Gilbert Cruz: The spirit of the book is it's hard for me. It's hard to grab on to. I think lots of feelings, lots of things that made me feel. But what would you say was the the inherent spirit that you were able to transfer over to the film?

Clint Bentley: Oh, I I think I would kill it if I tried to put it into into like a sentence or two here.

Gilbert Cruz: The life of man. Something something.

Clint Bentley: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

Gilbert Cruz: I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times and it's Oscar season. I love the Oscars. I've loved them my entire life. This year I've already seen eight of the 10 best picture nominees. On our last episode, I had the chance to speak with Guillermo Del Toro about his adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And today we have another Oscar nominee on the show, Clint Bentley. Clint is the director and the co-writer of Train Dreams, which is a film that he adapted from the 2011 Dennis Johnson novella of the same name. Both tell the story of Robert Grineer. Robert is a logger. He's a rail worker. He lives in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. And it's basically his life. He he works. He falls in love. He has a child. He suffers a tragedy. He grieves at tragedy. Like any of us, he experiences things both grand and trivial. And and I was moved greatly by both the book and the film, but in very different ways. And the film for its part is nominated for four Oscars, including the big one, best picture, and best adapted screenplay.

Gilbert Cruz: So when I talked with Clint, we went right to the source. So let's start by talking about the man. Let's talk about Dennis Johnson. When the New York Times pulled 500 authors and other literary figures to figure out what the great books of this century so far on, two of those 100 books were by Dennis Johnson. Tree of Smoke, which is this large, sprawling 700-page book set during the Vietnam War. And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you have Train Dreams, which is this short but extremely powerful book about this man's life, Robert Grineer. When did you first encounter Dennis Johnson?

Clint Bentley: I first encountered his writing actually through Train Dreams the year that it came out. I knew him by name, but I had never read anything. And then Train Dreams came out right around the time or right after I got out of college and I was like I was bumming around and Train Dreams was one of the books to read that year and it was a very like good size to slip in a backpack and so I picked it up somewhere on the road and just fell in love with the book.

Gilbert Cruz: What was it in that book that that connected you to it?

Clint Bentley: I don't know. There was just something about the the story of this little life and how Dennis rendered it in such a way that you felt you felt the epicness and you you felt the vastness of of this small little life and it reminded me of so many of the people that I had grown up with and and been raised by. I was raised in a ranching family in Florida and very working class and Grineer and all the people in this book just reminded me of the of of the people I'd been raised around. The book just like kind of lived inside me and I I would find myself over the years like different scenes would pop up to the surface without really knowing why.

Gilbert Cruz: At that point in your life, you're a young man. You read this book for the first time. Were you a writer?

Clint Bentley: Oh, yeah. I was I was making short films with my friends, but just for fun and didn't think of myself as as somebody who would become a filmmaker. I thought I would be a novelist and and tried very hard to be one and have a couple of like carcasses of novels on my computer that never that never saw the light of day and a ton of rejection letters from that time from from like every literary magazine in the in the country.

Gilbert Cruz: What were you writing about?

Clint Bentley: I was making all the mistakes that that a young writer makes of writing about everything from incredibly like autobiographical things from my childhood or from some random party that happened all the way to some sort of like I I'm embarrassed to say it but like historical fiction. But it was good training in in terms of just like learning how to write. Do you recall any particular moment from the book Train Dreams on that first reading that really stuck with you the entire time?

Clint Bentley: Yeah. One was like the way that he talks about their first date and their first kiss where Grineer ends up proposing to Gladys. That would just always like bubble up in my mind for some reason. There was just such a a beauty to it. There's like a phrase that he used in there of like the nodding of the buttercups that that just was so heartbreaking. And then there's another one that like always stuck with me as as being so strange yet very very emotional. And it was the one that like when I came back around and read it again thinking about like making it into a movie, it's one of the scenes I was like I I have to make this just to put this scene in there. And it was also my co-writer Greg when he read it. He was like, "Oh, you need to do this. This reminds me of you." It's the one where the kid Grineer is a 15-year-old kid comes across this man dying in the woods and gives him a a drink of water from his own boot. Those are the scenes that I don't know just got a hold of me.

Gilbert Cruz: You just mentioned your collaborator Greg Kwedar. Train Dreams is the fourth film that you've worked on. You've co-written all four with him. You've directed two of them. How did you get the opportunity to make this one in particular having read it, you know, 12 years ago, 13 years ago?

Clint Bentley: Yeah, this one came in a way that I didn't think a a film project would come to me. I directed a film called Jockey that Greg and I had written together and Greg produced and that went to Sundance and a few of our producers on the film had had the rights to Train Dreams for several years and had been trying to find a filmmaker to make it and they saw Jockey at Sundance and I think just really saw some like kinship of spirit or or some kind of artistic kinship there and reached out. And at first I was just so excited at the prospect. And then going back and reading the book again, I was like, "Oh, maybe this thing is unadaptable." And I was very nervous about it. I went back and forth on it for a while, knowing that I loved it, but not wanting to do a bad job of it, not wanting to let the book down or Dennis, even though he was passed on at the time. And so it took me a minute to really like jump into it and a lot of friends talking me off ledges along the way.

Gilbert Cruz: What at the time did you think was unadaptable? Like what was giving you pause?

Clint Bentley: Well, it's just I I think going back to the construction of the novella itself, it's only 116 or 117 pages and yet it is this entire life, an entire time in the world. And that is a red flag for a movie because if when you're trying to cover that much time, a movie can start to feel like a Wikipedia entry, just a bunch of like and then this happened and that happened. And then on top of that, the book has this really evocative style to it where it's it's very stream of consciousness and it just like slips all over the place, you know, and in one sentence he's a child and then the next scene he's dying and then it comes back and he's seeing Elvis on a train and and it all works so well. But I felt if if there were a situation where we needed to pin that down to more of a traditional three-act structure with an inciting incident and blah blah blah, you kill the magic of the book. And I really didn't want to do that.

Gilbert Cruz: So you get over your concerns, your trepidation, you decide to adapt this book. Walk me through

Clint Bentley: I just ignore them. Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Hey, I do it all the time. Walk me through how you start. Are you rereading and rereading? Luckily, this is a fairly short book. Are you ripping out pages, underlining scenes? Like, how do you start to sort of break this story, for lack of a a better phrase, into one that you can translate to screen?

Clint Bentley: Yeah, I I found pretty quickly that I I did have like a sense of this what the structure could be. And that being basically what it turned into, which is like the first half of the film, kind of watching him go back and forth between trying to reconcile being away for work and coming back home and and trying to spend time with the family. And then the fire would come in the middle of the film and just break the narrative in half. And then the last part of the film would be more of a of a of a film of searching or or longing and trying to find his way back to to something that he lost and and wondering if he could ever do that. And so that that framework gave us enough confidence to go into it. And then yeah, Greg and I each on our own just read the book multiple times, underlined, you know, anything that felt important. We we always start with like a a shared document that we write in that we're just throwing like any ideas, anything like that. There's like a grab bag at the bottom that's just like random lines of dialogue that don't have a home or images or or anything like that. simultaneously. There's a lot of research that we're both doing individually and together. Like reading anything I can get my hands on. The image of the the boots nailed to the tree actually is is one that came from just reading some random history of logging book and learning that that was something that they had done for the guys who would ride the logs down the rivers and would break apart log jams and when one of them died, wherever they found his body, they would nail his boots to a tree there.

Gilbert Cruz: It's a striking image. very very striking and and became something a bit larger than than the image itself, which is what you hope for. But yeah, there's a lot of research that we're doing. And then we're just like in that document, we're starting with just like writing a sentence for every scene and that we that we know is going to be in the film. And sometimes that's as simple as just like Grineer comes home and it's awkward, you know, or the fire happens, you know, and then we build out each of those sentences into a paragraph. and each paragraph is about a scene. Then we start taking passes at scenes and then passing those scenes back and forth to just try and refine them along the way until we until we have a what we always hope is a better first draft than it is, but a terrible first draft. And then and then you can start refining a script from there.

Gilbert Cruz: So, this is your first fiction adaptation and and as someone who's done it now and has seen, I presume, a lot of movies based on books, do you have, for lack of a a less fancy word, like a philosophy when it comes to adaptation, what's allowed, what's not allowed, fidelity versus lack of fidelity.

Clint Bentley: I do, and it's it's funny. It's it is one that I went into the process with. And so whether it was confirmed or or whether I just didn't look at any other evidence, I don't know. But I felt like whenever a book is adapted into film, the film really has to become its own thing and the filmmaker slash screenwriter has to allow themselves to be free of the source material in terms of what happens while being completely true to the spirit of that book. There there are exceptions to that like No Country for Old Men is an adaptation that like that book kind of already feels like a movie and was written as a screenplay or stage play before that. But that was the thing I I I felt very strongly and I still do with this one that like we had to be completely true to the spirit of the book and the spirit of the character. and you you can't all of a sudden make Grineer this like striving guy who wants to like create a a railroad empire or something like that, then you're then you're what's the point of making this book? But at the same time, you have to free yourself from the book itself in order to let the film become its own piece of work.

Gilbert Cruz: So, you talked about a couple of scenes that stuck with you when you first read it. What else did you want to spirit it aside? What else did you want to sort of transfer over in terms of tone, character moments, in terms of images? Because it's always fascinating to me to read a book, watch a movie, whatever order it's in to sort of say, "Oh, this yeah, I remember this from the book, but it feels different or it looks different, but it's still there." What What were you most excited about taking from one form and and moving over?

Clint Bentley: I the the biggest thing was more a feeling like the strangeness the inherent strangeness of the world that I think we living in like modern society in this city or in the suburbs or wherever life feels very safe and feels very predictable and you get outside of that and and you're reminded very quickly that it is not the case. That was one thing I wanted to get across is like how strange and wonderful and kind of magical the world itself is without embellishing anything. And that's not always in like a sweet cute way. Sometimes that's in a a very dangerous and and dark way.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm.

Clint Bentley: And then the other thing is like this aspect of time and just the way that you can have a year that just drags by and you're like this is never going to end. And then sometimes you look up and and you're like, where did the last 5 years go? We very rarely have an understanding of our lives in the moment we're actually living them. We only start to understand them when it's too late. And yeah, so there there's a lot of that. And I felt like there was something very special about Robert Grineer in terms of taking this person who's just an average everyday person who is just trying to lead a decent life and trying to make some money for his family and and build a little life for himself and his family that I feel like is very special and is very like epic without needing to be turned into something that it's not.

Gilbert Cruz: After the break, Clint talks about a few characters that he added to the film and the scenes from the book that he had to cut.

Gilbert Cruz: Some people think you you sort of referenced this before, but like a short story, a novella maybe is more optimal for adaptation because right you just have less to adapt. But of course here you're telling the story of a person. So often it's about what are we cutting out of the story in order to fit into a film. But you added a couple characters or a couple moments, a couple scenes into this. You added Apostle Frank, the very talkative logger played by Paul Schneider. You added the the Forest Service employee played by Carrie Condan. Paying respects still to the novella and Dennis Johnson. How do you make the decision to layer your own storytelling on top of that? I'm putting new characters and then what were you trying to say through those characters?

Clint Bentley: Yeah, I with with Apostle Frank, I felt like he there were several sections of the book that we needed to build out that Dennis had written something about some section of time but then does only writes three sentences about it, you know, and with Apostle Frank in particular just about building out the characters of that world to show us why Grineer is so connected to these people and and to this to this world that he's living And and I've worked on a lot of crews like in construction and on farms where there's always somebody who talks more than he works and you're just like please just shut up man.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, you have him and you have the the character played by William H. Macy. He's Arn who is a little bit older so maybe it's a more understandable that he's not working as much but he's just he's just blabbing blabbing blabbing that he does his one job blowing stuff up.

Clint Bentley: Exactly. Exactly. He had a he had a particular set of skills. That character is larger than life on the page armed peoples and I'd say like half of the stuff that he says in the film is just from the book just lifted directly from the book and then we were really just trying to expand on that to fill out that character without ever pushing him in a direction that that's felt unnatural to him. And then Carrie Condan's character, that was one that like it took us a while to get there. Claire Thompson is a character in the novella, but she's a widow that he's transporting, and there's not much that's said between them, but it's a really important moment in Grineer's life that culminates in her telling him in the book that the the Lord needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. that gives him some measure of like understanding of his life a bit even though he has the question back of like is that what I am a hermit? even though we've watched him for like 70 pages be a hermit.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, you don't always understand yourself. One doesn't always understand their own life.

Clint Bentley: 100%. And so there was like there was this amalgamation of things we were trying to do and fit in. One was like keep that character intact but expand her a bit. And then the other part that is a bit thematic and a bit historical, which is just like we really wanted to show these fire towers that had popped up across the Pacific Northwest. There were a ton of really terrible fires and some around like 1921 and some like 10 years earlier that had gone through and just decimated the area. And so then we have the Forest Service that gets created and all these fire watchtowers get put all over the area up there and a lot of them were operated and run by women. And so that was just something texturally that we wanted to put in that also spoke thematically to the fact that if these fire towers had been put up, you know, a decade earlier, his family might still be alive.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah. And then and then that character became a vehicle to talk about a lot of like some thematic things that I felt that I wanted to talk about in terms of you know kind of the like the tragedy of life moving on without you and ecology and our place in the world and our place in time and all of that ultimately building up to that line that's so powerful in the book itself of the world needing a a hermit in the woods as much as the preacher in pulpit.

Gilbert Cruz: I I want to ask you about another line that occurs when he's talking to the the Carrie Condan character. She says, "Were you here for the fire?" He says, "I wasn't. My wife and child were. They didn't make it." And then he describes possibly for the first time, at least in the film. It's a brief glimmer, but he describes what he's feeling. as a viewer, you have to largely up until that point just discern what he is feeling without relying on the character's dialogue. But he says, "Sometimes it feels like the sadness will eat me alive and sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else." I am lucky enough where I have not had to experience that sort of grief. I know it's coming. You know, my parents are still around and all that stuff. But how do you I was just re-watching again that scene this morning and I almost started I almost started crying. It really is affecting. How do you transfer emotion from a page to the screen? Because I think you probably watched that scene 20 times and still feel that emotion.

Clint Bentley: I mean that came from a very real place that line. I unfortunately have dealt with that loss that you're speaking of and and lost both my folks in in a very quick succession and and there was some tragedy to to it as time went on that you you do move on from something you don't feel like you can and and sometimes it feels very distant and sometimes you wake up and it feels like they just passed on yesterday.

Clint Bentley: I mean, there's a bit of a cheat code with being a filmmaker that if you get a great actor, they can they do the heavy lifting for you in terms of imbuing something like that that could be a bit flat. You know, that that that line could go a lot of different ways and it could be a bit straightforward, but I think that in particular is just the magic of what Joel does as an actor is just a testament to his subtlety and nuance as an actor.

Gilbert Cruz: Is that a scene? Is that a moment that you to your recollection you had to do a couple times? I know you're filming it outside, so you're trying to make sure you do it while the while the light is good. But what was your recollection of filming that that moment?

Clint Bentley: That was a really beautiful scene, I think. But that scene we started filming and we did a couple takes and and the sun was too high and it was just too harsh on them and they were both kind of squinting at each other. And so we all, Adelo, my cinematographer and I, and and Joel and Carrie, we all kind of decided like, let's take a break. Like, let's give it an hour, let the sun get softer. And so we just stepped away and like took a moment, had some tea, and then when we got back into it, it all that scene came together very quickly. And that scene is kind of how our editor, Parker Larie, first cut it together on the assembly cut. It's largely intact. Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: And do you feel as a a director, is it part of your job to be to be vulnerable with your actors as well? Like are you when you're talking to Joel, are you referencing your own experiences with grief and stuff like that? Are you sort of trying to convey what's inside of you as a director and the writer to him through that personal connection? Like you're taking him off to the side and telling him stuff.

Clint Bentley: As much as it's helpful, you know, we do we specifically with Joel and I, we did a lot of that before we ever got on set. And a lot of our prep would just be like these long phone conversations in the middle of the night. Talking about being a parent and losing family and and all the everything in between, you know. I think like it's such a strange thing where you have to as a director I I I want to be as open with them as possible at all times without making it about me. You know what I mean? So it's so it's about so that they can ground themselves in their character and what that character is going through emotionally versus thinking about like what was Clint thinking at the like when he when he buried his mother. And so there's a lot of that that just like it's kind of the tragedy of it where as a director I've found like I'm not as emotionally wrapped up in the scenes as they're unfolding and being as emotionally affected by them because I'm having to pay attention to so many technical elements in order to give everybody notes between takes so that we're actually using our time.

Gilbert Cruz: That's incredible that sort of you have to sort of bifurcate yourself in a way.

Clint Bentley: Yeah. And then you wrap and everybody starts breaking down the cameras and then and then you cry in a corner. Because it all hits you all of a sudden.

Gilbert Cruz: I want to ask you about Will Patton.

Clint Bentley: Oh yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: The audio book for Train Dreams came out, you know, 15 or so years ago. Will Patton narrated that. He is the narrator of your film. I'm sure you know narration can be pretty dicey in films. You can go.

Gilbert Cruz: You can have Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. You can have Harrison Ford in Blade Runner where they're like, "This is so bad. We're actually going to make a new cut of this movie in which there's no narration." What would you say are the pitfalls when it comes to film narration? And how did you make sure to try to avoid that?

Clint Bentley: Yeah, I mean, you never want to do the thing where like somebody walks through a door and then the narrator says, "And then he walked through a door." That's what you want to avoid. And it's funny. Blade Runner from what I've read, Harrison Ford did not want to do that.

Gilbert Cruz: Well, I see why.

Clint Bentley: Yeah. Yeah. Like, and so that's part of his performance is just like, I got to get through this. But I love the idea of a narrator like a narrator as a storyteller and and in this particular sense a narrator like if you had found yourself in some like little bar in a logging town and you were there late at night and this guy comes up to you who's had too many beers and is like hey let me tell you about this guy Robert Grineer and and somebody really like tells you a story.

Clint Bentley: And I always love the narrators from like Jules and Jim and Y Tu Mamá También who who kind of take take aides and tell you things that don't have anything to do with the plot but have everything to do with the story. And then the other side of it was just like one of the integral pieces of why that book works so well is Dennis Johnson's voice, his his narrative voice. And so I really felt strongly that that was something that we had to pull into the to the movie itself.

Gilbert Cruz: Your movie has been very well received. The only criticisms I've seen have to do with a change in tone, which is like smoothing a couple things out, making Grineer a little less, slightly less unlikable. There's the character that you talk about first time you read, the guy played by Clifton Collins in the film, in the book, not a nice guy, as you come to learn, you know, he's sort of sexually abused a family member. Do you see that those things are something that you changed on purpose because you wanted to achieve a kind of different feel in your movie? Those those the idea that Robert Grineer is someone who maybe was a little too enthusiastic about throwing his Chinese colleague off a rail bridge and the idea that the Clifton Collins character is someone who is not just suffering in the woods but also is a bad person.

Clint Bentley: Oh yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: What what were you like I don't think I need this. I mean, there's it's funny with Clifton's character, there's a whole 10 minute or eight minute version of that scene.

Clint Bentley: Really.

Clint Bentley: We filmed the whole thing and it just like it's like 90 seconds. It's very it's if that Yeah. Yeah. It's very short, which I felt terrible about because again, there's something about that that scene. And what I think Dennis did in his writing in general was to try and look at some people who had done incredibly depraved things and things that are in no world okay and try and find some little glimmer of humanity in them and try and find what's what's human about them so that we all maybe look at each other that way. Right. I that that's my take as as a reader of his of his work. And I think that scene with Clifton is an example of that from my perspective. But the thing is like it just didn't work in the movie. Like nowhere we put it even just structurally like there was nowhere we put it where it where it worked without feeling like it was suddenly coming from a different movie.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Clint Bentley: And so yet it was an image and and something that was like so potent that I felt like we couldn't lose it. And so just what remains is him giving this guy a drink of water from his boot. And then you know the narration says that he didn't like to think about that moment from his life to you know it's not going to mean anything to anybody who hasn't read the book but hopefully to pay homage to to that.

Clint Bentley: The other thing with like I mean Grineer in the movie does help he helps for a moment. He gets swept up in this violence of helping carry this guy up towards the bridge. Yeah. Grab grabs his legs. Grabs his legs to help take him up. Gets kicked off. that scene is not as built out as it is in the book. Partly just because of again a different medium and I've read the criticism. I don't really have any any response to it other than like there's things I think that like again I might my my viewpoints on this might evolve as I evolve as an artist. But I think there are things that can work and that you can do in literature. There there's a bit of sometimes a a distance you can have from something very tough that you can't have that emotional distance from it in film in the same way in in cinema. The fire is a good example of that. The fire and and the vision of Gladys and and how she dies and and the kid like how they get swept up in the fire. That's a very in early edits that was a much longer sequence but it was a cal it had to be a calibration of like okay how much how much are we putting people through and what are we giving them in return.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah I mean that part is pretty sad without those images already. Uh I have one more question. You have called the ending of Dennis Johnson's novella one of the great endings in literature.

Clint Bentley: It's not hyperbole. I I do mean that. I I sort of want to read the ending and then ask you why you think it's great, but it's quite long.

Gilbert Cruz: Do you disagree that it's that it's great?

Clint Bentley: I listened to the audiobook version and it was coming to the end. It's Will Patton and it my heart stopped when when the book stopped. I I thought it was incredible. You know what? I am going to read it.

Gilbert Cruz: You should read it and then you can cut it out if you want. I'll listen to it.

Clint Bentley: And then you're going to tell me why you why it's so great. So bear with me. This is the ending of Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams. The main character, Robert Grineer, is in a theater watching a performance on stage by by someone that is referred to as a a wolf boy. But they hushed all at once and quite abruptly when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders and went rigid and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine that far back and open his throat and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions low and terrifying rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor. And it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it. taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful. The originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the fog horn and the ship's horn, the locomotives lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan music of bag pipes. And suddenly it all went black and that time was gone forever. He was pretty good. He was okay. He knew what he was doing.

Gilbert Cruz: Why is that so great?

Clint Bentley: I mean, as soon as you like I I came to that and I was like, that's the end of the movie. That's perfect. That's going to be fantastic to what what an ending. And then we shot that and then two things happened. One, you realize very quickly, at least for where for my abilities now as a filmmaker, I could not translate the magic of that. How do you do the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made? Right? What does that sound like? And we tried some versions in sound design to make something like that and couldn't do it. And then simultaneously like we had a very early version of the plane sequence. It's in the book as well and that was going to lead up to this ending. And we were watching the film down and it was just so clear that after that plane sequence, the film was over. Like that's it. And and then the rest of it just kind of trailing off. And as an artist or a filmmaker, you either listen to that or you don't at your own peril.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Clint Bentley: And so I listen to it and we started restructuring the ending around the the biplane sequence and and letting that be the the the natural ending of the film. I mean, it's a very moving ending. You have this movie that is so earthbound for so long and then in its final moments almost as if he's ascending to heaven, the final moments of his life. It's you go up into the air and then and then it's over. It was great.

Gilbert Cruz: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Gilbert Cruz: Coming up, Clint has a few recommendations about what you should read next.

Gilbert Cruz: So Clint, for more than a decade, every week, the New York Times Book Review has asked authors a recurring set of questions about their reading and their reading lives. It's it's part of a series that we call Buy the Book. So, Clint Bentley, I have some extremely specific book questions for you. First, what is your favorite book that no one else has heard of?

Clint Bentley: There was there's one that I have recommended to so many people and and I just found I I just recommended to someone like three days ago and it it was one that no one had ever heard of, but I found somebody who's read it. It's called The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It's by Michael Ondaatje. It's it's so much more than what it sounds like. It's this very strange book that is a collection of short stories, photographs, poetry. It's just like it's hard to categorize what exactly it is. It's a very magical book where you like you don't know what you're going to encounter as you flip each page.

Gilbert Cruz: I've never heard of this.

Clint Bentley: It's fantastic. He's got another one that he did a similar thing with that I' I've got like coming from the library so I can so I can read it. But

Gilbert Cruz: I I love that you're a library guy.

Clint Bentley: Always.

Gilbert Cruz: Are there any classic novels that you only just recently read for the first time?

Clint Bentley: Well, yeah. Yeah, that is an ongoing thing. I feel like I'm I'm forever catching up. One that I've got here that I just picked up that I I sadly have never read To the Lighthouse.

Gilbert Cruz: Oh wow. I've I've read like I've read Virginia Woolf's Pros, but I've never read a full book by her and so um and so I just picked out.

Clint Bentley: You have a copy there?

Clint Bentley: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And are there any that you avoid? Just are not to your liking?

Clint Bentley: There are no genres that I avoid. There are ones that I read less like I don't read that much sci-fi, but not out of not liking it, just just out of like I don't know that I'm as drawn to it. But the books that I love the most and the things that I'm drawn to the most are books that like aren't of a specific genre and break and and break apart the conventions of whatever genre they're working in like that on Ondaatje book or I've just gotten into John Berger recently and and started reading some of his no some of his fiction which is lovely.

Gilbert Cruz: Is there a specific title that you would recommend?

Clint Bentley: I would and it's a bit out of order. He did this trilogy that I just like stumbled upon. The second one is the one that I started with and that I read called Once in Europa, but it's a collection of it's like a short story cycle. And I think for fans of Train Dreams might be fans of that as well because there's very similar themes about life kind of moving on and leaving people behind and some wonderful things coming from from modernization and and some really tragic things coming from it.

Gilbert Cruz: You're a filmmaker who obviously loves books and loves reading. Is there a book about film making that you would recommend that people read?

Clint Bentley: Oh, yes. I'll give you a couple depending on your flavor. I find there there's there's been a few that have been written by or about filmmakers that are really I think special. Andrei Tarkovsky has one, Andrei Tarkovsky has one called Sculpting in Time that is a really phenomenal book and he he was at the end of his life towards the end of his life when he wrote it and it's very much like not only him reflecting on his life but him reflecting on the form and so it's got both him speaking biographically about how he became who he is as an artist while also talking about what he feels like is special about the form and and unique about the form. There's another one about David Lean. It's just called David Lean, a biography. And it just it's like that thick, but it goes film by film.

Gilbert Cruz: Of course, a biography of David Lean is going to be epic.

Clint Bentley: And it's really got to be it's really good and I think really like gives a glimpse not only of that artist, but also of like film developing over the like like film as a medium developing over the 20th century. And last one I'll say is not film related, but I love it and I recommend it to everybody. It's called Coltrane on Coltrane and it's a collection of interviews with with John Coltrane that I I have learned so much as an artist and and and about life. Like it's such a it's such a special book.

Gilbert Cruz: I think that's it. I I think I ran out of questions.

Clint Bentley: I feel like we could talk for another hour.

Gilbert Cruz: So do I. Clint, thank you so much for joining the Book Review Podcast. This has been a real delight.

Clint Bentley: It's been a joy. Thank you for having me.