Adolpho Veloso: the award-winning Brazilian cinematographer of ‘Train Dreams’

0:13Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco, and today I speak with Brazilian cinematographer Adolfo Veloso, nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA for his work on Netflix's Train Dreams, a beautiful contemplative film starring Joel Edgerton, playing a logger in the changing American Northwest. Here's Adolfo with more and how he shot the film almost entirely using natural light.

1:02Adolfo Veloso, what a pleasure to welcome you to Monaco Radio. As a fellow Brazilian, of course, you know, but I did love Train Dreams. I think it's such a fantastic film. Well, first of all, how are you feeling? You've been nominated for a BAFTA for an Oscar. I mean, that's incredible, right? That is surreal. I keep saying that it's still hard to believe. Sometimes I wake up and I check on my phone to see if it's real. But, I mean, amazing to be here talking with you. Amazing to be talking with a fellow Brazilian. So it's a shame we can't be speaking in Portuguese, but I'll try my best in English.

1:39Amazing to be here. Well, my first question to you, of course, The film is directed by Clint Bentley as well. And actually you've worked with Clint before. So you're kind of friends. You do have a relationship going on there, right? Yes, definitely. We shot a movie together called Jockey in 2019, I think. And it was his first movie. It was a really small movie, like a movie we did with basically like 10 people and a really small budget. So I feel like the struggles of doing a movie like that really got us close. And I feel like we develop a friendship and a sense of it's almost like it's against the world, you know, because that's what it feels when you're doing such a guerrilla movie.

2:23So, yeah, we've been friends since and we've been talking about what to do next. He was after a lot of things after Jockey until he was offered Train Dreams to adapt an amazing book by Dennis Johnson. and I'm super happy that he invited me to do it with him again because, to be honest, I would do anything with him. Like, I would be happy to just... You have that trust. Yeah, totally. Like, I know the director he is. I know that we have common taste in general. I really believe in a lot of things that he believes too. So it is an easy mission to work with him. but I was really surprised by how much I could connect with the story.

3:08When he first sent me the script, he was telling me like, I'm not really sure you're going to connect with the story. It's the story of this American guy living in the beginning of the past century, living in kind of like the middle of nowhere, that it's like building on the construction of train tracks. It's a logger. I'm not sure you're going to connect, you know, coming from Brazil, like completely different reality. and I was really surprised and he was surprised too when I told him how much I connected with it because it's basically kind of the same life that I have like Robert's life, Joe Edgerton's character it's really similar to a filmmaker life you know like being away from your family for several months working with a bunch of people that you don't know and then the struggle of coming back home and don't really feel like you belong when you're back.

4:00So there's so many aspects of his life that are similar to a filmmaker life, especially a cinematographer. And like common themes in the movie, which is like grief and immigration, like so many things that I could connect with that felt a lot like my life. So I was really happy that not only was a project with a director I trust, but also a story I could connect so much. And one thing I was so surprised actually reading this, because when you see the film, of course, it's a beautiful film. It's visually stunning as well. But is it true that the vast majority of it was actually natural light? Yes.

4:38It's incredible. But it made your life a bit harder as well. Yes and no. I feel like, again, there's nothing I feel that beats natural light and its beauty. We shot everything in Washington State, in the U.S. It's in the Pacific Northwest, which is around where the story is set in the book, right next to it. And I feel like because we want to like, I have that problem myself, especially with like period movies. There's so many layers in between you and those characters, you know, like they talk in a different way. They dress in a different way. They live in a completely different way that I feel like everything you can do to make those layers kind of like less of a problem and kind of lose those layers, the better.

5:25I feel like that myself as an observer, so I feel like whenever I'm doing a movie, I try to put myself in that position a bit. So I feel like Natural Light was a choice to be able to do that a bit also, you know, to feel it more real. Like it's a period movie, but we wanted it to be connectable regardless. So Natural Light was really important for that. there's something about the way that Clint likes to shoot to give space to the actors so they can move around and not worry about like sea stands and we can just follow with the camera we can also change things as they go you know like if we had the scene scripted to shoot inside but it feels bad outside for some reason because the light is beautiful outside or because the scene doesn't make sense anymore inside because of what the actors are doing like or like random things like we shot a lot with like kids and animals and all those things are really uncontrollable somehow you know like you can't really ask for a two-year-old to read the script and and and follow it so i feel like you always need to be open to to change things in a way and clean does that really well And I feel like all those aspects of the way we wanted to shoot the movie really married well with natural light and to have a smaller footprint to be able to keep shooting and not worry about like changing the lighting and then lose an hour and everything breaks and the whole mood breaks just because you want to change the lighting or anything like that.

7:03You mentioned things you can't control, like kids as well in that case, but also nature itself. I mean, there's fire in the film, for example, and I think that's quite a big deal, actually, in the film. So how did you shoot that? How did you work on those scenes, for example? As nature, fire is such a big aspect in the movie, right? It's a big team, and I feel like it's the perfect metaphor for how everything in life has two sides. You know, like for the hugest part of the movie, you see fire as a friend, right? Like fire is there to light them at night, for them to warm themselves, for them to cook.

7:43And it's like an essential aspect of your life. You need it, basically. But then it's also what brings devastation and what destroys huge part of his life. So it's both beautiful and terrifying. both something that we need but we are scared of. So it's such an important aspect of the movie, and we wanted to be as faithful as possible to that. So all the fires you see in the movie, from, like, candles to campfires to oil or gas lamps, it's all real. We didn't want to, like, bring artificial lighting for anything like that. The only scene that we actually had to bring artificial lights in the movie is the big fire when they are in the forest and he's trying to reach his house and there's a big wall of fire that we couldn't obviously burn a forest down and we wouldn't even if we could yeah uh which would be ironic especially with the movie we're doing but for that scene in specific we needed to to rely on vfx and and to to light it so it was a tricky scene to do, especially because everything else in the movie is real fire.

8:57So how do you make sure that that scene doesn't pop from everything else? Everything in the movie feels so handmade and so real and naturalistic. Naturalistic. And so it took a lot of time during prep to figure out how to do that. What was the right lighting and that rig? And also with the effects, what could we give them to make sure they would have an easier job to change that for a fire. So everything we watched also was real fire footage instead of going to other movies and doing the Hollywood version of a fire. So we just tried to be respectful to what a real fire was the whole time. In the forest, every least thing's important.

9:42It's all threaded together. So you can't tell where one thing ends and another begins. Talking about specific scenes, Is it true that perhaps towards the end of the film, that was kind of one of the most challenging ones when he was on the plane? So tell us a bit more about that one. Yeah, that one was tricky too because, again, such an important, I mean, it's the ending of such an important scene. And it is a biplane, basically, which insurance wouldn't allow Joe to fly on for good, I think. It's a good thing, but it's always frustrating when you have those situations because then you realize, okay, again, everything in the movie is so real.

10:27Everything is shot for real. We are in real locations, sets built on location, on real forests. Everything is real, and then suddenly you're going to have one scene that pops out. Suddenly to go to a green screen to shoot him on a plane would feel so wrong. And again, like if on that final scene you're worried about like if that looks real or not instead of paying attention to the emotions and everything that's so important in that scene. So it was a tricky one to figure out how to do it and to make sure that that wouldn't pop. and the solution we came to which was to so our department basically built just a cockpit of a plane with like some parts of the plane building just to work on perspective on forced perspective but and we just put that on a giant gimbal basically that would like just turn in all possible access in a way that the cameras were mounted at that cockpit in a realistic way like they would in a plane and the whole thing would turn in all possible directions so the whole light interaction is real so the Sun is spinning around them and it's just a real Sun there and the plane is actually turning and because that whole thing was elevated what you see the sky behind is actual sky so we didn't have to like then put a green screen or anything like that so the whole lighting interaction is real, the background is real and even for the actor they had something to react because when the plane is like nose down the gimbal would go down so they knew the plane was going down.

12:05So the whole thing was kind of felt real somehow and it was really fun to shoot too because we were just like screaming, yeah, turn left and down and on. So it was a fun scene to make in the end. And it was the last thing we shot so it felt special. Oh so it was the last thing, that's great. It was a very touching scene, I have to say. And Adolf, I must ask as well, because we're here in 2026. What a year for our country in the Oscars or the BAFTAs, because it's not just about one film. It's about, you know, let's say three films. And even in your case, you're working not in a Brazilian production, but you are, of course, Brazilian.

12:40And you know how the country's excited for you as well, right? It's amazing. I feel like it's amazing that Brazilians are celebrating it like we used to celebrate World Cups. You know, like it feels like the Oscar last year with I'm Still Here felt almost like it was our sixth World Cup, you know, like. So I feel like it's beautiful that we're celebrating art and culture as we used to celebrate only sports inside Brazil. And I think it's amazing that other countries are recognizing Brazilian cinema. I think it's a delayed recognition because I feel like Brazil has been doing amazing films since ever and there's amazing Brazilian filmmakers and artists all over the world.

13:26So I feel like there's a bunch of things that kind of like came together in the past years in a good way. And I'm really happy this is all happening and I'm really grateful to be a small part of this whole thing. You did mention the World Cup. I have to ask you because you became a little bit viral with your football team in Brazil. You had a special visit there a few weeks ago as well, right? That must be quite exciting, which is Corinthians, we must say here on Amazon. Yes. It was really fun, actually, because the last thing I was expecting when I was shooting this movie in the middle of nowhere in the U.S.

14:02about this logger was a few months later I would be talking about football and visiting my team back in Brazil. When the Oscar nominations came, I live in Portugal now. It's been like six years I lived there. I was there. Like, we've been doing all this campaign, but, like, I had a couple days off and I went home. And when the Oscar nominations were announced, we celebrated a lot. Like, I went to the balcony and screamed. I was, like, just going crazy. And all my neighbors were, like, not really understanding what was happening. Like, why is he saying, like, go Brazil, go Corinthians? There's, like, it's 1 p.m.

14:42There's not even a game happening, whatever. and I decided to go to Brazil to celebrate with family and friends so I just like bought the earliest ticket I couldn't find and then I went to Brazil just like with the idea to celebrate with friends and family but the whole thing became so big in Brazil it was basically just like going to a lot of places and a lot of interviews there and I was invited to go to Corincha's to meet the players they gave me a shirt with my name on so it was really really amazing and it all happened because in some of the speeches from some other awards, I think it was Critics' Choice or something else, I was always saying Vai Corintias in the end, which is like something that everybody that roots for Corintias kind of say in any possible situation.

15:28My dad says that. He's very... Yeah, it's just something that we say doesn't matter what, you know, and it's not even related to football, you know, it's just like a state of mind somehow. Beautiful, ain't it? what is all of it every bit of it

15:56Thank you, Adolfo, and Vai Corinthians! Train Dreams is out now on Netflix I'm Fernando Augusto Pacheco and this show was edited by Mariella Bevan Thank you for listening

16:11Thank you.