Breaking Baz: Brazilian Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso On The Visual Poetry He Created For Awards Season Contender ‘Train Dreams’ 

EXCLUSIVE: Adolpho Veloso, the acclaimed Brazilian cinematographer who shot Trains Dreams, Clint Bentley’s beautifully realized adaptation of Denis Johnson’s elegiac novella starring Joel Edgerton, says that the picture’s Pacific Northwest locations reminds him of his homeland. 

It was where he filmed Leandro Lara’s Rodantes in the southwestern Amazonian region of Rondônia, a belt of rapidly disappearing forest, an area of his country that came to forefront of his mind when he was scouting locations in Washington State for Train Dreams, which premiered at Sundance in January and launched globally on Netflix last month. “There’s something about those big trees and ancient forests that just have an energy that is completely different,” he says, cherishing the thought.

“Whenever you enter those places, you can feel the energy changing. Even the air is different. You breathe it in another way, and so I feel like there’s something that [Rodantes and Train Dreams] have in common.”

It was Veloso’s cinematography for Hector Dhalia’s documentary On Yoga, the Architecture of Peace that Bentley had seen before booking him five years ago to shoot Jockey, the breakthrough movie Bentley wrote with longtime collaborator Greg Kwedar.

Since then Veloso feels that the truly independent filmmaking spirit he experienced working with Bentley created a friendship that has developed into a “relationship as human beings,” adding: “We share a lot of common taste and have had so many deeper conversations about life… Well, I’d be happy to shoot whatever he would throw my way.”

When Veloso read the first draft of Train Dreams, which is quietly building into an awards season contender, he felt an immediate connection between aspects of the story’s key character, Robert Grainier, played by Edgerton, an itinerant lumberman who cut a swathe across the Pacific Northwest felling timber for railroads at the turn of the 20th century. Just like Granier, Veloso also works months away from home “with a bunch of people” he’d never met before.

“When Grainier goes back home, it’s really hard to go back home,” explains Veloso. “You don’t know if you belong to that place. That is basically my life – going for several months away to film a movie, usually in a different place, even a different country – so I was happy that the movie also had those connections and had grief, which is something I feel like unfortunately everybody goes through.”

There’s also a darker element to the film involving the heinous treatment of an immigrant. Veloso abhors what happens in those scenes, but he sees himself through the eyes of an immigrant always on the move.

Veloso now resides in Portugal. “I’m an immigrant here,” he proclaims. “I work mostly in the United States, so I’m an immigrant there, and it is always like I’m the immigrant. Sometimes the fact that you are an immigrant is not necessarily easy,” he says, alluding to a tragic incident involving an immigrant laborer in the film.

Understanding those connections to the material, he believes, made it easier to know “where to put the camera and know which lens to choose; how to light it when you know what the characters are feeling.”

Emotional force

There’s an emotional force that comes through in Veloso’s images – and Bentley and Kweder’s screenplay – that offers, among other things, a sense of home. “Well, it’s good to hear that it translates,” Veloso says, his face beaming. 

Veloso notes that he’s not from a photography background, and the reasons he became a cinematographer is simply that he loved movies and wanted to be a filmmaker. “Then when I went to film school I realized, ‘Okay, cinematographer, it is,’ but it comes from loving movies and loving stories.”

That’s why he finds it “really hard to know what to do” if he’s not connected to the story and its characters. His initial thoughts upon reading a draft screenplay aren’t about how he is going to shoot, but whether he can connect and “see if it really translates into my brain somehow in a way that I can connect and assimilate.“ After that he feels it’s so much easier to make all other decisions.

The best cinematography for me, at any rate, equates, as it does with Train Dreams, to visual poetry, essentially. We may, if we so desire, place our fingers in our ears as we watch. but still be aware of what’s going on because we’re able to experience the story visually, which harks back to the beginning of cinema, obviously. “That was my goal with this movie,” Veleso says, nodding along to my sentiment.

“Even though the movie has a lot of narration, for example, which was even more present in the script and reduced in the edit. My goal was to think, ‘You know what? We have this narration, and Clint and Parker [Laramie], the editor, are going to rely on that later, but my goal here is to pretend there’s no narration and I can try to express everything with the images if I can.’ That’s what I’m always trying to do. If there is a feeling that I can convey with what I’m doing with the camera, with the light, with a subtle movement, I try to do it.”

Veloso notes that in Brazil and in Latin America in general, it’s not common to have a camera operator because usually it’s the job of the cinematographer to do it. Shaking his head, he protests: ”I wouldn’t imagine myself just sitting on a chair and watching on the monitor and hoping everything goes the way I was hoping.”

He remembers being aged around twelve or 13 when he watched Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange for the first time. “That blew my mind, and that sparked the interest to watch all the movies. I went to all the classics through to all the Kubrick movies,” he says.

“Another movie that really made a difference was City of God, because then I understood it’s possible to do it here [in Brazil] as well. It is not just that guy in the UK making A Clockwork Orange that is going to be impressive. There is this guy right here, right next to where I live, doing amazing cinema. City of God was the movie that was like, ‘Oh my god, I can do it too if I try.’”

Consequently, Veloso’s an admirer of the images César Charlone shot for City of God, Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 pic. “I just think he was so bold that I loved it,” he says.

There are other behind-the-camera visionaries on his list that include “a few of the obvious” names such as Roger Deakins (Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, 1917) and Sven Nykvist (Cries & Whispers, Persona, Sleepless in Seattle), and he extols the visual imagination of director Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker, The Sacrifice).

However, he feels that the “one guy” who has always been an inspirational reference for him is Gordon Willis, the master of light, who shot Francis Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and nine Woody Allen pictures from Annie Hall through The Purple Rose of Cairo, as well as Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. As I write these memorable titles, a random thought goes through my head: Which of the 2025 crop of movies will be remembered as fondly in years to come? A handful, if that, at best.

Velseo says that Willis – who himself admitted he went sometimes went too far with his darkness, – “was so bold all the time to do whatever he believed and not necessarily be afraid of studios, of whatever people would tell him not to do.

“From his movies from The Godfather, his movies with Woody Allen and everything else he did, I feel like [Willis’s cinematography] is such an important part of the story. The Godfather is as good as it is because of his work, in my opinion.”

Surreal on set

For me, Train Dreams is one of those pictures that I will return too because in its way it tells me much about how America was shaped, and hints, towards, not always in a good way, what kind of a country it has become.

Veleso chuckles and says that it’s hard for him to watch the film and not be full of criticism about his work in it, but he’s happy that others are relating to it in disparate ways. “That’s the reason I fell in love with filmmaking because of those movies that I can watch again and again and again,” he says. “It’s amazing to hear that maybe we made one of those.”

Even nowadays, filmmaking can be “surreal,” says Veloso, recalling his time on set with Felicity Jones, William H. Macy and Edgerton, who has been Golden Globe nominated for his role. “It was just unbelievable to be on the same set as Will Macy, [and I was] thinking, ‘Okay, Fargo is one of the movies that I love and suddenly I’m here on the same set with him.’” 

Veloso shoots movies in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere but feels it’s important for him to return to Brazil when he can “to see people that look like you, that talk like you, doing the things you want to do so you feel like you can do it also.”

With the need for different landscapes, Train Dreams was mainly in Spokane and then further afield, including in Seattle, and then further towards the Canadian border. “We needed ancient forests that seemed untouched as they would have been back in Robert’s early years, and we needed so many different landscapes that we just had to drive all over the state to find everything we needed,” he says. “Those forests are so beautiful that my job was kind of easy.”

Veloso worked with a full team with four in the camera department, with teams of three in grips and sparks. More people would be drafted in depending on the scene and what was necessary. “It wasn’t inflated at all because of the size of the movie and because we didn’t have a lot of money to spare, so to say,” he says. “We tried to be smart also with crew and equipment.”

Looking at Veleso’s forest imagery reminds one of how cinematographer John Toll captured tension by shooting coiled tree roots in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Veloso’s own work in Train Dreams skilfully uses the terrain to symbolize the melancholy of Grainier’s life.

“Those trees,” he observes, “especially the really, really old ones, they’re huge. There is something that makes you also understand how small we are, and it’s super sad at the same time because then you realize all those trees are gone now. I think you need someone like Terrence Malik to put it into words, because words are not really my strongest side,” he says laughing. “That’s probably the reason I’m behind the camera and trying to translate into images.”

Veleso praises the Train Dreams filmmakers and casting directors for assembling a company of actors “that made sense,” he says, referring to the ensemble that includes Edgerton, Jones, Macy, Kerry Condon, Clifton Collins, Alfred Hsing, Paul Schneider and Rick Rivera.

“If you don’t have a guy that looks like a logger that you believe that can do the job, then the whole thing is already hard to sell, so kudos to Clint for who he chose and kudos to actors for making us believe that,” he says.

The stellar thesps made it easier for Veloso to be reactive. “It’s a really thin line between trying to make everything look really well composed and to tell a story with what you’re composing, but without any artificiality to it,” he says. “That’s why it’s important to let them be and not give a lot of constraints to actors, because then they can actually belong to that place, especially with the work that Alex [Alexandra Schaller, the production designer] did, which is to build a real cabin on location where everything was practical. If they wanted to suddenly cook something, that stove would work.”

Bringing what you believe

I’m curious as to whether his choice to shoot footage himself is dependent on the size of the production? He argues that it’s important to bring whatever you believe in to any production.

“I’ve been in bigger movies, and obviously movies are different and production sizes are different, but I don’t think that necessarily because you have a bigger production that you need 2,000 cameras,” he says. “You can tell the same story and with the same movie size, the same way with one camera or with multiple cameras, it is just a choice. There’s no right or wrong.”

During the shoot, Veloso says that it was always his goal to have the best relationship with the cast “for the movie so they they allow me into their space,” noting that  Edgerton was such a champion of the movie. “He would be the first one to be there and the last one to leave. We got along super well doing Train Dreams,” says Veloso.

When Edgerton got the gig to shoot the commercial Glenmorangie: Once Upon a time in Scotland with the one and only Harrison Ford, Edgerton rang Veloso to ask if he wanted to “spend a few more crazy days together.“ Grinning, Veloso says: “I wouldn’t ever say no to those two geniuses together.”

As with Macy, Veloso says he found it surreal to be on the same set as Ford. He found it a “great experience,” but a “very intense,” one with just three days to shoot 12 scripts each running around two minutes.

“The only reason we did it was because of Harrison Ford. He’s so into it all the time, and he’s always ready. Whenever we needed five minutes for the next thing, he would be like, ‘No, I’m ready. Let’s do it. I can change here, let’s go for it.’  It was an amazing experience.”

Did he sample a wee dram of the local brew? “Yes, of course,” he says with a guffaw. “And it’s really good, by the way. I recommend.” 

Veloso also plans to work with director Justin Chadwick after having collaborated on Starz drama Becoming Elizabeth. They’re having conversations about Chadwick’s The Species, which is set to star Anthony Hopkins as Charles Darwin. The cinematographer cautions that it’s still “early days.”

Recently, Veloso shot M. Knight Shyamalan’s Remain, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor. He reckons he may be called back soon for some re-shoots. And prior to Train Dreams he shot Queen at Sea, starring Juliet Binoche for director Lance Hammer (and producer Tristan Goligher. It’s due for release early next year.

Before that, make sure you see Train Dreams.