TORONTO (AP) — It’s popular in Hollywood to follow the tax credits wherever they go, but that was never going to be much of an option for “Train Dreams.”

When director Clint Bentley embarked on adapting Denis Johnson ’s 2011 novella, he knew the book’s early 20th century Idaho and Washington setting would take him into the Pacific Northwest forests. Johnson’s book is a small miracle: a slender and quiet tale of the simple life of a logger and railroad worker named Robert Grainier. He's a small, almost infinitesimal piece in a larger drama of time's march forward and the inexorable maw of progress cutting through an untamed landscape.

In scouting for “Train Dreams,” Bentley, 40, found it harder than ever to find the old growth forests of the book. If “Train Dreams” is about unearthing a forever-lost American past, locating it for the film was fittingly elusive.

“When we were looking for locations, it proved the point of the film,” Bentley says. “It’s hard to find those old trees. There are protected areas you can get to. We drove three hours north from Spokane, up to this grove of old trees by the Canadian border. You get there after a hike and it’s not that big of a stand of old trees. It’s the few they couldn’t get to.”

“Train Dreams,” meditative and radiant, seeks to evoke an ever-changing land upon which Grainier anonymously labors. This is a time of seemingly slower pace but one constantly in flux, with forests being cleared, railroads being laid and lives being sacrificed along the way.

“The thing that’s beautiful about the book is that it feels like an elegy for a lost time. That’s what I wanted the movie to feel like,” says Bentley. “And I think a big part of that is we look around and we see, ‘Oh, that was a forest, and now there’s a Costco there.’”

Bentley’s film, currently playing in theaters before streaming Nov. 21 on Netflix, is resonating with audiences in part because of how deeply un-Hollywood it is. Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton in the film, doesn’t talk much. He isn’t leading a heroic or even particularly notable life. It’s more that life is happening to him.

“What hooked me was about the significance of what we would otherwise presume of an insignificant life,” Edgerton says. “We go to the cinema to watch what we hope for ourselves, that we would be more active and in control and heroic. But I think the majority of us share similarities to Robert in that we don’t presume to have full control of things in the world, and we absorb the blows of the world. We’re not the controllers of our universe.”

Adapting a cherished favorite of 21st century literature

When “Train Dreams,” which first debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, was premiering at the Toronto Film Festival, Edgerton, Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the co-screenwriter, gathered to discuss a movie that tends to inspire soulful rumination. Bentley and Kwedar, the writing-producer partners behind 2024’s “Sing Sing” and 2021’s “Jockey,” have shown a rare knack for crafting textured American stories.

“We want to build our stories from the dirt up,” says Kwedar, 41.

Bentley and Kwedar write together but take turns directing. Their script to “Sing Sing,” the acclaimed real-life inspired prison drama populated by formerly incarcerated men, was Oscar nominated. (Clarence Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield were also credited as writers.)

Yet little about Johnson’s novella, first published in a 2002 issue of The Paris Review, screams movie adaptation. It's harsh and unsentimental. Grainier experiences tragedy. His life is mostly hard and remains a mystery to him. But it contains small joys and moments of epiphany.

Over the years, “Train Dreams” has gone from a cherished cult favorite to an established classic, “an American epic writ small,” as one critic called it. In 2012, “Train Dreams” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Last year, The New York Times included it on a list of the best books of the 21st century, praising how its soft-spoken protagonist “bears witness to the real-time formation of a raw, insatiable nation.”

Edgerton read it around the time “Train Dreams” was published as a book, and inquired about the adaptation rights. But they were taken.

“I remember thinking there would be a great movie in here, but how difficult of an undertaking it would be,” Edgerton says. “The fear would be how much would you have to bend Denis’ work and alter it so much that it lost a few of the elements so beautiful about it. In order to put it on the screen, you might end up destroying the best of it.”

Years later, when Bentley and Kwedar began writing the adaptation, they proceeded carefully, trying to stick to the spirit of the book while reshaping it for film. As they describe the reverence they had for the book (“The quality of the prose, you feel like you’re in the presence of greatness,” Kwedar says), Edgerton smiles.

“I just had the image of someone coming to you guys and going, ‘Hey, can you restore this church for me?’” Edgerton says.

Filming in the shadows of giants

The way “Train Dreams” evolves as a series of disjointed encounters, with narration and lyricism filling in between, has led to a lot of comparisons to the film's of Terrence Malick. The film’s supporting cast includes Felicity Jones as Gladys, Grainier’s wife, William H. Macy as a well-traveled explosives expert and Kerry Condon as a woman Grainier meets later in life. Like the book, the movie slowly, subtly gathers a force that you only fully feel in the movie’s final, profound moments.

“Someone said, ’Across this whole movie we’re going to build a fire and at the end of it, we’re going to light it,” Bentley says.

“You just hope the box of matches isn’t wet,” Edgerton jokes.

But they collectively trusted that “Train Dreams” could get there. They knew Johnson's book held a recognizable truth.

“I had a feeling that if I feel these things, someone else will have them, too,” says Edgerton, who gives one of his finest performances with only a smattering of dialogue. “And they’ll reach into this film and see their own love in it, their own joy and it might allow them to reflect on their own loss and grief.”

There weren't only the words to go by, either. While shooting, the filmmakers felt dwarfed by the immensity of the Pacific Northwest forest around them. Grainier is often shown in the bottom of wide shots with trees looming overhead. On their outdoor sets, ancient stumps of even larger trees could be seen, too.

“Just being in the presence of these trees stirs some deep part of your soul,” Kwedar. “And you can't avoid that. You can blindly go about this work, but there's still that latent pull towards that deeper question of the cost of things.”

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