Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar's Advice on Adaptation: How Train Dreams Became an Oscar-Nominated Film
Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar have been collaborating for fifteen years. They met in Austin, Texas, never signed a contract, and have moved from one film to the next supporting each other. Their adaptation of Denis Johnson's novella Train Dreams received four Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Original Song. It was their second Oscar nomination together - they were previously nominated for Sing Sing.
Their advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, interviews with The Wrap and Collider, and discussions of their adaptation process.
Spirit Over Literal Translation
"We had to follow the rule of being very true to the spirit of the book, but then letting the rest go." Denis Johnson's novella is stream-of-consciousness, unconventional in structure, and powered not by plot events but by the texture of its prose. Bentley initially thought it was unadaptable.
The solution: stop trying to translate pages to screen. Understand what the book does to a reader emotionally. Reproduce that effect through a completely different set of tools. Film operates under different rules than prose. A twelve-page conversation about a man shot by his dog is extraordinary in a novella. It has no structural place in a movie.
"When a filmmaker lets a film be its own thing separate from the novel, it tends to work better as long as it retains the spirit. That was our North Star: be completely loyal to the spirit of the book, but then let the movie become its own thing."
Where Eric Roth adapted sprawling source material into screenplays by finding the emotional through-line, Bentley and Kwedar worked with a hundred-page novella where the through-line was tonal rather than narrative. The challenge was different. The principle was the same.
Dialogue as Last Resort
"Only use dialogue as a last resort." A screenwriting mentor gave them this advice early. It made no sense until they shot a scene in Trans Pecos - a long dialogue sequence between two characters in a truck about what would happen next. On set, that entire scene collapsed into one line and a few exchanged looks. "It was so much better than all this shit we had written."
Joel Edgerton's performance as Robert Grainier proved the principle at scale. When their sound designer suggested removing a voiceover Bentley loved, the question was blunt: "It's some very good writing, but it's not a good scene. Do you want the good writing or do you want a good scene?"
But they insist on overwriting first. "Write it, overwrite it. Because then the actors are going to internalize that and it's gonna come out even if it's not said." The exploration feeds the performance even when the words get cut. A line the pilot improvised on set - "You better hold on to something" - became one of the most quoted moments in the film. Viewers experience it as deeply thematic. It was never in the script.
The Ending You Plan Is Never the Ending You Need
All four of their released films have different endings than originally shot. Train Dreams underwent thirty-five editing variations for its final sequence. The ending the audience sees - Grainier paying four dollars for an open-cockpit airplane ride, seeing his entire world from above - was not planned as the ending. It was a sequence buried earlier in the cut.
"We were watching it down and saw a very early version of that montage... oh, that's where the movie wants to end."
The original ending used the wolf boy sequence from the novella. It did not work on screen. The airplane worked. The film told them where it wanted to stop.
"The ending is what you walk out with." This is why thirty-five variations were worth the effort. Everything the audience remembers, everything they carry into the parking lot and the conversation afterward, depends on the final minutes.
Research Through Place
They rented a cabin on the river where Denis Johnson had lived. They hired a local naturalist to teach them about glaciation and native trees. They went to bars in logging towns and just talked to people. One night they met a member of the Kootenai tribe working at a fish hatchery, trying to reintroduce sturgeon that had been in the area for 350,000 years. "You could never find that in a book. You could also never say, oh, I'm going to a bar to meet that person."
While driving through the landscape, Kwedar listened to Will Patton's audiobook narration of the novella. The prose recontextualized against the physical place. They finished the first draft looking out over the river during a snowfall with trains running through at night. "We were riding high on finishing the draft, but then we read it as we left - deeply depressed. We got a lot of work to do."
Kwedar compares the revision process to building cabinets during the pandemic: "You get them up on their frames and it looks terrible. You put some molding around it and it still looks bad. You keep working at it until it gets to a place where it looks good." The Rolls-Royce principle: "I just looked at a normal car and I said, how do I make every single thing better? And you just do it over and over and over again."
Their mission statement, created fifteen years earlier: "Tell stories of human connection in impossible places." This guides project selection without consciously restricting the writing process. The cabin in Idaho. The prison in Sing Sing. The racetrack in Jockey. Each film finds human warmth in circumstances designed to extinguish it.
Fuse Actor to Role
Rather than actors performing written characters, Kwedar explains: "We try to fuse work to the artist and allow them to empty the tank." They refine scripts to match Joel Edgerton's essence and movement. The character and the actor become inseparable.
Bentley saw something in Edgerton that existing films had not used: "He just had this boyishness and the sense of humor to him that I was so taken by and felt like I hadn't seen him do in a lot of films." The performance was not about suppressing the actor's personality to serve the character. It was about finding where the actor and the character overlap.
Grainier participates in violence early in the story. This haunts him throughout. Conventional screenwriting advises making the protagonist sympathetic before revealing flaws. Bentley broke that rule. The moral complexity exists from the opening. The audience must decide whether to stay with someone who is not innocent.
Natural Light, Emotional Truth
"Everything inside the cabin is lit by candles and by lanterns, and then everything where they're sitting around a fire is lit by a campfire." No artificial light in period scenes. The limitation became a gift. "It provided such a special feeling to those scenes. It just helped the actors slip into it more."
When they needed a tree-falling shot, they asked loggers if they could attach a camera to a tree being cut down. The loggers said sure. "Taking any limitations you might have and trying to look at them as gifts rather than limitations."
Working with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, they referenced Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood for compositions with minimal extras, using elements like a burnt log to create visual depth and emotional resonance with almost nothing on screen.
The Mantras
Bentley's mantra comes from his father: "Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention." Applicable to every creative decision. Every frame. Every edit. Every word of dialogue that either earns its place or does not.
Kwedar's mantra comes from their Sing Sing program work: "Trust the process." Because "it's a shit show until opening night, then somehow it just works."
Key Takeaways
- Adapt the spirit, not the letter. Understand what the source material does to a reader. Reproduce that feeling through your medium's own tools.
- Use dialogue only when silence cannot do the work. Looks, gestures, and stillness carry more than exposition.
- Accept that the ending will change. Be willing to find it in the edit, not the outline.
- Research through place. Go where the story lives. Let the landscape generate details that research cannot.
- Fuse the performer to the role. Find where the person and the character overlap.
- Treat limitations as gifts. The constraint is often the creative breakthrough waiting to happen.
Bentley and Kwedar prove that adaptation is not translation. It is reimagination in service of the same emotional truth. Athens can help you refine prose, but only deep attention to spirit over letter can guide an adaptation worth making.
This post draws from Bentley and Kwedar's appearance on How I Write, their interviews with The Wrap and Collider. For more on screenplay adaptation, see Eric Roth's writing advice.