Still from Train Dream. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams follows Robert Granier, a railroad builder, as he participates in America’s expansion to the West and finds love. Director Clint Bentley (Jockey) has adapted the Johnson’s attempt to contextualize the role of an individual within the immensity of history.
Bentley’s Train Dreams screens as part of the Premieres section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Below, editor Parker Laramie (Sing Sing, Unfriended) explains some of the differences between the film and the novel and why scenes were rearranged in the edit.
See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Laramie: I had worked with director Clint Bentley on his first film, Jockey. We really hit it off on that project, which was a delicate balancing act to achieve a tone I can best describe as “heightened naturalism.” Clint sent me an early draft of his script for Train Dreams just as Jockey was making its way into theaters, and I was really excited about the opportunity to do what we’d been refining on Jockey on a bigger scale. Getting the film greenlit took a few years, and in the meantime, we continued to chat about the film, I read a few drafts of the script, read the novella by Denis Johnson, and we worked together on other things (Clint produced Sing Sing, which was directed by Train Dreams EP Greg Kwedar).
Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?
Laramie: The thing that stood out to me immediately about Clint and Greg’s script was how it took the sweeping, unruly novella and boiled it down to a tight, emotional story. Cutting the film was all about retaining that focus and pushing it one step further. I had a very gifted editor (Karl Stieg) do the first assembly; so many of the scenes were already up on their feet and humming. Some scenes he cut remained untouched in the final film. That really gave Clint and I the freedom to do a lot of restructuring, which I love to do when I cut. It reveals new meanings for scenes and shows you what you can afford to lose (Karl’s first cut was about 2.5 hours long). This film also had the freedom afforded by a narrator—any given moment can suddenly become far more than the sum of its parts. But narration is a double-edged sword, since it very quickly can become prescriptive and suck the life out of a film.

Filmmaker: How did you achieve these goals? What types of editing techniques, or processes, or feedback screenings allowed this work to occur?
Laramie: The bulk of our work was rearranging scenes and re-writing narration. The opening of the film is completely different from what was scripted, which was much more abstract and tonal. We cobbled together the current opening after going back to the novella and re-appropriating scenes that used to be much later in the film. It was important to firmly plant ourselves in Grainier’s world and the relationship between him and Gladys in order for the rest of the film to resonate the way we wanted it to. But we also found that it was a little too much to take it all in right off the bat, and we wanted to ease people into the film a bit more and make it feel more inviting. So, I had the idea of putting what we call the “Strange Passageways” scene at the very top. It was a darling of Clint’s that we had lost from the closing montage, but it ended up being a beautiful entry into this fable-like world and really showcases some of the most stunning footage shot by DP Adolpho Veloso.
Filmmaker: As an editor, how did you come up in the business, and what influences have affected your work?
Laramie: I grew up in LA, and my whole family worked in TV and advertising. We watched a lot of movies and TV growing up. In high school I started digging into the Criterion Collection and the AFI Top 100 and stuff like that. I did critical studies of film in college, watching, reading and writing about film from a pretty academic and theoretical angle. In those years I was probably watching at least a movie a day, if not more. I don’t even remember most of the films I saw. I frequently will sit down to watch something only to realize halfway through that I’ve seen it before. After I finished school, I immediately started working as a PA and an assistant editor in whatever post production scenarios would take me (VFX, web series, feature films, you name it). I did a lot of work for free before I was really qualified to do any of it and spent a lot of time teaching myself how to do it all both technically and creatively.
Filmmaker: What editing system did you use, and why?
Laramie: Recently I’ve been on more Adobe Premiere projects, but I came up using Avid almost exclusively. I prefer Avid’s robust media management and performance, but I prefer Premiere’s audio editing & mixing tools. Lately, Premiere has made some structural improvements to how everything is organized that bring it much closer to Avid, so I’ve started preferring Premiere lately. But a lot of times I don’t have a choice: I frequently come on to a project after it’s already been worked on for a few years, especially on the small indie docs I tend to gravitate towards. I like to make it easy for directors to do some of their own cutting if they like to, and they are usually more comfortable in Premiere unless they’ve done a lot of professional editing work on bigger shows. I’m fluent in both now, and if I have a solid AE I might start letting them decide based on which one they prefer to use.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?

Laramie: The most difficult scene to cut was probably what we call the “Logroll” scene. They had problems on set getting the log to roll down the hill in the right way, getting the horses to do what they wanted them to do. Basically, anything that could’ve gone wrong did. On top of that, it’s a scene that sometimes felt like it was overshadowing some of the later tragedies in the film. Like with the opening, we ended up pulling a passage from the book and cobbling together footage intended for elsewhere to build what we call the “logging montage” that sets it up. I think it helped the scene not feel so abrupt because it teased out the brutality of logging.
Filmmaker: What role did VFX work, or compositing, or other post-production techniques play in terms of the final edit?
Laramie: VFX was a huge part of this film, selling and supporting the biggest emotional turning points. I like to cut by feel, but when you have entire sequences that have a huge main element completely absent from the frame (i.e. a huge forest fire), it forces you to focus in on what’s really at the core of the moment while you’re cutting. You also rely on crude temp sound design and score to help carry the moment and then prune those back as the VFX shots start to come in and you can get back out of the way and let the scene play more organically.
Filmmaker: Finally, now that the process is over, what new meanings has the film taken on for you? What did you discover in the footage that you might not have seen initially, and how does your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding that you began with?
Laramie: I think going into this I thought it was a film about mourning, but what’s really cut through as we refined the edit is the environmentalism message. Especially now with the fires raging in LA (where I’m based), the consequences of boundless human ambition are front of mind.