With Bentley shooting in real-life locations, the idea was to simulate the audience looking through memories and putting a life together where those the images were being shown. In this case, those memories belong to Joel Edgerton’s character, Robert.
For research, Veloso looked through a lot of old pictures from the era and even as far back as 1920. As he was going through them, it dawned on him that they looked like the 3:20 aspect ratio. Says Veloso, “We just kept going back to this memory feeling. We were like, ‘Why we just don’t use that aspect ratio?’”
Once they had that, Veloso knew this would be an intimate film, and also tried to capture the beauty of the natural setting. To properly film in natural light and capture the beauty of the landscape, Veloso says, “We knew we needed a smaller camera and because of the natural light…we just decided to go with the Alexa 35 to have a lot of dynamic range.”
(https://variety.com/2025/film/news/train-dreams-cinematographer-adolpho-...)
