William H. Macy and Kerry Condon Reflect on the Soul of ‘Train Dreams’ [VIDEO INTERVIEW]
“You cut down these magnificent trees that were around when Jesus roamed the earth, and it hurts your soul,” William H. Macy said, quoting one of his favorite lines from his recent film Train Dreams.
Macy, an Oscar-nominated actor best known for Fargo and Shameless, plays Arn Peeples, a logger and philosopher of sorts who watches the world around him change faster than he can accept. “Arn is sort of a prophet in that he says we’re moving too fast, and we’re changing things too quickly, and we’re going to regret it someday,” Macy said.
Across from him is Kerry Condon, the Irish actress who earned an Academy Award nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin. She portrays Claire Thompson, a woman defined by love, loss, and reflection. Condon shared her favorite line from the film: “Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.”
“And I feel like that’s the feeling when someone dies or someone you love dies, there is a little bit of you left behind kind of, like your world is not the same world. They’re gone, and you’re left,” she continued. She went on to point out that another favorite line of hers was “the world needs a hermit in the woods just as much as a preacher at the pulpit.” Highlighting that no one is more important than anyone else.
Written and directed by Clint Bentley, whose debut feature Jockey premiered to acclaim at Sundance, Train Dreams adapts Denis Johnson’s celebrated novella about an ordinary man whose life in the early 20th-century American frontier becomes a meditation on solitude, patience, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit. Bentley once again explores working-class endurance with poetic stillness, aided by cinematographer Adolpho Veloso (The Great Movement), who captures the wilderness in luminous, painterly light.
Macy described the atmosphere on set felt like business as usual, “all the characters putting one foot in front of the other, just doing their jobs,” he said. “When I read it, I got got the epic scope of the thing. And then when I saw it. When you see the whole thing,” he added.
Condon nodded in agreement. “The music as well. The music adds such a layer to it.”
She also recalled a moment of transcendence during filming. “I remember when we were shooting a scene, the sun was going down, and there was just trees, and you hear it was very peaceful, and it felt very spiritual,” she recalled.
“And that light that’s on our face is the actual sun going down, it isn’t a light. And I just had a feeling. It felt like a special moment to me as a person, so I just had a feeling, have we just captured something spiritual?”
With Bentley’s direction and Veloso’s naturalistic imagery, Train Dreams becomes more than a story about one man’s life. It’s an elegy for time itself, a reminder that even the smallest moments can carry something eternal.
Train Dreams is currently in select theaters and will be on Netflix November 21.
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