There’s a certain kind of movie that doesn’t announce itself so much as it settles in. It doesn’t ask for attention; it assumes you’ll give it. Train Dreams is one of those films — the kind that lingers long enough that watching it twice in 24 hours feels less like indulgence and more like instinct. When Felicity Jones and Kerry Condon talk about it, they don’t sound like they’re describing a project so much as a shared memory.
“It needed spontaneity,” Jones says early on. “It needed you to be relaxed. You’re sort of trying to capture life.” The film, directed by Clint Bentley and based on Dennis Johnson’s novella, resists the usual mechanics. There’s no sense of hitting marks or delivering lines on cue. Instead, everything bends toward ease. “Minimum people on set,” Jones recalls. “Usually just Clint and Adulo and the actors. Everything was in the service of helping the performances.”
Condon pushes back gently on the idea of looseness. “There weren’t holes in the scenes,” she says. “It was so well written. The script was pretty close to perfect.” If improvisation existed, it wasn’t in dialogue but in texture — feeding chickens, watering vegetables, standing in good light while the sun dropped behind the trees. “Sometimes it’s literally like, ‘Go and do something over there in the grass,’” she says. “If the light was really beautiful, they’d go, ‘Quick, guys, let’s just get something.’”
Those fragments matter. Train Dreams isn’t interested in plot momentum so much as accumulation — moments stacked until they resemble a life. “It was shot more like memories,” Condon says. “Flickers of things you see.” She recalls the editor describing the pacing as “breathing,” a rhythm shaped as much by absence as presence. That rhythm is carried by the score from Bryce Dessner, which Jones notes is “nearly always there,” quietly nudging the film forward even when nothing seems to be moving at all.
Condon is candid about why she wanted in. “I just really wanted to be in this movie,” she says, without qualification. Not a career move, not a pivot — just the gravitational pull of a good story. “I never want to stop doing small parts in great things,” she adds. “When the story is really good and the filmmaker is really good, you want to be part of it in some way.”
That instinct paid off. Her role avoids easy expectations — no romance, no tidy arc. “I loved that,” she says. “That it was just what it was.” Jones echoes that sense of purpose, describing how even the smallest actions were taken seriously. When her character handles a rifle, she practiced obsessively. “Whenever I had any time off, I’d go to the prop store and keep practicing,” she says. “You don’t want to be picking it up on camera. It has to be second nature.”
Then there are the skills you don’t list on a résumé. “I did learn how to skin a goat,” Jones admits. It wasn’t novelty — it was character work. “If the character is doing it, I feel like I should learn how to do it,” she says. “Hopefully it makes it look convincing.” Condon laughs, countering with her own grounding in reality: growing up around horses, owning them now, pretending she’s a jockey when she’s not working. “I did actually go to jockey school,” she says, as if that’s a normal aside.
The conversation eventually circles back to the film’s ending — the moment where Robert hears Jones’s character in the wind. Is it memory or ghost? Jones leans toward the former. “I think he’s probably imagining it,” she says. “When people die, their physical form dies, but they live on in the people that remember them.” Condon allows for romance. “If she’s a ghost, it’s a totally different genre,” she says. “But there’s something really moving in the idea that you’d get to see someone again. How nice that would be.”
That ambiguity is the point. Train Dreams doesn’t insist on answers. It trusts the viewer to sit with uncertainty, to let meaning surface when it’s ready. In a moment when movies often feel engineered to survive an algorithm, this one exists because someone, somewhere, really wanted to tell it. As Jones puts it, “Hopefully you’re doing something because you really want to be doing it.”
This one feels like that — a film made not to impress, but to remember.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
