On the morning in January when Oscar nominations were announced, 40-year-old director Clint Bentley was in Dallas with his wife and two close friends, who’d gathered to watch the livestream. Champagne was chilling, because whether the news turned out good or bad, drinking seemed in order.
Bentley’s drama Train Dreams had turned into The Little Indie That Could: scooped up by Netflix after a Sundance debut, named on 2025 best-of lists and nominated for two Golden Globe awards, although neither went to Bentley, who directed the film and adapted it, along with his creative partner Greg Kwedar, from a Denis Johnson novella.
The Academy Awards weren’t a long shot, but they were nothing close to a lock. The 10 nominations for best picture came last, announced in alphabetical order. Bentley held his breath through the first nine names. The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, so many S titles. The final movie read from the podium was the one Bentley was waiting to hear.
“And then I blacked out,” he jokes, several weeks later, recounting the emotional peak of the moment Train Dreams became a best picture nominee. “I cried, and I blacked out, and I have no idea what happened next.”
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Actually, the group headed to brunch, because celebration was in order. Train Dreams landed three more nominations that day: best adapted screenplay for Bentley and Kwedar, best cinematography for Adolpho Veloso and best song for Nick Cave.
“It was a surreal morning,” Bentley says, sipping from a coffee cup as we speak over Zoom, his thick, wavy ginger hair glinting in the light. “I asked for the Oscar-nominated discount at brunch, but they didn’t have one.”
An epic in miniature
The Academy Awards take place on Sunday, March 15, and it’s a safe bet no Dallas resident has more skin in the game than Bentley. It’s an unusual feat for a down-to-earth guy who’s lived in Oak Cliff for the past decade, but Train Dreams is no ordinary movie.
The film casts its spell from the opening shot, as the camera travels along a railway inside a tunnel that opens onto a lush forest in Idaho, whose disappearing splendor — the symphony of birdsong and rushing river, the trees that nearly scrape the sky — forms the backdrop of a story about a man increasingly alienated by the modern world he’s helping to build.
Joel Edgerton, right, plays a logger building a life with his wife, played by Felicity Jones, in Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams.” (Netflix via AP)
AP
Joel Edgerton plays a logger in the early 20th century, toiling on the trains and bridges rapidly transforming the country (the film was mostly shot in eastern Washington). It’s a backbreaking job marked by danger and casual violence, though the film’s most tender scenes capture the home and family the protagonist is starting with his wife, played by Felicity Jones. After tragedy strikes (best left unexplained), the movie shifts into a melancholy key, with powerful moments of grief and wonder.
“It’s about little moments in our lives that end up defining our lives,” Bentley says. Johnson’s 2011 novella has been called an epic in miniature, and the film has that quality, an elegy for the kind of everyman that history tends to forget.
Edgerton’s magnificent performance earned him a Golden Globe nod. The only bittersweet moment for Bentley on that morning of the Oscar nominations came when Edgerton’s name was not among the best actor nominees.
What the academy did recognize was the cinematography of Adolpho Veloso, who shot almost entirely in natural light, capturing both the epic landscapes and the hushed moments between characters. The visual poetry of the film evokes Terrence Malick, a filmmaker Bentley cites as an influence, with the camera seeking out nature’s majesty in the trickle of a stream or sunlight filtering through trees. Adding to the Malick vibe is a voice-over veering toward the philosophical, voiced by Will Patton, who read the audiobook for Train Dreams.
“Part of the style comes from the films that I love and admire,” Bentley says, “and part of it comes from trying to replicate the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of our lives.”
Two fateful meetings in Texas
The rhythms of nature were central to Bentley’s youth on a cattle farm in Florida. “I was very much a country kid,” he says. “I didn’t appreciate it much at the time, but I miss it now.”
His father was a jockey, part of a little-known subculture Bentley explored in his 2021 directorial debut. Like Train Dreams, Jockey is a character study anchored by an extraordinary performance, this time by Clifton Collins Jr. as an aging horse racer. Both films examine the toll — physical, emotional, mental — of these men’s lonely paths.
Clifton Collins Jr. in the 2021 film “Jockey,” Clint Bentley’s directorial debut about an aging horse racer. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Adolpho Veloso.
Adolpho Veloso / Sundance Institute
Jockey was cowritten with Kwedar, a Fort Worth native now living in Austin who became Bentley’s collaborator after the two met in 2010. Bentley’s parents had moved from Florida to the Hill Country, and after graduating from Stetson University, Bentley says, “I was kind of bumming around, living in Montreal and living on the road, when I went to visit my parents.” That trip led to two fateful encounters: one with the woman who would become Bentley’s wife, and another with her friend Greg Kwedar, who became Bentley’s creative partner.
Both men were drawn to filmmaking and fascinated by the border region, which became the subject of their first feature, Transpecos, winner of a 2016 SXSW Audience Award. The duo’s breakout came with Sing Sing, a sleeper hit that nabbed three Academy Award nominations in 2025, including one for best adapted screenplay and another for the song “Like a Bird,” cowritten by Fort Worth’s Abraham Alexander. Sing Sing is based on an Esquire article about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program inside Sing Sing prison, and several former inmates and RTA participants acted in the film, though the movie’s star is a magnetic Colman Domingo, whose performance earned the film’s third Oscar nod.
Bentley and Kwedar write scripts together and take turns in the director’s chair (Kwedar helmed Sing Sing and Transpecos), a partnership with an impressive track record: Of the four films the duo has made, half have been nominated for Oscars.
“It certainly helps when you try to get money for a film, which has always been hard as an independent filmmaker,” Bentley says. How will two nominations in a row change his career? He runs a hand through his wavy hair. “Ask me in a couple years,” he says.
The road to Oscar
When he’s not on the road, Bentley lives a low-key life with his wife and kids in Oak Cliff. “We’re lucky in Dallas to have a lot of good theaters,” he says. “Angelika, Alamo Drafthouse, but Texas Theatre is my jam.”
On March 1, Bentley gave a Q&A at a sold-out screening of Train Dreams at the Texas Theatre, and he introduced the film at another screening later that day.
“I love that space,” he says. “I’m there quite often seeing films and hanging out with friends.”
The week leading up to Sunday’s Oscars is a whirlwind of star-studded events in Los Angeles. “I know this sounds hokey, but I get to go to these parties and hang with the other nominees,” he says. “I get to talk to Jafar Panahi [It Was Just an Accident] or Joachim Trier [Sentimental Value] and ask about their films. I get to meet actors that I’ve been watching since I was a kid.”
“This film is about all the small lives that keep the world going,” said Clint Bentley, center, accepting the award for best feature for “Train Dreams” at the Film Independent Spirit Awards on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
Chris Pizzello / Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Though the Academy Awards mark the finale of awards season, Bentley is already a winner. Train Dreams took home three statues at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in mid-February, including best cinematography for Veloso and best director for Bentley. Actress Regina King announced the best picture award at evening’s end, and her face softened when she opened the envelope. “Awww,” she said. “Train Dreams.”
“This film is about all the small lives that keep the world going,” Bentley said, accepting the award, “the people who don’t always get movies made about them, that don’t have monuments for them.”
Awards season has been so all-encompassing that Bentley isn’t sure what his next project will be. “I’d love to make something closer to home,” he says, mentioning the new tax incentives for filmmaking that make shooting in Texas easier. “But I don’t think about stories locationally. I’m drawn by the story, and then the location follows.”
Meanwhile, his partner-in-creativity Kwedar has been working on a romantic comedy slated for Netflix later this year called Saturn Return, whose script the duo revised together. Kwedar has faith that wherever Bentley heads next, it’ll be a good place to follow.
“I’ve gotten a front-row seat to witness Clint grow into the exceptional filmmaker he’s become,” Kwedar says. “And the wild thing is that it still feels like he’s just scratching the surface of what he can do as an artist.”
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