Joel Edgerton Explored His Greatest Fears for Train Dreams

0:01Hey, Little Gold Men listeners, especially the ones across the pond. We're recording a Little Gold Men episode live in London on the evening of February 19th with the cast of Sentimental Value. We've got a select number of tickets to give out to our listeners. So if you'd like to join the fun, email us at littlegoldmen at vf.com. We hope to see you there.

0:31Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. I'm Rebecca Ford. Today we're bringing you a live episode from last month, taped at the Regent Santa Monica Beach. John and I got a chance to sit down with the star of Train Dreams, Joel Edgerton, in front of an audience of Guild members and Little Gold Men listeners. We talked about how it felt taking this small, beautiful movie from a Sundance premiere to getting picked up by Netflix to a slew of awards recognition. We also asked him about his work as a writer-director and how he feels the industry is shifting with acquisitions and AI.

1:09Without further ado, here's Joel Edgerton.

1:15Joel, we have spoken before about this film, And you told me that you read it a long time ago before you were ever attached to the movie. Can you tell me about how it touched you at the time you first read it? Yeah, I'd been given the book as a rap gift, the novella, which I always think if somebody gives you a book and they know you and they've given it to you, there's a reason for it. Maybe they feel like it's going to be something that you'll respond to. And I read it. I tried to get my hands on the rights to it. And I guess the reason for it was, you know, what I think is special about the movie now in hindsight, you know, but at the time this idea that we're just following the life of an ordinary person and, you know, spans breadth of, you know, 80 years of one person's life.

2:09In such a, I mean, in such a thin page count to 100 and I think 117 pages. The celebration of an ordinary life and showing us the majesty of that was something I found very special about it in this Western setting and it felt to me like it sort of didn't quite ever dare to try and answer the question of what is the meaning of life but swelled around questions of the purpose of life and what does it all mean and is it all worth it? And so it was a Western but it was very much a philosophical Western and it just really got under my skin. I tried to get the rights and it was a really good thing that they were taken because five years later, Clint Bentley serendipitously reached out to me about playing the character in a movie he was going to make of it.

2:59There's a spirituality in this film, whether it's the relationship to nature or the character Gladys who you meet in church. How did you connect with that? I mean, did that make you rethink like your own relationship with your own spirituality? I found it very, the second time I watched it, spiritual. Yeah, I agree. And there's a sort of a natural world, religiousness or spirituality or philosophy that swells around a lot of things and different characters' points of view. It doesn't quite get into typical religious ideas so much as ideas around, for example, karma. and there's one sense in the film that, you know, these characters that I work with, the loggers, are sort of in their own just day-to-day grunt and grind, harvesting the earth and taking trees away.

3:54And there's this real sense of personification of those trees, you know, in different ways. We talked about Will Macy's character, Arne Peebles, who's described as a gadabout, sort of old guy who runs the dynamite for pushing through the hills. he describes or he's talked about describing the moment you put a saw or an axe into a tree you start a fight with it and the cutting an old 400 year old tree down is like it hurts a man's soul to do that this sort of connection with the spiritual nature of our connection with the land and of course Kerry Condon's character later in the film talks about the intrinsic sort of connectivity of everything us with nature and nature with itself and the smallest and the biggest things sort of working in harmony and i have found all that stuff very special too beyond all the character uh universal relatable stuff like marriage and family there's this like you said this philosophical or spiritual level to it robert's um a man of few words i would say yeah well yeah damon knows me never shut up so how hard was that for you to play someone who had to speak because we still get so much emotion from him but without the words how difficult was that well i i had had a bit of an experience before with it in jeff nichols movie loving playing richard loving who was a man of very few words but a lot of feelings a lot of things to say and a lot of uh a sense of injustice and railing against the world and and that experience was very special i guess it taught me something about focusing my thoughts not having to rely on dialogue to convey things for film and knowing that film is a visual medium and knowing that as they say, I don't know if I'm going to mortgagedly say this, but the camera doesn't lie.

5:47And interestingly, when I had tried to get my hands on the rights to the book, part of the reason I'm glad I didn't, partly because Clint, I think, had done a greater adaptation of it than I ever would have tried to do. but also in the ensuing years, in the four and a half years since me reading the book, I'd become a dad. And for anyone who's seen the film or is going to see the film, you will know that it meant so much more to me, the story. It was sort of wrapped up so much in my greatest fears around loss and my hopes and ambitions of being a good dad and always feeling like I wrestle with, am I doing that right or how do I do it right?

6:29and conflict around being a, even though I'm not cutting down trees for a living, I do contract work. That's what we do. And we're asking ourselves to go away from family for stretches of time. And I'm in love and I was like, well, am I not more similar to this character than most other characters I've played in so many years and therefore if I have less of a need to reach for imagining things that I'm not familiar with, because I am familiar with these things, that the camera won't lie and if I just create a more personal performance than I'm usually prone to do. Because I love the idea of being a character actor and I'm always trying to be something I'm not and play dress-ups.

7:14So Robert, for me, felt like some real, some version of myself. And that felt like a worthwhile thing to do at that time in my life and I'm glad that I did. I think this film is a uniquely American story. How was it approaching that as an Australian? Did you see parallels in Australia's history with this time period in American history? Yeah, very much. I think Australia and America in their modern context have run similar tracks, you know, and in many different ways that you can look at Europeans coming to a country that's already populated by indigenous people and then the seeming claiming of a land and populating the land and in terms of that having to go out into, for those European people, inhospitable environments and their sense of taming the land.

8:12And, of course, in America that was about the movement west. In Australia we had our own versions of that, homesteaders and pioneers and explorers and so on. And I really have a lot of respect for people who have put themselves in the task of the hard work of building a life outside of a city and rural people are very much an Australian identity. And these men like Robert that I play, they're as Australian as they are American, as they are part of maybe any culture. These men that feel a lot, have a lot to say, but they don't articulate themselves particularly well and they may be reticent to share their feelings when it comes to the softer side of things.

8:55This film debuted at Sundance almost a year ago now. It was an independent film looking for a home. You're no stranger to that experience, but do you get nervous when a film is about to finally be shown to people? How did you feel? How high were the stakes for you with this one, I think? You get involved in any movie. I'm sure there's lots of filmmakers or actors or storytellers in general. Hello, everyone over there. that you have an instinct for me I'll just talk about my experience I have an instinct for something I was invested in the story and the character I really thought Clint was a great young filmmaker I was excited about the prospect of it all and then once you get involved and you look around you're like this is looking good Adolfo Veloso one of the most incredible young cinematographers and it looks good but every movie should look good hopefully every scene should feel good by the end of the day, hopefully, but does it amount to something?

9:48And at the end of the day, what does the entire thing, what does the entire piece feel like? And it's out of our hands to a certain degree because it's too subjective an experience. So then you wait to show it to an audience. And there is an anxiety to that, particularly, I think, for the filmmaker. I think actors can sort of go, yeah, well, I did best I could. Didn't work out so good, but I did my thing. But particularly for a filmmaker, I think it's very exposing. But all of us cared. And then we went to Sundance. You could feel the silences and you could feel people starting to sort of breathe in step with the scenes.

10:28And then, of course, on a business level, because we're talking about the film business, knowing that Netflix was so into the film and was so willing to support it and had a vision for how to do that to push it out into the world. felt like we were like a garage band that was suddenly plugged into a really big amplifier because of that prospect. Is that what it feels when you have an independent film purchased by something as large as Netflix? Yeah, look. Because you've worked across a lot of different types of films and a lot of different types of indies. Yeah, there's a lot of times where you go into a film and it's already set up.

11:08Right. There's no mystery. I think a lot of filmmakers, storytellers are in the gambling business because anyone who asks me to, you know, should I invest in film, I'm like, do you want to do it because you want to make money? Then go invest in real estate, right? But if you want to invest in the creative process, you know, come what may, then yeah, get involved in investing in movies. So often they're set up. When they're not, there's this sort of excitement and nervousness, Again, particularly for the filmmakers, I think people who have invested their well-earned dollars in putting it together.

11:44When it gets picked up, I think it's important to remind yourself also along the way that a small story and an independent story can be as big as the biggest movie you've seen. Because story and character, I think, are the most important things. Spectacle movies, I believe, only really work because of the human relationships within them. I think you could make a movie about space and asteroids hitting the earth and robots and all stuff. If the human relationships in it aren't good, it's never going to be successful. In that sense, human relationships and character are the great equalizers. So a$4 million movie can make as much noise as a$150 million movie.

12:28And I think Trained Dreams is a good example of that. It's connecting with people somehow, and yet it's below the$10 million budget sort of range. And it's epic because of the story. It's epic because of the cinematography. But yeah, you know, the accountants will tell you it's a small movie.

12:51More of our live conversation with Joel Edgerton after the break.

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14:32Welcome back to Little Gold Men. Joel has been getting a lot of well-deserved recognition for his acting this season, but he's also a writer-director. So I wanted to know if there was anything he'd picked up from the Train Dream set and director Clint Bentley. Here's Joel. Yeah, like as a writer-director, I'm like a spy hanging out on the set of other directors. You know, I'm not there to kind of hover over anyone's process, don't get me wrong. ever since I became a director, I never suddenly turned up on other people's sets and they'd be like, you know, you sure you want to do it that way? I have another idea.

15:07I just become more and more curious and each director teaches you something good or bad. And oftentimes it's about the craft and also about conduct. I think conduct is a really great thing to learn lessons from other people, how they conduct themselves. And Clint is like the central character of this film. He's an honest, reliable, decent human being. but what was good about him was his collaborative abilities which I think is a great show of power as a director to not presume to control everything but to know when to give people the reins in their own creative avenue. For example, with Adolfo, he would let him sort of free to do certain things that he wanted and deputise people, actors included and he was a great listener and there's a great sensitivity and calmness to him.

15:56So I think he is a very special director. And when you talk about Clint, you also have to talk about Greg Quedar, who's writing partner. The two of them are very unique. What are some other, like what did you pick up from working with somebody like Baz Luhrmann or Cap and Bigelow? They're also different in their styles. Yeah, I feel like I go around with a basket and I'm like, oh, that's a good thing to remember. An Australian director, when I asked him, you know, what advice would you give directors? He said, bring a second pair of shoes and change into them at lunchtime. I was like, that's weird advice.

16:33And then I did it and I was like, that was good advice. Catherine Bigelow was, I remember asking her one time, she seemed so calm on set and that was Zero Dark Thirty and that was a set I imagine you could also not be calm on. And she said, I hire the best people and I get out of their way. And when she elaborated, she said, why would I tell Greg Frazier how to frame a shot. She would tell him what she wanted from the scene and let him do his thing. Baz is a master and he teaches you just by osmosis to dream big and to not let your ceiling be too low. And the other thing in terms of conduct, I've seen Baz show so much gratitude to every single member of the crew, no matter what they're doing.

17:21Someone brought him a prop one day and it was a last minute ask and he literally made a point of gathering the whole crew, showing them the prop, thanking the props master, telling them how it was going to make the movie better and then everybody went back to work and he filled people up with confidence and he's a beautiful man. Have you ever had a director you maybe didn't gel with? You don't have to name them, but how... Oh, I'm going to name them. Please, just list them. How long you got? But as an actor, how do you deal with that? I would never name names. Yeah, I figured. But I'll describe what they look like.

18:05How do you navigate that stuff? I think it's a shame if you ever end up on a film and realise you're left to your own devices. And even further than that, I would say I think it's a shame when an actor thinks they can go and sail their own ship and leave the director behind as if the director has nothing to provide them. I think it's a very important relationship. I think the director should be captain and that everybody else should be doing whatever they need to do to help the captain arrive at their destination. And it doesn't always work out that way and there should never be a mutiny, to extend my terrible analogy here.

18:48But I have seen a director implode. It's a difficult job. And the best directors who come at it from a non-directing background, for example, as a writer or as an actor, I've watched people become a sponge and absorb things and sort of really grow within the experience. I've seen that happen once where somebody didn't grow. They diminished within the experience and it hobbled them. And I saw that person about two years later and I said, are you ever going to direct another movie? And they said, you know, I realised, Joel, that being a director you get asked a lot of questions and you need to have the answer to all of those questions.

19:32He said, next time, if there ever is a next time, I'm going to have answers to those questions even if they're the wrong ones just so that I seem to have the answers to those questions. And I was like, oh, no. But directing is like running the household and being an actor is like being the child in a household. And to run the household, you're having to have these interesting relationships with numerous people. This is why Baz is so great. He knows how to create a relationship with every single person. He knows their strengths and he knows how to empower them in his vision. He knows how to enlist them and inspire them to what he wants to do.

20:16And I think that's one of the biggest jobs of a director is to set the tone, let everyone know what the brief is and inspire them to join them on that journey.

20:32More with Joel Edgerton after another short break.

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21:32Welcome back to Little Gold Men. We're in a pretty crazy time right now in this industry. I mean, just this last week, Warner Brothers for sale may be being purchased by Netflix. Maybe not. Let's all pitch in here together tonight. Disney announced today they're making a deal with OpenAI to license their IP property. Where is your personal head at about the future of the film industry? are you hopeful? Sometimes I am and sometimes I'm not. There's a moment in Train Dreams where my character goes out to the cut later in his life, gives it another try, feels like everything's a bit meaner and tougher and I try and start a chainsaw and I can't.

22:19And I stare at it like, how is this going to affect my work? And like, what is this thing? And I feel like that's me wondering whether to download chat GPT on my phone, which I still haven't. I kind of refuse to use it as a writer. I know when anyone's sending me an email or a bio that's been written by AI, there are the, you know, get rid of those punctuation markers for a start. Come on. Whoa. That's Sam Altman. They're listening. Okay, I'm now on the AI watch list. Okay. Is there a back door? Face down. I'm sweating. My optimistic point of view is this. And I've said this before, and I always cite zone of interest as my example of great human creative thought.

23:19The choice of Jonathan Glazier and his team, his collaborators, to tell a Holocaust story through the point of view of the general's wife in that opulent setting. while everything we know from other movies we've seen is going on over the wall. I thought that was, to me at that moment, or at least in this moment, is something that I don't think AI would do if you prompted it. I don't think AI could ever think of anything right near a Holocaust movie. Exactly, and I think that's my optimistic point of view is it pushes us into good, bespoke, original human thought and to not do the typical thing because, look, some of us do do exactly what AI does, which is we go, okay, got to write a cop show and we're thinking of all the great cop shows.

24:08We're processing it. We're just doing it slower of an amalgamation and doing a riff or a cover song on things that we've seen before. So my optimism is about humans want to watch human stories, hear each other, watch each other, see paintings by real humans and listen to music by real humans. we're going to enjoy the other thing as well and we shouldn't pretend it's not there the pessimistic part of me is just robo-apocalypse yeah and I'm ready I haven't got the tools yet but I'm down for the fight I think on that note we have to move on to some audience questions okay so the first one here is from a real person allegedly Named Lanny.

24:59I hope I'm saying that right. Okay. For much of the movie, your character is covered in sweat, sawdust, and ash. Do you find that this juxtaposition between being physically stained while shooting in these stunning natural surroundings drove your character's interior life? I love being in the environments, that's for sure. I'd rather be doing that than pretending I was in an office setting or something. There's something about being in nature that feels good to me and I think I am suited to that kind of setting and those sort of period settings in a way. Definitely being in the forest affected the interior life of the character and the way that I moved because I just realised how significant it is being in that sort of silence and really being attuned to it and how through all the physical labour there's this imperative need or this need to move slow when you're not moving fast.

25:56So the setting really did inform performance on a lot of levels, yeah. I have a question from Frank. What's one thing that always helps you step into character on the day? Like, do you listen to music? Did you read passages from the book for this? I think one of the great, the portal to set to me is always the makeup chair. It's also the hive of the most gossip. Yeah, they know everything. Yeah, they do. It's in the makeup chair. You want to know anything, go to the makeup boss. but I do think for me on The Great Gatsby I remember and other films where it can be like this great sort of, I'm the last person that want to sound like acting is like threading the eye of a needle while hopping on one leg and, you know, blindfolded.

26:43It can be a very pleasurable, effortless thing as well but sometimes you do want to find your way to set and go, okay, well, I am doing something that's challenging or it's outside of my own experience. And the portal is seeing yourself, literally, for me anyway, sometimes seeing yourself in a mirror finally put together. So sometimes I really appreciate the idea of putting the costume, if there is one, putting it on first, and then going to the makeup bus, trying to shut out all the gossip, unless it's good gossip, and then go to set, and it's a nice divide. I think we're going to wrap this up with the last question here, which is from Shane who I would bet is also a parent.

27:25But what's been the bigger honor, getting a Golden Globe nomination the other day or being on an episode of Bluey? That's a tough choice. That's tough. Because Bluey, you're a big deal to your kids forever, I assume. In this room, I'm going to say, but it is a podcast. It's a real conundrum here. I should get a Golden Globe nomination for voice work in Bluey and then I wouldn't have to answer that question.