Hi, I'm Clint Bentley, co-writer and director of “Train Dreams.” This is actually the final scene of the movie, spoiler alert. This is Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, and he is at an airfield where they offer plane rides. This pilot is Amelia Hilsen, who is a real and amazing pilot. In fact, she's flying this old plane. Grainier boards this plane for what he thinks will be a $4 joyride, and in the end something much bigger happens. The way we filmed this was really exciting. We actually did it in three parts. Obviously we had a bunch of cameras set up on the plane and Amelia got on the plane. We're also filming the plane from the ground and then for insurance reasons we couldn't put Joel in an old vintage plane. And so we built a recreation of the plane itself. Alex Schaller, our production designer, and her great team built it. And then we put it on a gimbal about 12 feet off the ground. And then our great visual effects supervisor, Ilia Mokhtareizadeh, and his team, painted and replaced the sky behind Joel's head. And what happens here is that, as you make this flight, moments of your life flash before your eyes. Memories of his life come rushing back to him as he goes through this experience. A lot of these moments we use are things we didn't see earlier in the movie or alternate takes of things we saw earlier in the movie. Parker Laramie, our editor, did an incredible job of figuring out how we move in and out of these memories in a way where we feel like they're moving forward and not just a series of random images flying at us. “Beautiful, isn't it?” “Simply beautiful.” “When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November 1968…” This narration, which comes from the always wonderful Will Patton, has been guiding us throughout the entire movie, and it took a long time to decipher this narration. What was the right balance to conclude the film? And then I'm also impressed by what Joel does here, all the countless feelings he conveys on his face in this final shot say so much more than we could have said. “He finally felt connected to everything.”
