How Depression-era pictures impressed the Oscar-nominated visuals for ‘Train Dreams’ | Options

When cinematographer Adolpho Veloso learn the screenplay for Train Dreams, he was astonished to see himself mirrored within the lead function of Robert Grainier, an itinerant logger within the Pacific Northwest within the early twentieth century. “Coming from Brazil, I was surprised how much I connected with the story,” explains Veloso from Sao Paulo, town the place he was born and attended movie faculty at Fundacao Armando Alvares Penteado.

“Not only because it’s a character who has a similar lifestyle to me, in terms of being away from home for several months at a time, working with people he doesn’t know,” continues Veloso, who’s now primarily based in Portugal. “It’s hard for him to go back home and feel like he belongs and reconnect with his family and his place, which is my life, as a filmmaker, as a cinematographer. There were also a lot of themes that were universal — grief, the immigration aspect. There were so many points I connected to deeply.”

Veloso — who has been Bafta- and Oscar-nominated for his work on Train Dreams, and beforehand labored with the movie’s director and co-writer Clint Bentley on 2021 Sundance hit Jockey — started his visible analysis by images from the Twenties.

“One of the things that struck us was [American photojournalist] Dorothea Lange’s work, especially her pictures during the Great Depression, and the way she was able to capture beauty within the desperation and chaos,” he says.

“It’s what we wanted to do with the movie. Clint wanted it to feel like someone’s life told through memories and we talked a lot about how to translate that into a visual aspect. The closest thing we have is family photos, so we dived deep into that concept of having found these pictures and trying to figure out who this person was through them. That was the starting point for everything.”

So a lot in order that the format of outdated images led Veloso to shoot the movie in a boxy 3:2 facet ratio, “to better resemble a still image”. The squarer form additionally helped with framing, providing extra headroom and area across the characters within the huge forests of the Pacific Northwest.

“It is not a reason we chose it,” continues Veloso. “But during prep we realised how much that would help with nature and tall trees. From the beginning we knew how important nature was in the movie. Everything happening around those characters plays a big part in who they are and what they’re feeling. The conversation was always, ‘How do we give nature the same importance as the other characters?’”

One approach was no drone photographs. “You wouldn’t shoot a person that way. Why would we shoot nature that way? It’s going to create a distance from it. We wanted to do the opposite,” says Veloso. Another was to deal with the timber as characters. “Whenever we’re shooting nature, it’s either a PoV of a tree, or the camera is attached to a tree, or it’s a reverse on a tree, like they’re having a silent conversation.”

As properly as resonating with the nomadic way of life of Train Dreams’ protagonist (performed by Joel Edgerton), Veloso says he felt related to the character when it comes to his persona. “He is very introspective, very silent, someone who takes things in but does not necessarily express them in words,” he notes. “I could see myself in that, and a lot of people involved in the movie could too, like Clint and Joel.” Again, that fed into how Veloso selected to make use of the body, continuously choosing wider photographs.

“When you have a movie that is very quiet, you could fall into the trap of going for closeups all the time, because you need to show all the emotions,” he says. “What I realised early on with Joel, because he is a genius, is that he is able to show so much with his whole body, not just his facial expressions. So, we knew we just had to be there with the camera, and he would give us everything.”

Bentley and Veloso had a crew of 10 on Jockey, with a smaller on-set footprint permitting them to “shoot more, to improvise and to interact with the spaces”. They needed to translate that ethos into Train Dreams, a film that was greater in each scale and funds.

“That was the challenge and the idea,” explains Veloso, who filmed Train Dreams utilizing pure mild 90% of the time. “Even though we had a 100-­person crew, when we were shooting it felt like a 10-person movie, because whoever was around the camera and the actors was minimal.”

That meant taking pictures digitally, utilizing the Alexa Arri 35, with Kowa lenses for daylight — “they have the most beautiful sun flares ever and we wanted a lot of those moments to feel magical, like a vivid image made in the ’20s” — and Zeiss Super Speed lenses for evening scenes and darkish interiors. “We briefly talked about shooting on film but gave up early on that idea, not just because of budget, but we had scenes literally lit by campfires or a single candle and that would be much trickier.”

Moreover, with the brisk, 29-day schedule, taking pictures digitally allowed for improvisation, with Bentley generally filming for as much as 40 minutes, throughout magic hour, sundown, blue mild and evening. This translated into fewer takes, with the onus on Veloso and the actors to get it proper first time. “It was tricky, but as soon as we started shooting, we understood we were getting so much in so little time. It takes a lot of time during prep to figure out how to do it. Clint is not a director that loves to do a lot of coverage, so that makes everything move faster. The actors feel they can give it their all because they don’t need to give it 300 times.”

Making historical past

Since Train Dreams, which was financed by Black Bear and launched by Netflix following its Sundance premiere in January 2025, Veloso has shot two different options, together with Remain from M Night Shyamalan, which he filmed partly in Vista Vision. His Oscar nomination is the primary in cinematography for a Brazilian — with Train Dreams additionally Oscar-nominated for greatest image, tailored screenplay and authentic music — and Brazil is flying excessive because of 4 nods for Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent.

“Last year was the first Oscar ever for Brazil, for I’m Still Here, which is insane, thinking it took 97 years for the Academy to recognise Brazilian films in that way,” says Veloso. “I moved to Portugal six years in the past, however I’m nonetheless related with Brazil. When the information got here out in regards to the Oscars, I flew out to have a good time with household and buddies. Everybody’s celebrating and rooting for it, nearly prefer it’s a soccer World Cup.

“I hope it will inspire other generations the same way I was inspired by what City Of God did 20-something years ago. It’s a great moment and I’m happy to be a small part of it.”