Joel Edgerton on the silences in Train Dreams

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:12Welcome to The Treatment. My guest is a writer and a director and an actor, and he sometimes even acts in other people's movies. He's with directors from Jeff Nichols to David Lowery to his new film with Clint Bentley. All the Texans. All the Texans who like people who don't talk in their movies and they'd pick the right guy to not talk for them. In this case, Joe Edgerton is starring in—he's got two new films, actually, both of which played at film festivals this year. The first is the adaptation, the incredible adaptation of Trained Dreams, and also the film The Plague. First of all, it's a pleasure to see you.

0:46It's been way too long. It has. It's good to see you. Way, way too long. And I wanted to tell you one of the things that—first of all, getting to see Trained Dreams at Sundance, and really getting to see that on the big screen and hearing the audience start to breathe with your character, because as he gets older, his breathing slows. I want to ask you about that physicalization because you do this thing where it's not just that he moves slower or anything, but it's just his breathing slows down. Yeah, I became fascinated by how work and emotional experience sort of, you know, shape the body, particularly the physical labor.

1:21But also emotional experience is how it bears down on you. And one of the things that, you know, I feel like you sometimes don't learn about a character until you're in the midst of doing it. One of the things I really realized about intense physical labor of which I am not in the business of, except pretending for like the odd few minutes here and there between action and cut, is how much conservation of energy you start to need in between the physical labor. I realized like how slow some of these guys move when they're not actually in the midst of their work. That was a really good thing to learn.

2:01It's like how to amble and how to relax and when to sit down and how to breathe. We should say it's an adaptation of Dennis Johnson's. I guess it's a novella. I thought of it as being a short story because I read in the Paris movie a few years ago. And it's interesting, too, because it's really a story following a day laborer over several decades about guilt, a survivor's guilt. And that's the one thing that Clint really brought from the story. to the movie is we feel his guilt over the course of the decades. And part of that, too, is just for me the way he sort of stops holding his head up by the end.

2:37He's so bent by not only all these years of work, but what he's gone through. Yeah, and the sort of retreating from the world, the choice, you know, that he makes. Weirdly, I reread the novella again on the plane coming over here from Australia a few days ago. It's the fourth time I've read it. It's a different thing every time you read it. And it's there to reflect for anyone who's reading it or for the film who is watching it, their own experience in ways. But this time when I was reading it too, I was reminded too of this choice to retreat from the world. And it's not like a big thing that he plants a flag in the ground.

3:16It's like he lives in an isolated place with his wife and once he's sort of in his later years, he chooses to stay there. He's never really with people. And part of the significance of it is when he does find community with certain characters that you realize. It really, really strikes me just how important it is, human connection and what a significant choice it is when we decide to isolate. Whether we're in a big city or not, we can isolate. Part of it, I find myself wondering, is this his remembrance of what these things were that he chose to try to help rather than not? I know, I mean, because did you think about it that way too?

3:56Memory is such a big thing in this movie, and the lens with which Clint and Adolfo, the amazing cinematographer, chosen to sort of render the film is this, when you read the book, and to a sort of certain degree as well, when you watch the movie, it's a collection of memories. It's the memories of 80 years of a person's life. And it jumps around. You see moments of him as a child. And of course, when we look back on those earlier memories, It's like, are we remembering them exactly the way they were? Or is there a slight patina that we put on them based on our hopefulness or our despair or any other thing?

4:33What we wish we had done. What we wish we had done. There's a really interesting moment, and I didn't realise this until I saw the finished film. There's a moment of my character is a contract worker, and I can relate to this as an actor. Again, I'm not cutting down trees, but I ask myself what's important to leave my family for long stretches of time. And Robert has this scene with A Farewell with the daughter and we shot the scene and I was playing a little magic trick with a flower and the child had no interest, as Clint jokes, like child never read the script, child didn't care, you know. So you've got to find ways of bringing that to life in your own way on set.

5:13So we shot it and there's a moment later in life and as you talk about, the film has a lot to do with memory, that we see certain moments through Robert's eyes again. And Clint made the choice to use different takes. So this idea that the farewell didn't go so well in reality, but when he remembers it later in life, he remembers it as if it was a successful and more heartfelt farewell. It's the treatment. Our old friend Joe Edgerton, who I think hasn't been around for about 10 years or so, I guess he's been busy making movies and writing movies and directing movies he's starring in two currently.

5:49Train Dreams, which is on Netflix, and The Plague, which is getting theatrical release. These are both stories about communication or lack thereof. And we should also say here today, you're a nominee for the Critics' Choice Award and for the Golden Globe for Train Dreams. So congratulations for all of that. And I think what's interesting, though, is the way you use silence in both of these films. But there's two conversations you're having where you're listening to women. In both these incidents, three-minute long takes of you not saying much, which is really, to me, kind of the heart of the film and kind of shows what he needs and where he is.

6:25I mean, there's that scene with Carrie Condon, which is extraordinary. Again, I come back to this idea of human connection. You know, there's people that we encounter in our life we don't really know that we needed to meet that allow us to get things out of ourselves. that we need to express. And in this case, Robert has certain feelings around the seismic event that changed his life, that he's been kept buttoned up and pushed these feelings down, as many men in my life I know I want to do. And, you know, silence on screen is an interesting thing because I always feel like, for me, my life has really kind of overlapped with who Robert is.

7:08You know, I became a dad during the pandemic, I've got twins that are four years old. They were toddlers when we were shooting the film. My greatest fears are wrapped up in anything happening to them. I'm constantly wrestling with how to marry life and work. Also something happening while you're away. Yeah. So I felt like all of this was very personal to me and that without words, what was sort of fine for me was understanding that if I just think the right thoughts that are already inside of me, that the film will capture that. And for Robert to talk too much kind of destroys the nature of the character that he is, which is these men that we all know so well in our lives, most of us, that we wish would talk more.

7:50We wish would express their feelings more. We know they have wells of feeling inside of them and damned if they're ever going to show it. There is those moments when you're just listening to these women. Yeah. Unlike the men in the movie, they actually sort of say exactly what needs to be said. Yes. They're in touch with themselves in a way that... This is the world. Exactly. But these guys who are all talkers in movies are sort of talking about nothing. And these women are very, very specific. And for me, I want to ask you how that changes your concentration because you smile listening to these women.

8:24And you don't start with a smile, but you sort of relax enough. Robert relaxes enough, I should say, to smile because he realizes there's somebody who he really wants to hear. Yeah, there's something really interesting about the difference between the banter between the working men. You know, William Mage Macy, for example, is sort of wonderful to listen to. You don't know if you could trust anything he says. He's full of hot air, but he's fun to listen to. The women really speak the truth in the film, you know, on the family front with beautiful Felicity Jones. And then later with this sort of chance encounter with a sort of platonic connection with Carrie Condon's character, Claire, who's a conservationist employed to be up in this fire watchtower and inadvertently stumbles into this conversation that brings up Robert's sort of traumatic past.

9:15But these women do speak the truth, and Robert feels comfortable around them, albeit that he's been living his life for a certain time as a hermit. These are also women who, in their way, are really modern women and very capable. and the thing I like about the movie is that it really sort of defines his attraction to that thing that he isn't, that he doesn't have. For me, the character kind of challenges points of view on masculinity. I'm a lumberjack doing this hard work and Robert is a capable man but he's also someone that you can imagine finding the comfort in putting his head in the lap of a woman.

9:54Which he literally does in that first scene. Yeah, and not feeling that that is any way a diminishment of what we would classically consider, which I think is the wrong kind of definition of the harder edges of masculinity, is that he looks for wisdom and looks for guidance and comfort in the women in his life. And I think that is a big dimension of what masculinity should and is. He's kind of looking for wisdom everywhere. I mean, in nature, in people, in animals. I mean, he really is looking for a kind of fundamental connection that really speaks to not loneliness, but the choice to be alone.

10:35I love always looking for the child in any character that I play. And this, again, circles back to the question of what is masculinity, is that I believe that, you know, we're all a child once. I'm watching my children grow up, wondering with my son what kind of a man he's going to become and how I can help shape that. But as I approach character, I'm always thinking about who is the child that was the origin of this man and with Robert more than anything, it was a chance to bring that really into the foreground to a certain degree in terms of his wonder at the world, his naivety at things around him, his curiosity of the people that he encounters, his willingness to observe and listen and start to calculate things in real time rather than someone who's made his decisions about the world already.

11:31We'll take a break. We'll talk more about wisdom with my guest, Joe Edgerton. He is nominated for the Golden Globe and the Critics' Choice Award for his lead role in Trained Dreams. He's also in the movie The Plague. He's very busy. We'll take a break. This morning, it comes to treatment.

11:57Welcome back. The much-lauded actor. He's also a writer and director. Joe Ettrudin is here. talking about his two films, The Plague and Train Dreams, Train Dreams on Netflix, The Plague in theaters. These films are both about masculinity. And The Plague is really about the trap of trying to assume a kind of archetypal masculinity at a very early age. Yeah, I always saw The Plague and, you know, I always wonder how you would describe a movie to another person. Train Dreams is very elusive, you know, to me. Train Dreams is about an examination and the rumination of life and the celebration of an ordinary life into something majestic, you know.

12:39And it's like a poem, but the plague is an easy one for me. I always describe the plague as like full metal jacket for kids, you know, full metal jacket. With kids. Yeah.

12:51And the movie I made, The Gift, dealt with bullying, but a generation gone. But also you talked about finding the child in his characters, and that character you played in The Gift has not progressed past the age of 14. Yes, exactly. I realized how fascinated I am by this sort of formative age stuff and choices we make between kindness versus cruelty. It seems like a theme that really resonates with me. And so much so that the reason I got involved with The Plague is an agent who's not my agent, a Hollywood agent friend of mine, said, read this script, I think you're going to love it. I immediately read it.

13:30I was like, how can I be involved? There was one single adult character in the film because the film is, like I said, it's like full metal jacket with kids. It's about a bunch of 12-year-old boys at a water polo camp and it deals in decisions around the herd mentality, who's ostracized, and the central character is a boy who comes into the camp. he's a good kid and he wants to be kind to the boy that's ostracized but he also doesn't want to put a target on his back and it's about his struggle to how to navigate good versus bad in that scenario one of the things that's up we've talked about this before in various places is your attraction to the seductive power of toxic masculinity yeah because your character in the gift.

14:22I mean, he's certainly a bully, but you make him, he's preening. I mean, he's convinced of his own charisma. And we can see his relationship to the character to Simon, why that relationship exists. And that's a part two of what goes, I mean, there's some sort of hazing that happens in Train Dreams that exists in the periphery, but still a part of that. And we ask ourselves why Robert keeps going back to that world. It becomes a subtext that doesn't exist in the novella. And here, we see that there's something really attractive about that. What is it that keeps bringing you back? I had once someone described to me that when you sit in the seat of the cinema, your moral compass becomes quite binary, more than in life.

15:04You see the subtleties and the gray areas more in life. But we watch movies and go, there's the baddie, and we're looking to identify immediately. There's a goodie and there's the baddie. And we have a moral sort of courtroom in our own mind at the end of each film about who deserves what punishment or who deserves to get away with things or who deserves happiness. You know, it's like you've done good things, you deserve good things. You've done bad things, you should be punished. I'm really interested in the grey area in cinema. So, you know, when I've played heroes in the past, I'm always looking to find the floor.

15:43And if I'm playing what would be quite a bad guy, it's like how do we understand that person? Not love them, but... And with Train Dreams, there's a purity to Robert that I didn't want to mess with. But I seem to be fascinated thematically as a writer, as an actor, with these sort of... The space between good and bad. Not like a trope-y, typical thing. But like with The Gift, it's like, you know, Simon, Jason Bateman's character, we think he's the good guy in the typical triangular thriller. I'm like, I want to go and turn that guy into the villain by the end of the movie. And the guy that's the villain, which is me, I want the audience to suddenly go, oh, we can't empathize with this guy.

16:25Because we couldn't understand him. Yeah, and I believe that we as people are never binary. We're not just good or bad. It's like I could be a good person for 10 days straight and then I do one thing. I should be called a bad person because of my last thing I did. It's interesting because you're a character in the play and dealing with this kid, you're going to say, oh my god this was me you could sort of see him seeing that in that moment can't wait by the way that's i'm 51 years old i'm i always saw myself as a young person and now i'm starting to with it with a sense of kind of weird doom looking to the second half of my life you know the later chapter of my life going when i always look back or was in the present and it's weird how you start to worry about the future, you know, particularly with kids.

17:14In the plague, you realise my character as a coach, like, you know, and he's like failed somewhere along the way in his life. He's ended up looking after these idiot kids that he doesn't like. But you start to realise that he maybe bears a lot of resemblance in his life to the central kid, that he was maybe the subject of cruelty when he was his own young person. proceeds to try and give a pep talk to this kid to keep him at that. Don't give it away because it's so awful because you can see his attempt at being empathetic. Yeah. The worst pep talk of all time. The worst pep talk. Just running through the generations of his life.

18:01It's funny though because, again, we're talking about the effects of toxic masculinity but the allures of archetypal masculinity. And that's what Warrior is about. I mean, it's all these things we're talking about that you're attracted to, and Gavin is somebody you've worked with before too. You've gone back to work with, I mean to say. These are all filmmakers. These are all storytellers who make these stories about asking questions about, even in this modern day, what does masculinity mean? It's got to be, in one sense, one of the broadest terms. my brother and I when we first started watching movies as kids all we watched was movies with dudes with muscles on them like it was 1980s you probably said your brother's Nash yeah it was all about Arnold and Sylvester anything with a cop starring in it you know and the adventurous worlds at Spielberg beautiful Spielberg was creating Goonies and E.T.

18:59and you know these these sort of fantasy things that we could get invested in as kids. But there was an idea of masculinity, which is like very simple in the, in the muscle movies, you know, and Chuck Norris movies, which is like, you look at me wrong. I'm going to you up. Then I started discovering movies of the seventies when I was at drama school and realized there was this beautiful, like character based central protagonist world of very flawed men, And, you know, particularly as an actor, I'm talking about male protagonist movies because that's what I was looking, you know, as you move through the world as a kid, I think you're looking at movies going, maybe we get some of our cues from movies, you know, which makes sense, you know.

19:47So looking at flawed characters and looking at more sensitive characters, I think each decade has thrown up almost like a different generalized palette of what masculinity is. I never really thought of myself as an actor going, all right, well, now I'm part of that palette. But I have my own curiosities about what are the components of a man and what I think is a limited view of it. And therefore, how do I bring more to a character that, like I said, bring the child into the man and allow sensitivity to be there and allow a man to show emotion. And I think they're important components of it. That's probably a great place to end.

20:26since we're out of time anyway, my guest, was nominated for the Golden Globe and the Critics' Choice. I'm sorry I'm not going to let you get away with that, but I'm bringing it up. As Best Actor for the film Train Dreams on Netflix is our old friend Joe Edgerton. You've got to come back. It's been way too long since I've seen you. Oh, no, no, no. I'll be back any time.

20:54actor joel edgerton had quite a 2025 at sundance the film adaptation of train dreams exploded and he is now a golden globe nominee for best actor and the unusual adolescent thriller the plague broke out of last year's Cannes Film Festival. He's also starred in Warrior and The Gift, which he wrote and directed. Train Dreams is now on Netflix. Actors on the power of silence at the archive, kcrw.com slash the treatment. While you podcast, take a listen to actors and others on sources of inspiration at kcow.com slash thetreat. This show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist.

21:45To a happy new year, everyone. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.