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A stunning plane ride and flashes from a life are what make up the final sequence of Clint Bentley’s period drama “Train Dreams,” which is nominated for the best picture Oscar.
In this scene, the movie’s lead character, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), has arrived at an airfield where plane rides are being offered for $4. He takes one, and while airborne, key moments from his life flash before his eyes.
Narrating the scene, Bentley said that the pilot was played by Amelia Hilsen, a real pilot who did stunts for the sequence.
The filming involved rigging cameras to the plane to capture scenes in flight, as well as shooting the plane from the ground. But Bentley said that, for insurance reasons, they couldn’t fly Edgerton in an antique plane, “so we built a re-creation of the plane itself.”
“Alex Schaller, our production designer, and her great team built it,” he added, “and then we put it on a gimbal like 12 feet off the ground, and then our great VFX supervisor, Ilia Mokhtareizadeh, and his team painted out and replaced the sky behind Joel’s head.”
Regarding the bits of life that Robert visualizes, Bentley said they were made up of “either things we didn’t see earlier in the film or alternate takes of things we saw earlier in the film. Parker Laramie, our editor, did an amazing job at figuring out like, how are we coming into and out of these memories in a way where they feel like they’re moving forward and not just a series of random images that are flying at us?”
The other element that helped make the scene, Bentley said, was a strong performance from Edgerton.
“All of the myriad of feelings that he gets across on his face in this final shot just say so much more than anything we could have said.”
Read the “Train Dreams” review.
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Mekado Murphy writes about the world of movies and produces the Anatomy of a Scene video series.
The post Watch the Final Scene of ‘Train Dreams’ appeared first on New York Times.
