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  • 7 months ago
Go behind the scenes of Train Dreams as director Clint Bentley, star Joel Edgerton, and composer Bryce Dessner reflect on shaping the film’s emotional soundscape and translating Nick Cave’s haunting story to the screen. Streaming now on Netflix.

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Transcript
00:00In a long line of like so many surreal experiences that I've had with this film,
00:03like that was one of the most surreal is like being on the phone listening to Nick Cave read lyrics.
00:10Lately I've been having dreams.
00:13Like a lot of serendipitous things that happen along the way,
00:17you know, Nick said to me that Train Dreams happened to be one of his favorite books
00:22and he immediately watched the film and I got this call from him while I was traveling
00:25saying that he loved the film and he'd already started thinking about a song.
00:29Crazy dreams are going for hours and I can't begin to tell you how that feels.
00:37It was basically like, look, you've done a wonderful job with this music.
00:40The film feels so complete as a piece. Can you send me something?
00:44A lot of the music I write is, we often call them, you know, songs without words.
00:47You know, the kind of emotional core would be like a song.
00:50It doesn't necessarily have a text with it.
00:52Throw bright lightning across the sky.
00:55Seen a man with a broken curse.
00:59We talked a lot about wanting to find a way to let the song be lyrically connected to the film
01:04and expand the frame of the film.
01:07And I think his poetry and his lyricism is just amazing.
01:10A woman standing in a field of flowers and screaming locomotive train.
01:16I had an idea of a piece that was kind of floating in time, the way the film is floating and cycling
01:22through time and bringing in, you know, there's essentially these sort of beats of piano and
01:28woodwinds and pizzicato strings that cycle through.
01:31And he immediately latched into it and wrote on it and developed more musical ideas with it.
01:37The space that connects me where I am now
01:40To the place where I'll one day be
01:43Is measured in the words that we speak
01:46And the strange and wondrous things I've seen
01:50It wasn't like he then saw the task as a chance to just do something separate.
01:56He wanted to, you know, connect with Bryce about the music he'd written
02:00That it wanted to sort of integrate it with the score
02:03Rather than just go, I'm going to do a separate thing and tuck it on to, you know, the end of the film.
02:08He called me and said, hey, I'm going to send this to you now.
02:10Can you listen?
02:11Where are you?
02:12And I listened and it was just a sort of, you know, heard essentially what you hear in the film
02:15And afterwards I called him and he's like, so do you like it?
02:18And it was just this kind of beautiful of Nick Cave asking me if I liked it.
02:21I was like, it's incredible.
02:22He's like, really?
02:22You think so?
02:23Should I change anything?
02:23Like, don't change a thing.
02:25I mean, and the moral of the story, all of it really is Australians are very reliable.
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