tabletops. All props had a use — like hand-carved wooden candle holders and the mobile above Katie’s bed.
Finally, working with costume designer Malgosia Turzanska, Schaller put touches of Gladys’ signature color, yellow, throughout the space, visible in the concept art in the bed linens and delicate curtains. The overall vibe was warm and optimistic, a family home “brimming with potential,” she said.
But after leaving for several weeks to work on the railroad, Robert returns to see his home engulfed in flames, with Gladys and Katie nowhere to be found. And the cabin Schaller’s team built really did burn down. Both she and Bentley were inspired by the viscerality of the burning cabin scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” and decided that nothing short of real flames would do. They worked with the fire department and forestry service to create a controlled fire. “It felt kind of magnificent,” Schaller said.
But before they could turn their work over to pyrotechnics, the team had to transform the Grainiers’ happy family home into the modest lodgings that Robert builds on the same plot of land, hoping that his wife and child will return.
“We talked a lot about, OK, well, what should the new cabin look like? How does he rebuild it?” Schaller said. “And I thought, we’re living so much in his memories. Wouldn’t it be quite beautiful and tragic if we built it in the image of the one that came before, but without the bedroom so there is no remove from the tragedy — he is living it?”
For the new dwelling, Schaller’s team covered up the space that served as the sleeping area in cabin No. 1 and used minimal furnishings to create the stark environment of a grieving single man. As Robert ages, flora sprouts between the floorboards and walls, eventually overwhelming the space by the time Robert takes his last breath. The flowers were, of course, yellow. “His physical body has returned to the land,” Schaller said. “But his soul is being returned to his family.”
