‘A lot of movies are not really worth talking about’

Key Points

• Joel Edgerton hopes his new film, Train Dreams, gets people talking: “It’s a world that people can reach into and either pull out their own experience or reflect their own experience.”

• The Australian actor talks about the physical preparation for the role, which he felt was “somehow in my DNA” to play.

• Edgerton goes deep about what it all means to him in his own life: “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a movie that gets close to, not the meaning of life, but perhaps something close to the purpose of life.”

Joel Edgerton is absolutely thrilled to talk about his new film, Train Dreams.

“A lot of movies are not really worth talking about,” he tells Entertainment Weekly, before clarifying his statement. “It’s not that they’re not, it’s just that all the questions are answered. It’s a satisfying experience, and then you walk home and you go to the car park or you switch off your TV and you go to bed or whatever.”

But, Train Dreams is not that kind of movie. “It’s a world that people can reach into and either pull out their own experience or reflect their own experience, about grief, about loss, about life in general, about the insignificance versus the significance of our seemingly small lives on this big planet,” he says.

The film — which hails from director Clint Bentley, who also adapted it with Greg Kwedar from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name — follows the life of a logger named Robert Grainier (Edgerton), who works to install railroads across the continental United States in the early to mid-1900s. His job forces him to spend long periods of time far away from his wife (Felicity Jones) and daughter, and he struggles with his place in a changing world.

It’s the type of movie that the Australian actor, who has done everything from arthouse films to Star Wars, says he wishes he could make all of the time. But, as anyone who closely follows the shifting Hollywood landscape knows all too well, “it’s harder to get smaller movies out there onto a bigger landscape in front of more eyes.”

“I really think it comes down to the nature of each film on its own merits, and there’s so many components that go into it, but the hope is that a movie has a universal core to it that really speaks to people,” Edgerton, who also executive-produced the film, explains. “And I think Train Dreams, from the moment I read the book, was something that had the marks of that.”

Though he feels it’s “so stupid to say,” it’s the sort of role Edgerton feels he was born to play, because his grandfather and great-grandfather were farmers, and his grandfather even drove trains. “Part of me feels like that’s somehow in my DNA and that I fantasize about my ability to play those sorts of characters, like I’m living out some alternate version of where my life should have or would’ve ended up,” he says.

Even still, given that Robert Grainier is a man who lives all of his years in the unforgiving forests of the Pacific Northwest, working the land at the turn of the 20th Century, the part did require some physical preparation in addition to the more cerebral stuff. For instance, he learned how to properly hold an ax and how to use the double-handed saw loggers used to tear down massive trees. “There are times as an actor where you’re like, yeah, I could probably just work this out on the day, but other things like Warrior that I’ve done where you go, ‘We really need to put some weeks and months into this,’ and Train Dreams was somewhere in the middle,” he explains, adding, “I’m a pretty physical person, but there’s still certain things you want to get right.”

Whatever the process, apparently it worked. The film debuted at Sundance earlier this year to universal acclaim — it currently sits at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Already, awards prognosticators are anointing it a possible Oscar player in several major categories.

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More than all of that, Edgerton hopes it sparks the type of introspection, thought, and conversation in viewers that it has in his own life. “For me, it means something really rich about how beautiful life is. Even though some terrible things might happen within it, the friendship and the smallest kind gesture can ignite the regrowth of your soul. And to me, the film is a really uplifting experience about human nature, and it’s a very sort of unpolitical look at life on this planet and what it means to be amongst nature,” he says.

Edgerton continues, “But I think people can reach in and pull out any number of these things and find a kinship with it. And I don’t think I’ve ever been in a movie that gets close to, not the meaning of life, but perhaps something close to the purpose of life. And I think they’re very different. I think the meaning of life is some elusive holy grail that we talk about — what’s it really mean to be alive; why are we here? And the purpose is more of a practical, hands-on sense of life being a kinetic thing that I think is something this movie speaks to that we can all find a reflection in.”

Academy Award nominees Kerry Condon and William H. Macy also star. The drama also features Nathaniel Arcand, Alfred Hsing, and Will Patton as the narrator. Train Dreams will be released in select theaters on Nov. 7, and will arrive Nov. 21 on Netflix. 

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