Clint Bentley doesn’t watch his own film “Train Dreams” much anymore, and why would he? He’s been screening it since Sundance a year ago. But on Thursday night in Los Angeles, he sat with a crowd and was “moved” anew by his gorgeous, ruminative Americana story about the place we have among our natural world and what we leave behind in it.
That’s because Netflix screened it at the Egyptian Theater along with a live performance of composer Bryce Dessner’s score by the Wordless Music Orchestra and Dessner himself. Dessner and Bentley each acknowledged during the event how rare it is to experience a film and its original score in this way, and they’re not wrong. But increasingly, such events are becoming more common during awards season and are one of the hotter tickets in town. The “Train Dreams” event had Academy members seeing the film for the second or third time because it was so unique. And with all due respect to Timothée Chalamet playing basketball with Adam Sandler, seeing a great film this way is a genuinely awesome and truly memorable cinematic experience.
Three years ago, Netflix hosted such a screening on behalf of Jonny Greenwood’s Oscar-nominated score for “The Power of the Dog.” Universal two years ago also had a screening for “Oppenheimer” and Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-winning score that brought down the house and got Göransson’s collaborator Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) to attend. But this week alone, Netflix had a music showcase for “Frankenstein,” other studios have had live performances featuring music from “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and “Wicked: For Good,” and Neon did a live accompaniment of the techno “Sirât” score along with the full film. And as IndieWire exclusively reported last month, Wordless Music is planning a year-long showcase of A24 films with their own live scores.
Bentley before hearing the performance on Thursday evening though described Dessner’s Oscar shortlisted score as the wind that lifts up the film, something that grants “Train Dreams” its emotional depth. In chatting with IndieWire afterwards, he was still processing how special the moment was for him as a filmmaker.
“There’s a piece that I had heard so many times throughout the process of cutting the film and working with the music and all that. There’s one simple piece, like a staccato violin, that I just didn’t realize how many violins were in it, and that there was a viola in it as well,” Bentley said. “It’s things like that that gave me a new appreciation for the music and for the score that Bryce had built. I was already in awe of it, but seeing some of the intricacies, you don’t fully appreciate until you see a bunch of performers actually performing.”
Bentley’s playlist of inspiration for how he wanted “Train Dreams” to sound had everything from Tchaikovsky to Leonard Cohen, so he was blessed to have a composer like Dessner who could work in classical music, folk, and of course rock music thanks to his work with The National. Wordless Music also performed during “Train Dreams’” somber title track song that plays over the film’s credits, the shortlisted track Dessner worked on alongside Nick Cave (who is on tour and was not present). Netflix is pulling double duty to get this film some Oscar nominations.
But Dessner only managed to get the live performance together in the last three weeks. Dessner recorded the “Train Dreams” score at times playing multiple parts alone in various locations or at his home, and he explained to IndieWire it meant he didn’t actually have written sheet music for a live performance. Despite being a rock star, he’s also currently in residence at the concert hall in Berlin, so it’s not as if he hasn’t worked with orchestral scores many times before. But it still required working through the holidays to get a live version ready, adding live cues that would be different than recording with a click track. And he further tweaked the cinematic version, such as adding oboes, other woodwinds, or three different piano parts in order to emulate something that would’ve been played with a synthesizer on the actual score, creating a truly ephemeral event.
“There’s a human side to the dimension of the film being this sort of beautiful, cinematic poem that’s really about empathy and grief,” Dessner said. “So what’s beautiful about a live orchestra is seeing 30-40 people making music together. And this film in particular felt really would be a beautiful one to do live in that way, to bring even more of emotional, human element out of it.”
Though the orchestra as conducted by Lauren Wasynczuk featured several dozen performers, Wordless Music’s performance often captured the intimacy of Dessner’s score, with just a quartet of strings playing at times. It echoed what Dessner said were the warmer, more analog sounds of older instruments and recording equipment that are present on the actual score, and Dessner felt the cinematography by Adolfo Veloso “just drinks music up.”
“There was a lot of room for music in the film, and I almost had the feeling like I was writing a kind of pastoral symphony. Music comes in and out, but it’s almost as if it’s there lurking, like the way that nature is,” Dessner said. “It’s another character, like the wind or the river, the water underneath itself somehow. And it peeks its nose out occasionally. But it felt like a poetic conversation with this beautiful universe that Clint created.”
