‘Train Dreams’ Co-Writers Weren’t Going to Watch Their Oscar Nominations for ‘Sing Sing,’ Then Decided: ‘Don’t Be an Idiot’
“Sing Sing” co-writers Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley almost ignored the 2025 Oscar nominations — and it’s a good thing they didn’t.
The duo, along with John “Divine G” Whitfield and Clarence Maclin, are nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. The feature also received nods in the Best Original Song and Best Actor categories, with Colman Domingo landing his second consecutive Oscar nomination.
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Kwedar and Bentley dropped by the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox, to discuss their latest feature, “Train Dreams.” But first, IndieWire film editor Ryan Lattanzio wanted to know how it felt to be newly minted Oscar nominees.
“I didn’t want to watch it,” Bentley said of the nominations, which were announced in a livestream by Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott. “I was packing to come here [to Sundance], actually, and I was in the closet packing a suitcase, and then my wife turned it on the TV and she’s like, ‘Just don’t be an idiot. Just watch it.’ And it was my wife and my son and I, and we watched it and I don’t know, we had no expectations, and so it all just felt like Christmas morning coming through. It’s amazing. It’s crazy.”
Kwedar agreed, saying that he couldn’t believe he was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter now.
“I just started weeping kind of uncontrollably in the airport, just thinking about the eight-and-a-half year journey we’ve had with that movie [‘Sing Sing’] and all the people that we traveled with and just trying to get to a place of gratitude before knowing some result that we had been also working towards,” Kwedar said.
He later quipped, “I’m also always crying in airports and making people uncomfortable, but then I was on a plane when it happened, I didn’t have the internet on, and I was just sitting next to some guy in medical sales who was just telling me about his job, and I didn’t say anything about how momentous a morning it was that was unfolding. When we were landing, I turned on my phone. I was like, well, I think I’m going to find out if I’m an Oscar nominee. He’s like, wait, what? And I had 150 text messages as I turned my phone on, and honestly, it took a while to even figure out what happened or what we were nominated for.”
However, there was one glaring omission in the nominations for “Sing Sing,” as IndieWire’s Lattanzio pointed out: Clarence Maclin, who is nominated alongside Kwedar and Bentley for Best Adapted Screenplay, was snubbed for Best Supporting Actor. Maclin won that title at the Gotham Awards, and has been recognized by other ceremonies for his acting debut.
“He’s got the best perspective of it all,” Kwedar said of his co-writer Maclin. “I mean, once we were even at Toronto in 2023, he was like, ‘Y’all, we did it. And everything after that happens is just part of the joy and the ride.'”
Kwedar continued, “But I mean, if you think about it, like Gotham Award-winning actor, independent Spirit Award nominee to be nominated, and now he’s also an Oscar nominee because of the screenplay. And so he did get some beautiful recognition that I actually just hope enables him to make a career out of this. I just want to keep seeing what he creates and does as a performer.”
Ahead of the Oscars, Kwedar and Bentley are promoting their new feature “Train Dreams,” which made its world premiere at Sundance. “Train Dreams” centers on a day laborer, played by Joel Edgerton, who is building America’s railroads at the start of the 20th century. The film is a Denis Johnson adaptation; Kwedar and Bentley previously brought the original film “Jockey” to the screen.
Actor Edgerton said during the IndieWire Studio at Sundance that the “Train Dreams” script almost “felt almost too good to be true.”
“These guys had done such a wonderful job of turning quite a challenging transition from the novella to a screenplay, given that the story spans such a massive breadth of time in one man’s life,” Edgerton said of the story and source material. “So I was very eager from the moment that I was contacted about it, and everything that happened afterwards just felt like the right step forward.”
Edgerton teased that “Train Dreams” was an unprecedented experience on set for him.
“I love movies that allow you to learn new things and get physical, and I feel good being on set in nature,” he said. “I was really drawn to this for those other reasons as well. And there’s certain skills and you want to make sure that you’re doing things just so, and along the way, we have to really take care because we were talking about logging, and we obviously don’t want to just go in cavalier and start presuming we could chop down a bunch of trees. So there was a real artfulness actually in the consideration of how [writer/director] Clint captured these things. And yet we were doing it in ways that we were done with certain tricks and certain builds, and I mean taking care of the nature while also talking about an industry that wasn’t quite aware of taking care of that nature.”
Edgerton also spoke about the awards love for “The Brutalist,” which he was originally set to star in. Adrien Brody instead leads the Oscar-nominated film alongside Edgerton’s “Train Dreams” co-star Felicity Jones.
“I’m not tender about it,” Edgerton said of missing out on “The Brutalist” role. “Actually, I’m happy for a number of reasons. There’s a long story as to why I’m not a part of that film, and they’re the right reasons. And it also means that I could sit back and appreciate what [writer/director] Brady [Corbet] had achieved, what they’d all achieved. I think it’s an extraordinary film, and I know a lot of filmmakers will look at that film and go get excited for the reasons of the budget he made it for in the number of days, which general audiences won’t, but it’s a double feat considering all that extra stuff. I was very impressed when I saw it.”
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