Tina Kakadelis
Production designer Alexandra Schaller’s career in film and television didn’t begin at home in front of the family television set, watching a movie that would ignite a lifelong passion. Before TV and film, Schaller worked in fine art and installation art. Even before that, though, her passion for creating tangible worlds for actors to exist in began on a theater seat.
“As a young child, my dad always took me to the theater, and I just loved the magic of it,” Schaller reminisces. “You know the feeling when the lights go out and you’re being transported to this other place? I wanted to recreate the feeling I had every time I was at the theater.”
“I’d worked on some bigger movies in the art department, but I was like, wow, movies are crazy. I found myself working on short films on the side. People needed help and I found myself doing the production design without even knowing that was what I was doing. I was creating the environments, decorating the rooms, and trying to visually chase the feeling the director was after tonally for their film.”
Schaller’s most recent work is on Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a staggering piece of cinema that paints a beautiful, melancholic picture of a man’s life at the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a film that looks at technology’s impact in shaping the world as this simple man, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), knows it. He’s a logger by trade and is endlessly searching for meaning in his life. A sense of purpose becomes clear to him when he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) and the two build a life together surrounded by nature. However, the way Schaller became involved with Train Dreams could not be more rooted in technology.
“I DM’d him on Instagram,” laughs Schaller. “ I’d seen a very early lookbook moodboard he’d put together for the film and I was like, wow, wow, wow. This is right up my alley. I felt like we should know each other because we speak the same visual language.”
“After I DM’d him, it happened very quickly. He was like, the movie’s happening, I’m interviewing production designers, would you want to meet? Literally the next day I had a meeting with him and we really clicked. The rest is history.”
Prior to the meeting, Schaller read both the script and the novella by Denis Johnson that the film is based on. While she was inspired by Johnson’s work, Schaller focused her pitch on the script, tailoring her work to serve what Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar had written.
“When I met with Clint and the producers, one of their first questions was, it’s a relatively modest budget, how are we going to do all this stuff?” recalls Schaller. “I just said one foot in front of the other, we’re going to figure it out.”
“The reason I connect to Clint so much is because he’s so in tune with the essence of something. There are practical challenges throughout filmmaking: money, budget, logistics, blah, blah, blah. But if you can talk about the essence of what you’re trying to say, it’s easier to figure out how it should look and what’s important and how it looks and feels, if that makes sense.”
“In a more literal sense, though, the big thing to answer their question was how the hell do we make a crazy forest fire? How are we going to do that? How are we going to create a bridge?” poses Schaller. “The first question I asked him was, hey, Clint, are we going to burn the cabin for real? He was like, I don’t know, are we? I said, yeah.”
“We set out to find a plot of land where we could build a cabin that could be a completely immersive, standalone set for the actors and for Adolpho Veloso, the cinematographer, and Clint to shoot it in a very naturalistic way, and so we could also burn it down for real.”
So much of Train Dreams is about Robert and his relationship with the natural world around him. When he’s home, he lives off the land with Gladys and their child. They don’t take more from the world than they need, and they enjoy the quiet simplicity their riverside plot of land affords them. On the flipside, when Robert is on the job, he’s chopping down trees to fundamentally alter the course of the natural world. Terraforming the land before him to the whims of men with far more money than he’ll ever see in his lifetime. To blend these two sides of the same coin, Schaller’s production design had to be, as she describes, “invisible.”
“We built so much of the world for this movie, and it doesn’t look like it. We built the fire tower, the train, the plane he’s in in the last scene of the movie, the cabin, we built logs, we built so much,” Schaller explains. “I think it was a question of finding the beautiful environments, firstly, and to build off of that.”
“One of the first inspirations that Clint and I had was the work of the land artists. How they do such big-scale sculptural installations. Land art uses the natural landscape as both the material and the canvas. That became our approach to the design of the movie because design is a conversation with the landscape and the environment. At every point in the movie, it was very important to feel completely immersed in the world and in Robert’s point of view. What we did want is to thread a little dreamlike undercurrent through everything. Something very subtle.”
One of the most compelling parts of Train Dreams’ narrative is the lifespan of Robert. He’s born sometime in the late-1800s and passes away in the 1960s. He lived a long life of eighty-some years. Beyond his personal life, it’s fascinating to consider the way the world changed right before his eyes. He went from laying the tracks of a railroad system to seeing cars overtake and deem trains almost obsolete. He went from using a saw to seeing a man in a spaceship orbiting the earth on a TV.
Robert spends much of his life in nature, but as Train Dreams chugs toward its ending, Robert ventures out into the world around him. Schaller had to make sure this modern life of 1960s America fit within historical facts, but also felt so alien to a man who has been surrounded by nature for decades. The audience also has to find it both jarring and factual because of the amount of time we’ve spent with Robert in his beloved woods.
“Malgosia Turzanska, the costume designer, and I talked a lot about period accuracy in the movie. What are the markers we’re going to use to show that time is elapsing? We had to show the late 1800s, the 1920s (where most of the film takes place), the 1940s, and the 1960s. A lot of that was done with color. It’s all very subtle, because at no point do we want to take the audience out of it and be telegraphing, whoa, okay, here we are in the ’40s. We wanted to avoid the museum diorama feeling. Everything is very subtle, but everything was very period accurate. Not down to the specific year, but to the feeling of the ’20s, the feeling of the ’40s, the feeling of the ’60s.”
“Feeling is really what’s key to that subtlety, because it’s always this tension between practicality, realism, and someone’s interior landscape. It’s small, little details. So yes, the props change over time. Really, though, it’s about what’s the color, what’s the texture? So much of this movie is somebody’s memory and how someone’s memory is not necessarily how it happened.”
One of the most prominent colors in the film is what Turzanska and Schaller have referred to as the “Gladys yellow.” Gladys is Robert’s wife, who isn’t in nearly as many scenes as Robert is, but whose impact is felt in nearly every breath of the film.
“What was so special about this is that Malgosia and I both saw the movie in the same way. We both started from a pretty conceptual place when we were making our original boards. They were pictures of yard worms or something, not necessarily the set or the dress. We had some of the same images of color and chewed-up pieces of bark. We both felt that yellow was Gladys’ color. I can’t really tell you the reason it was yellow, other than the fact that that’s just what it was.”
“She’s in such a small part of the movie, but she’s such a big part of Robert’s world that we felt like we needed her presence throughout the movie. We see it in her costumes, we see it in the flowers of the landscape at the end of the movie when the cabin is overgrown and Robert is going back to the land. The plane at the end, too, is yellow. It’s like he’s back where he belongs when he’s around the yellow.”
After Robert and Gladys become a couple, they daydream of a home that belongs to them. They buy a little plot of land by the river and begin to build a cabin that will house them and their future child. For Robert, this is everything he ever wanted. A home and someone to come home to, so the cabin needed to feel larger than life while also being realistic. The cabin also, unfortunately, needed to burn.
“I think everyone thought I was stark raving mad when I said we could do a practical fire,” laughs Schaller. “I love immersive design, and it felt like the world needed to be immersive. Seeing a practical fire feels different than a visual effects fire. Clint and I love the cabin-burning scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and how visceral that is. We wanted to recreate it and we wanted to recreate that visceral feeling at all different stages of the cabin.”
“It starts out when Gladys and Robert are plotting the outline of the cabin, and then he builds what is the postcard version of the cabin. If you look at the details, it’s not very postcard. It’s actually very rugged. I designed the cabin based on historical drawings that I had of the way real log cabins were built because I wanted it to be authentic in order to transport the actors. It’s in the details that he remembers where it becomes a little magical and there’s a little bit of fluidity.”
“Then the cabin burns down, right? So you’re like, oh my God, how are we going to shoot the rest of it on a small budget once we burn the cabin down? So we shot it out of order. We did the family’s cabin first, then we changed it over to the post-fire cabin, which you don’t see that much of in the movie, but it’s a drastic change in the decoration. Then we overgrew the cabin with all the plants and flowers, and then we burned it.”
“In terms of the passage of time, there’s this feeling that the land is always creeping in, right? The way we’re thinking about trees, how we’re thinking about the landscape… nature is omniscient, ever present in the movie. To show the passage of time, what we have is weeds growing through the floorboards when Robert returns from months away logging. After he rebuilt the cabin, we charred the logs to make it look like he’d rebuilt the cabin with logs that had been burned in the fire. That stuff is all very, very subtle. Hopefully you feel it without it sort of jumping out at you, being like, hello, here’s a burnt cabin.”
“Materials played a really big part in the movie to show how the world was changing. We have our bridge that’s made of logs. Hundreds and thousands of logs from all these forests they’ve decimated. Then, as we enter the ’60s, Robert is on the train and he’s passing a concrete and steel bridge, which makes you wonder, well, what was that all for?”
Many early reviews praise Train Dreams for its ability to capture such naturalistic environments, but Schaller, and everyone who worked on the project, knows that many of these so-called natural environments were made.
“What I think people don’t know is that we were shooting natural light. When I was scouting, I had my phone and I was texting Adolpho going, I found a piece of land that’s this many degrees south, southwest…will this work? And he’d be like, we need to go a little more in this direction. There’s an art to shooting with natural light. I think it makes it very fluid for the director, the DP, and the actors. You have to really plan for that, so we were all working in concert.”
“It’s a hit to my ego, right?” Schaller laughs. “The reviews are like, oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful, they did such a good job. But I’m like, we made it all! That’s what the movie needed, though, you know? That’s a job well done in my book.”
