𝓐𝓵𝓮𝔁𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓻𝓪 𝓢𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓵𝓵𝓮𝓻

Train Dreams directed by @clintbentley Building the trees 🌲 SWIPE ➡️ I’ve had lots of questions about the trees and the logging, so before we get into it: yes, some real trees did fall, but we shot in areas that were actively being logged where trees were already scheduled to come down. That said, we also built a number of trees in order to minimize our impact on the landscape. Another reason we built trees is that the forests Robert Grainier knew don’t exist anymore, they were logged in the exact era we’re depicting. To show what was there, we had to reconstruct some of what had been destroyed. Our wonderful scenic artists, Vince de Felice and his team, hand-sculpted massive tree sections out of foam wrapped around plywood bases. Some were enormous stumps to show the scale of what existed, with trunks so big you could fit multiple men on platforms carved into their sides. As you probably know by now, Train Dreams was a small movie with a very tight budget, so every dollar had to be carefully considered. I felt like the vignettes of men posing with the really big trees, based on historical photographs we found, could create a large impact with storytelling and world-building in a single image. The giant tree with the springboards is the same structure as Hank Heeley’s tree house, just turned around and fitted with a roof. These set pieces were almost cut for because of the budget, but my art director @johnlavinart was resourceful and figured out how to make them happen. We believed in what they could do for the film. We also built logs. Real logs from trees that size are impossibly heavy to move! Building them allowed us to cut, reposition them on location and ultimately repurpose them on multiple sets. The boots nailed to the tree, slowly being consumed as the bark grows around them, is another powerful image from the film: a quiet marker of a life, of time passing, and of nature reclaiming what we leave behind. We attached real boots to a real tree and Vince worked his magic by sculpting and painting layers of foam to make it look like decades of growth had swallowed them. It’s one of those details that looks completely organic but required incredible craft.

Train Dreams directed by @clintbentley 
The overgrown cabin 🌼🌱
SWIPE➡️➡️➡️
••• “When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November 1968, his life ended as quietly as it had begun.”
He died peacefully, alone in the cabin, and the seasons turned before anyone found him. By the time we see him in this scene, the forest has already begun its work. Moss climbs the walls, roots thread through the floorboards, and his body has started its slow return to the earth. The cabin he made eventually absorbs him. In the script, he’s been lying there so long that vines, ferns and moss have started to claim him: he looks like a man mixed with a plant in the corner of the room. The work of the land artists was one of the first things that Clint and I connected about: how their work was both massive and intimate. They treated the landscape as both material and canvas, and that became our approach on Train Dreams. The production design needed to feel like a conversation with the land. For the overgrown cabin, we wanted the forest to reclaim what Grainier had once built. After a lifetime of carving out a place in the wilderness, the wilderness takes it back. The look of the film is grounded in reality with a dreamlike undercurrent, and this was a moment where we could lean into the dream without drifting away from the film’s established visual language. The foliage had to feel native to the place, consistent with the acre and the forests we’ve seen throughout the film, so the dreamlike quality could grow out of what was already real. A sweep of yellow flowers overtakes the cabin, petals scattered around him on the floor. This was our way of bringing Gladys back into the room. Yellow is her colour throughout the film and I’ll do a separate post about how we used it, but here it becomes the land remembering her. Grainier is back with her. (continued in comments ↓)

Better late than never because I went to the Oscars!!! 🏆🏆🏆 What a truly wild and special time. Train Dreams at the Oscars!! How amazing. So proud of us and this whole insane journey 🎬 Had too much fun to take lots of photos but here’s some of what we’ve got! ✨ 1 - Clearly needs no explanation! 2 - A moment for the dress 🌿 4 - Thank you @nikkiprovidence and @ghost_artistry_ who went above and beyond with my hair and make-up. You should work with them!! 6 - Some Train Dreams family. The only pic from the night with our wonderful leader @clintbentley 💚 7 - A reminder that @lucasjoaquinog and I clean up nice 💁🏻‍♀️ 8 - When you and @charliekbuddy both lose at the Oscars 😭 9 - jk!!! 😂 10 - til next time ✌️ ••• Dress: @temperleylondon Bag: @chloe Earrings: @tagliamonte_official ••• #traindreams #oscars #oscars2026 #academyawards #temperleylondon @traindreamsfilm @theacademy @netflixfilm

Imagine building your dream home from scratch and then burning it down on purpose. That’s exactly what the team behind Train Dreams did. Production designer Alexandra Schaller constructed a real log cabin in the wilderness, filled it with a life, and then set it on fire, for real, because the story demanded it. What happened next is even more extraordinary. Full interview at thesetset.com Photo/Video credits: Netflix, Alexandra Schaller

The woman who built early America for Train Dreams. Production designer Alexandra Schaller constructed an entire world for Clint Bentley’s Oscar-tipped film: real log cabins, old-growth forests, a cabin built specifically to burn. Every frame you’ve been obsessing over? That’s her. We sat down with Alexandra to talk process, period research, and what it actually takes to make a landscape feel like memory. Full interview at thesetset.com Train Dreams is in theaters and on Netflix now. Photo credits: Netflix, Alexandra Schaller

Train Dreams (2025) Dir: Clint Bentley @clintbentley DP: Adolpho Veloso @adolphoveloso Production Designer: Alexandra Schaller @schallex Costume Designer: Malgosia Turzanska @malgosia_turzanska Editor: Parker Laramie @parkerglaramie Colorist: Sergio Pasqualino Over 400 shots from the Oscar-nominated (and @filmindependent Best Feature winner) period drama available on ShotDeck!

Some odds and ends from Train Dreams, directed by @clintbentley 🚂💭 ➡️➡️➡️SWIPE! ••• Production design by yours truly • Art director @johnlavinart • Set decorator @melisa_mj • Prop master Andy Wert • Scenic artist Vincent De Felice • Construction coordinators Dave Lewis & Doug Clark • Graphic designer @mattvidalis • Cinematographer @adolphoveloso • Costume designer @malgosia.turzanska and many more! ✨ ••• #TrainDreams #productiondesign #ArtDirection #FilmCraft #WorldBuilding

Train Dreams directed by @clintbentley The fire tower SWIPE >>> Typically on small films, our work is finding and enhancing existing structures. On Train Dreams, we had to build almost everything from scratch. We’d found a real fire tower that could work with some modifications, but days before shooting it was still buried under feet of snow and the roads leading to it were impassable. That led us to pivot and find a new location where we could build the tower ourselves. Because we were shooting entirely in natural light, placement was critical. The site needed not only the right view but also the right coordinates. I was out there with my phone compass, texting @adolphoveloso angles and sun paths while he and Clint were on set miles away. Many potential sites were discounted purely based on orientation. When it came to building the tower, we took inspiration from Ozu - allowing framing and restraint to do the work - and realized that we could build only what the camera needed. In the 1940s, fire towers were beginning to shift from wood to steel, but it mattered to me that ours was built from logs with the same trees being felled below, seen in another stage of their life. Our fire tower was built on the ground right up to the edge of a sheer dropoff and our VFX supervisor Ilia later added the log supports to give us the height we needed. Historically, many fire lookout positions were held by women, which made Claire’s presence in the tower feel special and right. Though the set is modest in size, it carries real weight in the film. Our scenic artist Vince and his team overpainted the windows and gave it a patina that felt genuinely old. The coolest thing is that real life fire lookout @lookoutlindquist saw the film and told us that we nailed it! ✊🏼 go team! ✊🏼 ••• Production design by yours truly • Art director @johnlavinart • Set decorator @melisa_mj • Prop master Andy Wert • Scenic artist Vincent De Felice • Construction coordinators Dave Lewis & Doug Clark • Cinematographer @adolphoveloso • VFX Supervisor @illeffects • Costume designer @malgosia.turzanska and many more! ✨ ••• #TrainDreams #productiondesign #ArtDirection #FilmCraft #worldbuilding

The latest episode of “Apotheosis: Notes From the Field” with @schallex is live! Listen in as PDC Member Alexandra Schaller (After Yang, The Get Down) reflects on her experience of leaning into nature and designing the transcendent world of Train Dreams (2025). Check out the episode on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts, and don’t forget to rate and subscribe.

How the world of TRAIN DREAMS came to life by production designer Alex Schaller. Watch now on Netflix.

Train Dreams directed by @clintbentley The colour yellow 🌻 SWIPE FOR THE PLANE BUILD✈️✈️✈️ ••• When costume designer @malgosia_turzanska and I first started talking about the film, we both arrived at yellow for Gladys. Then, while scouting, we came across a field of yellow flowers. It was as though the land itself was confirming what we’d already decided. We worked together to weave yellow through the story. It’s in Gladys’s dress when we first meet her, it’s in baby Kate’s clothing. It’s in the wildflowers scattered through the landscape. It’s in the yellow flowers that overtake the cabin after Grainier’s death: the land remembering her. It’s also the plane at the end of the film, yellow against the sky, carrying him above everything he’s known. We had Dunkirk’s aerial sequences in mind as reference (…ambitious for an indie budget?!) but insurance wouldn’t let us film Joel in a real plane, so art director extraordinaire @johnlavinart built the cockpit of the biplane (with his own hands!) and @ryan_roundy SFX created the gimbal system. Gladys is such a part of Grainier’s life, but she’s only in the film briefly. Assigning her a colour that we could come back to again and again meant that she could have a presence throughout the whole story, long after she’s gone. In a landscape of greens and browns, yellow quietly marks her presence, and when she’s gone, what remains is her absence. ••• Production design by yours truly • Art director @johnlavinart • Set decorator @melisa_mj • Prop master Andy Wert • Key greens @robjoy & Matt Lask • Scenic artist Vincent De Felice • Construction coordinators Dave Lewis & Doug Clark • Cinematographer @adolphoveloso • Costume designer @malgosia.turzanska and many more! ✨ ••• #TrainDreams #ProductionDesign #ArtDirection #foryourconsideration #ColorTheory

Train Dreams directed by @clintbentley 🪵 The rebuilt cabin SWIPE ➡️➡️➡️ ••• After the fire, Robert rebuilds the cabin alone. Same place, same logs from the surrounding forest, but everything has changed. The first cabin was built for two people starting a life together. This one is built by a man trying to hold onto what’s been lost. Grainier raises four walls in the exact footprint of the old home, but it’s not really the same place anymore. The land has changed, and so has he. We kept the original shell of the cabin and plugged the back wall to close off the former bedroom. He couldn’t bring himself to rebuild that room, and we made his loss part of the design. On the exterior, we wrapped the footprint of the missing bedroom in young trees, the kind that would spring up from burned ground, allowing the forest to press in on the very part of the home he couldn’t recreate. You can feel what’s not there. We charred the timbers and darkened the woods so it would look as though Robert had scavenged burnt logs from the fire site, rebuilding with whatever had survived. Inside, the objects return over the years but not the warmth. A stove, a table, a chair, a bed off to the side. The cabin becomes spare and functional, a space built out of muscle memory rather than hope. A place where Robert is waiting without knowing what for. ••• Production design by yours truly • Art director @johnlavinart • Set decorator @melisa_mj • Prop master Andy Wert • Key greens @robjoy & Matt Lask • Scenic artist Vincent De Felice • Construction coordinators Dave Lewis & Doug Clark • On-set dresser @samwhys • Cinematographer @adolphoveloso • Costume designer @malgosia.turzanska and many more! ✨ ••• @traindreamsfilm @adg800 @unitedscenicartists @productiondesignerscollective @joeledgerton @williamhmacy