“That wasn’t so fun”: Joel Edgerton names his most harshly treated movie
If you’re one of the bafflingly large number of people who have not yet seen Train Dreams, perhaps because you don’t like trains, or dreams, or both, then I urge you to remedy that situation immediately, and if you don’t have Netflix, then break into someone’s house who does and just tell them you need their TV for an hour and 43 minutes; they’ll understand.
Because Train Dreams is a genuine masterpiece, a beautiful, immersive, engrossing and complete sensory experience, that’s sad and yet encouraging, reminding you what’s important in life and it also lets you pretend you’re a lumberjack in the deep woods of the United States at the end of the 19th century, and who hasn’t had that fantasy once or twice? It’s going to be a film that people look back on in years to come and marvel at, rather like we do now with films like Paris, Texas or Barry Lyndon.
Also, Edgerton is as good as he has ever been in anything, and that means very good, because he’s been superb in many TV shows and movies over the years. His performance in Train Dreams is something special however; even though I watched him as completely different people in The Gift, and Dark Matter and Obi-Wan Kenobi, I would swear blind that he is actually called Robert Grainier, and he has a big beard and chops down trees in Spokane, Washington State in the late 1800s and he’s still out looking for his wife somewhere. He’s that convincing.
Slowly but surely, over the course of the last 25 years or so, the Australian Edgerton is becoming one of modern film’s greatest actors, racking up award nominations and compiling a list of movies that demand repeated viewings, including the romantic drama Loving, Netflix’s The Stranger, the Timothée Chalamet epic The King and Johnny Depp’s fine Boston mob movie Black Mass from 2015.
That same year, he appeared in a western from the Die My Love director Lynne Ramsay titled Jane Got a Gun, the story of a woman going to her ex-husband for help after her current love is targeted by a bloodthirsty gang.
Co-starring Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor, it was a film that suffered from delays, casting changes, script rewrites, and then, dramatically, Ramsay going AWOL from her own movie, meaning The Accountant director Gavin O’Connor had to step in at the last moment.
Edgerton, who co-wrote the script, recalled the process to Digital Spy, saying, “For a start, the film didn’t come out for two years after everything, and it was plagued by so many problems in between, like day one of the shoot when the director quit, and someone else came on board. It just felt like the movie was buried. I think Harvey [Weinstein] had done something with The Hateful Eight that hadn’t gone as well as he wanted. If Quentin Tarantino can’t make any money, what’s a problematic western going to do? That wasn’t so fun.”
When Jane Got a Gun was eventually released, it performed in line with the fraught production, earning just $3.8million at the box office against a total spend of more than $25m and received decidedly mixed reviews from critics, but Edgerton didn’t let it affect his prospects for long.
Later that year, he wrote, directed, produced and starred in the low-budget thriller The Gift with Jason Bateman, which grossed $60m on a budget of $5m and earned him several award nods, including a Directors’ Guild nomination for best first-time director, plus he has most recently finished filming a thriller called Fangs with Toni Collette, due out late this year.
