EXCLUSIVE: Brazilian Adolpho Veloso, the Academy Award- and BAFTA-nominated cinematographer of Train Dreams, declares that his country has World Cup-like Oscar fever.
“This whole Oscar thing is so big in Brazil,” he says, “that people are celebrating everything, like it’s a World Cup!”
Veloso adds: “I think is amazing because suddenly we are celebrating culture and art like we used to celebrate only football, which is also amazing. I’m a big fan. I go to World Cups, and I love it. And I’m that person doing that for football, but I love to now see all Brazilians doing that for culture and cinema. And to be a really small part of that, it’s even more amazing.”
Veloso is, without a doubt, a football fanatic. He attended the past three World Cups — 2014 in Brazil, 2018 in Russia and 2022 in Qatar — and is hopeful of purchasing tickets for Brazil team games during this summer’s tournament. Although, being a cinematographer, he says he spends most of the time being annoyed at how badly the stadiums are lit.
The dude has been fêted in his hometown of São Paulo, where the city’s celebrated Corinthians football team presented him with a jersey emblazoned with his name and the magic number seven in honor of his soccer hero Marcelinho Carioca, the legendary free-kick wizard who played for Corinthians for record goal-scoring spells from 1994-2001.
The cinematographer was at his home in Lisbon, Portugal, when his Oscar nom for the Netflix film directed by Clint Bentley and starring Joel Edgerton was announced. The next morning he was on a flight to Brazil, where he spent six days whooping it up with friends and family in Rio and São Paulo.
Joel Edgerton, left, and Kerry Condon in ‘Train Dreams’
Netflix
“But then this whole thing about the Oscars now, especially like after last year when Brazil finally won its first Oscar [Best International Feature] for I’m Still Here and Fernanda Torres was nominated for Best Actress, and this year with The Secret Agent with four nominations and myself with one. So we have like five nominations for Brazil in the year. It’s a big celebration and everybody’s like so excited … and amazing things happening like Lula, [Luiz Inácio Lula], the president, posted about it and posted my name, and then I was invited to go to my football team and meet the players.”
Receiving a jersey with his name and the fabled number seven on it “was a really special moment,” he says beaming brightly.
Adolpho Veloso (center) framed by players from Brazil’s Corinthians football team
He played the game in his youth. Was he any good? I ask. “I was decent,” he shrugs modestly. “But I would never have a future in that. I haven’t been playing much now because I’m kind of afraid of injuring myself and not being able to work.
“It’s frustrating, and I miss it,” he laments.
Veloso reckons that Brazil is having what he terms “a late recognition,” even though the country has “always had amazing movies, amazing talents in Brazil and Brazilians out of Brazil. I feel there is something about a good momentum that I have not really … I’m not really sure why.”
One theory he proffers is that it has a lot to do “with Brazilian influence of all Brazilians in social media” and “even the Academy — Instagram, for example. The Instagram post on the Academy account that has more likes is Fernando Torres’ picture from last year and then Wagner Moura pictured this year. There is an understanding of everybody now that Brazil is also a voice, in a way. And Brazilians are part of the conversation and Brazilians watch films and Brazilians go to social media and Brazil is just an amazing country in itself, not just a single film that comes from time to time.”
Warming to his theme, Veloso proclaims that “there is a bigger understanding of Brazil as a whole, as a culture, as a movement, that I think is really important for everything that is happening, for sure. It has a lot to do with all Brazilians suddenly being involved in the conversation.”
Suddenly he shakes his head as he reflects on his circumstances. “I would never expect when I was doing a movie in the middle of America about a logger, then suddenly I would be, because of this movie, in my football team’s training facility, meeting the players and getting a jersey with my name on it. It’s like childhood dreams coming true in ways that I would never expect.”
Veloso says his recognition in Brazil comes at a time when he believes cinematography is being more widely recognized as an important storytelling art by the general public. “I used to feel like mostly filmmakers or cinephiles are the ones that actually know that there is a cinematographer even, but it’s cool to see that there is more recognition happening. Again, filmmaking is maybe the art that depends more on teamwork and on more people in equal level — there’s so many people equally responsible for the end result, maybe more than any other art. So yeah, it’s tricky. I feel like we are a small percentage actually of everything that’s happening. So hopefully there’s going to be more recognition to all departments and to everybody involved that it is everybody’s movie in the end. It shouldn’t be just the director’s movie,” he reasons.
Train Dreams, based on a novella by Denis Johnson, follows his key character one Robert Grainier, played brilliantly by Edgerton, a lumberman who felled timber for railroads at the turn of the 20th century. The film also stars Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and William H. Macy.
Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton in ‘Train Dreams’
Netflix
We’re walking and talking — at the same time, even — The Broad Walk, a tree-lined avenue in London’s Regent’s Park, over 400 acres of parkland once used by Henry VIII as his London hunting grounds but since 1818 laid out as formal gardens with acres of woodland surrounded by grand houses, villas and terraces primarily designed by John Nash.
It’s a very different landscape from the rugged Pacific Northwest, where Veloso shot Train Dreams, but he readily concedes that it’s a beautiful day with beautiful light “which is not always the case here in London, but I’m surprised. It’s sunny, blue skies,” he says in denial that it’s also freezing.
“I love when all the leaves are actually gone and you can see just the trees without any leaves. The naked bark. It’s so beautiful,” he remarks.
RELATED: Take Ten: Joel Edgerton On The Kismet Of Making ‘Train Dreams’, A Terrifying Ghost Experience And The Films That Make Him “Ugly Cry”
The official prep for Train Dreams was eight weeks, and Veloso, often with Bentley and their teams, would spend most of those days just driving around “the whole state trying to find all possible different kinds of environments and trees.”
The tricky thing, he explains, “was to find forests and trees that looked untouched and really ancient because when we would look at the pictures from the time period, all the trees were so big and so large and they felt like things that we don’t see much anymore, that it was hard to find anything like that. So the closest things we could find were around like Seattle, in protected parks.”
The key was to figure “how do we shoot here without obviously interfering and harming the land and the trees at all? So it was a combination of a lot of trees, but it was amazing to be around those really untouched ancient trees. Everything feels different there. It’s really magical.”
However, Veloso felt unable to shoot in areas that had been reforested. He looked around Regent’s Park, pointing out where trees had obviously been planted to a formal plan. “It doesn’t feel organic, it feels like they were planted and didn’t grow organically as if they’d been there for centuries,” he observes.
“We had to avoid those places as much as we could,” which was hard because most of those places had been replanted, he adds.
The laid-out gardens of Regent’s Park would look glorious in something like Bridgerton but obviously out of place in the rough-and-tumble landscape featured so gloriously in Train Dreams.
However, there’s one thing about the park that he also saw in Seattle. “You have a lot of moss,” his says, eyes fixated on the non-flowering plant that carpeted the ground beneath his feet. “This is so beautiful too. So we wanted to have a lot of that too.”
They also wanted the really large trees that you could build a house inside. Their search was unsuccessful, so it was left to production designer Alexandra Schaller and her team to solve it by bringing huge fake trees to blend with the real ones. “There’s an iconic shot in the movie, which we actually referenced from a picture we saw of a guy laying inside the tree between two other guys. We couldn’t find a tree that was that big and that we could cut into, obviously, to put a guy laying inside of it. So that’s just a piece of fake tree that Alex Schaller and her team brought in and put it in the middle of the forest,” he marvels.
As we continued our nature walk — lovely as it was, I got a rotten cold out of it — I asked what other problems in the forest the production had to overcome.
“We needed those guys to be working around those trees and to be cutting those trees, but obviously we couldn’t cut those trees because they’re protected and we wouldn’t do it anyway. … We went to this park near Seattle that had a huge tree that had recently been struck by lighting. That tree is large. We could walk on top of it, and it’s just amazing.”
Their aim was to find similar places where trees had been felled by natural elements — wind, lightning, etc. — where the filmmakers could make it seem that lumberjacks had sawn or chopped them down.
They discovered one area where a massive tree had fallen, crushing vegetation in its wake. “So the whole scene was very impactful already and we didn’t do anything. We just basically just sat everybody around it and shot it like they were just like having a break. And then for some trees we’d have to have fake instruments, like fake axes and stuff like that, that they could be kind of like hitting the tree without actually harming the trees.
“And then with camera angles, then it’s almost like shooting stunts. You need to find the right angles where you can sell the punch,” Veloso explains.
William H. Macy, center, in ‘Train Dreams‘
BBP Train Dreams
Occasionally they found forests where real loggers were working “and then we could grab real trees going down and real axes going to the trees and stuff like that because those trees are in replanted areas.”
The other important, and obvious, factor was that the locations be accessible. They found amazing locations that were just too far. Veloso remembers walking with his team for an hour inside the forest and amazing places would be discovered only to be discounted because of the difficulty accessing such a distance on foot even with a small and nimble crew.
On occasion, however, Veloso and director Bentley argued with colleagues that “if we had the right location, the magical location, we would rather be in that place and shoot for half an hour than to be in the wrong place and shoot for two hours.“
Veloso adds: ”It works for everybody, for the actors even. So we were always fighting for the right locations.”
Adolpho Veleso and Joel Edgerton on location for ‘Train Dreams’
Daniel Schaefer/ BBP Train Dreams
Veloso already has shot Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, starring Juliette Binoche and Noah Hunt Basden, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Remain with Jake Gyllenhaal and Phoebe Dynevor, so I ask him what’s next.
Pulling up his suede jacket to ward off a sudden gust of icy wind — and probably these questions — Veloso admits that he’s been “getting a lot of scripts now, which is obviously amazing, and I’m trying to find the time to read them all, because to be honest, there’s no time. But I want to be cautious also. I don’t want to just jump into anything. I feel like I’m in a good position now to choose well.”
However, he notes well that ”the thing I would love the most is for Clint [Bentley] to have another script and to just go for it. We’ve been talking about it. I always text him and like, “No pressure, but should I be reading a script or am I good to just wait for you?” And he has two projects that he’s writing, but it’s hard to know when they would be ready.”
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Veloso also realizes that he’s seeking a project that he can connect with the way he did when Bentley and Greg Kwedar posted him their Train Dreams screenplay. “It’s a lot easier for you to do a better job because you understand the character, you understand the emotions, and you can put that into your craft. And I realize that even more now, “ he says, explaining how he related to many aspects of Robert Grainier’s story. “You always try to have empathy in all the situations in your life, but whenever you can connect more and you can actually feel what the characters feel because you feel the same way, I feel like it’s easier to have the empathy in a way and to understand it better so you can translate that into the visual language, into my tools to tell the story. … If I find those projects more and more in my life, I can do my job better.”
One thing he doesn’t want to be is a cinematographer just for hire.
Passers-by peer at the dashing figure in his signature sunglasses as he slams a fist to make the point that he makes movies because he “loves it.”
Adolpho Veloso in London’s Regent’s Park
Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Movies always have been an integral part of his life. “So I want to be involved in the movies as much as I can because I just love it — and as you said, like it’s nothing more frustrating than just being a cinematographer for hire. You want to be part of something that you’re proud of and that you feel that you are involved and to collaborate with people that you feel that you are doing something together,” he says passionately.
With that, Veloso has the audacity to cry “Vai, Corinthians,” something he’s been heard to mutter at awards ceremonies.
I say “audacity” because we’re less than three miles as the crow flies from Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. And they might have heard him.