Greg Kwedar
Where to hear and read about Greg Kwedar1 episode or test
Greg Kwedar is a filmmaker who co-writes and directs with Clint Bentley, and their films include Trans Pecos, Jockey, Sing Sing and Train Dreams. The habit most worth stealing is writing a scene in full, then letting the shoot and the edit show how much of it the film needs.
we build stories from the dirt up
Why You Should Write Less Dialogue — Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Greg Kwedar: the story and the lessons
1Greg Kwedar's path and his partnership with Clint Bentley
Kwedar grew up on blockbusters until one film showed him another way. He grew up on blockbusters and rented tapes. Y Tu Mamá También hit him like a shock wave, because it showed him you can make a movie like that.
He describes it as a road trip about the simplest things that is also the deepest, and says it lets the world breathe into it.
An accounting dropout, he wrote a business plan for a filmmaking career. Kwedar was a business major turned accounting dropout. More than 15 years ago he wrote a mission for his and Bentley's careers: tell stories of human connection in impossible places.
The market research in that plan was nonsense, but the mission survived. The impossible places vary, from a maximum security prison to a society that grinds its workers into nothing.
Kwedar and Bentley split the work by what each sees best. Bentley brought the classics Kwedar had missed, and Kwedar sniffed out who was worth watching now. In writing, Kwedar would shoot an idea off a napkin, and Bentley pushes it from a good idea to a great moment.
Kwedar taught Bentley, who began as a fiction writer in love with the sound of words, to ask first whether you are telling a story. The rest is how it gets delivered.
Kwedar uses the mission as a filter on projects, not a checklist for scenes. As success brought more offers, the line helped them see the forest through the trees on which film to make next.
On Train Dreams, a brutal logging world, they asked where the light was, so the writing would not turn cynical.
2How Kwedar and Bentley built Train Dreams from the ground up
Kwedar wrote the first draft in a cabin on the river where the story is set. They rented a cabin on the river where Denis Johnson lived, paid a local naturalist for a day to show them the trees and the glaciation, and spent evenings in logging-town bars talking to strangers.
Kwedar suspects the place was the seed of Johnson's story. He calls what the visit gave them "texture", a reality that only comes from doing this.
A conversation with a sturgeon restocker gave the film its opening image. A Kootenai man restocking sturgeon at a hatchery shaped a character and gave them the opening image of a 10-foot fish hanging from a pole.
He earns the right to change a beloved book through care and research. Kwedar's sequence is to honor the work, understand its essence, then go on your own journey to what lies beneath and between the words. That meant reading logging books, loggers' journals and US Forest Service rangers' journals, then going to the place.
They read Johnson's 117-page novella as showing deep research in glancing details, such as loggers using sap to repair their hands.
Kwedar keeps an adaptation's spirit and lets the book's words go. They saw no point in adapting the novella if they changed the character or the tone, for example by making it a thriller. A scene about a man shot by his dog went in transcribed straight from the book, was trimmed, and then no longer fit the developing narrative.
Kwedar compares the change of medium to walking versus swimming: you move through the world differently.
Time on location changed how they read a text they thought they knew. They played the Train Dreams audiobook, read by Will Patton, in the car, and passages they had read many times on paper took on new meaning. A night controlled burn gave them a sense of the fire's power in the story's Nolla chapter.
Will Patton went on to narrate the film.
3Kwedar's method of overwriting, then cutting
Kwedar treats a rough first draft as clay and keeps improving it. He cites the Rolls-Royce idea of looking at a normal car and asking how to make every part better. He quotes the line "I just took that scene and I found 74 ways to improve it."
He learned screenwriting from building bookshelves during the pandemic. IKEA shelves framed into built-ins looked bad through the frame, the paint and the trim, until more trim finally made them look good. After finishing the Train Dreams draft at the cabin, they left deeply depressed, knowing how much work remained.
He writes the whole scene, excess included, before cutting. Performance, camera and setting can later carry what the words said, and you cannot know what to cut or turn into a look until the whole excess is written. On Jockey they wrote at least half the script while filming, and much of it never made the cut.
Actors, designers and the cinematographer absorb every line, so cut material still shows up in the film even when unsaid.
Kwedar and Bentley use dialogue only as a last resort. A screenwriter mentor gave them that rule, and it made no sense until they learned it by doing. In Trans Pecos a long truck scene became one line and some looks, and it was far better.
He asks for the least you can do that gives the most. The rule does not apply to talky films like His Girl Friday and Before Sunrise.
When the scene and the writing compete, Kwedar's team lets the scene win. A voiceover about the deep history of the land and the glaciers was a favorite of Bentley's, but it did not connect in the edit. Their sound designer told them it was good writing but not a good scene.
The choice they put to themselves: do you want the good writing or do you want a good scene?
They make improvised and planned moments feel identical. Their documentary background shows in how they set up a space, such as actors feeding chickens, let it play, and shape it in the edit. The pilot Amelia, a real pilot who had never acted, replaced an awkward scripted line with what she would actually say to a passenger.
Her line "you better hold on to something" was taken by audiences as a thematic line.
4How Kwedar lets the film show him its ending
Kwedar shot the book's ending, then found the real one in the edit. They shot the novella's celebrated ending, but in the edit the airplane sequence they had also shot felt like the true end. They accepted it, then built everything before it to lead there, and cut the sequence about 35 ways.
They resisted at first, saying "surely not," before leaning in. All four of their released films ended differently from what they first shot.
He treats a discovery on location as a chance to open a new beat. Production designer Alex Scholler found a basement bathroom in a theater and told them to shoot something there. That became Grainier seeing himself in a mirror for the first time in years.
The new beat raised new questions, such as how the wolf boy and John Glenn in space fit in.
He knows film cannot always carry what prose can. A whole paragraph of the book describes the wolf boy's sound. Imagination conjures it, and the screen may not match it.
Using it as the ending might have been a fatal flaw. The plane sequence expresses a similar feeling in film's own way.
Kwedar counts a film as a success only if it grows past his vision. A film that only meets the plan is not a success. It has to surprise the makers and still feel true to the intention.
He asks collaborators what is underneath the starting idea and beyond it.
5Kwedar on feedback, references and music
Kwedar takes notes from readers who know the intent and readers who don't. His small circle includes Linda Halbert, who has read almost every draft in over a decade. Informed readers say what isn't coming across, and cold readers who ask what the film is about are closest to an audience.
Financiers and producers come later.
He treats a note as a pointer to where the work must go. Early on they took notes too personally. Now the answer is "just try it." Once you lose perspective, feedback "shakes the tree," and a scene that feels wrong may have its cause much earlier in the script.
Watching people watch is a note in itself: you can feel a lean forward or a retreat in the room.
Kwedar tuned the Train Dreams marriage by testing for too much and too little. Early cuts held too many barbs, and later ones felt too sweet. They went back and forth until the couple showed both hands that can't stay off each other and a quarrel over money at the dinner table.
Most modern films about couples lean cynical, as if they must hate each other.
He builds a playlist and mood reels while writing, then clears them away. Both directors start a playlist during writing. Mood reels pair key shots with a piece of music, like a tone poem, to name the feeling they want.
They show composer Bryce Dessner early, then pull out all the temp music so he starts from a blank slate with a common language. He has scored all their films.
Kwedar and Bentley keep a reference bank and use it to solve shots. A remembered frame from Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood fixed a bare frame on Train Dreams. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso set a curved burnt stick between camera and actor and dropped the camera low.
The stick hems the man in, like his grief. They invented it on the spot to fix a problem, and the meaning came afterward.
6Kwedar's working principles
Kwedar gives quiet, ordinary life the weight of a heist. Falling in love or a peaceful day with family deserves resonance and respect, without schmaltz. When Grainier later meets a girl, it does not become a Hollywood romance.
One viewer left the screening in a melancholy that lasted for days, and found it wonderful.
He lets the hero break screenwriting 101 when the character demands it. The lead is passive and quiet, and early on gets swept up in a violence he doesn't condone and is haunted by it. That is the book's man, who feels deeply in ways he can't understand.
Kwedar pairs "pay attention" with "trust the process". Bentley's father kept saying pay attention, and Kwedar adds trust the process, a phrase from the prison program at the center of Sing Sing. Focus on small details like the shot list, and a big sequence or a love story will play out.
He says the process is where the life is, so make it healthy and imbue the work with the values you live by.
Why You Should Write Less Dialogue — Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Two filmmakers who write together explain how they adapt a beloved book, build a story from real places, and cut dialogue until the film does the talking. The habit worth stealing is overwriting a scene in full, then letting the shoot and the edit show how much of it is needed.
Kwedar grew up on blockbusters until one film showed him another way. He grew up on blockbusters and rented tapes. Y Tu Mamá También hit him like a shock wave, because it showed him you can make a movie like that.
He describes it as a road trip about the simplest things that is also the deepest, and says it lets the world breathe into it.
An accounting dropout, he wrote a business plan for a filmmaking career. Kwedar was a business major turned accounting dropout. More than 15 years ago he wrote a mission for his and Bentley's careers: tell stories of human connection in impossible places.
The market research in that plan was nonsense, but the mission survived. The impossible places vary, from a maximum security prison to a society that grinds its workers into nothing.
Kwedar and Bentley split the work by what each sees best. Bentley brought the classics Kwedar had missed, and Kwedar sniffed out who was worth watching now. In writing, Kwedar would shoot an idea off a napkin, and Bentley pushes it from a good idea to a great moment.
Kwedar taught Bentley, who began as a fiction writer in love with the sound of words, to ask first whether you are telling a story. The rest is how it gets delivered.
Kwedar uses the mission as a filter on projects, not a checklist for scenes. As success brought more offers, the line helped them see the forest through the trees on which film to make next.
On Train Dreams, a brutal logging world, they asked where the light was, so the writing would not turn cynical.
Kwedar wrote the first draft in a cabin on the river where the story is set. They rented a cabin on the river where Denis Johnson lived, paid a local naturalist for a day to show them the trees and the glaciation, and spent evenings in logging-town bars talking to strangers.
Kwedar suspects the place was the seed of Johnson's story. He calls what the visit gave them "texture", a reality that only comes from doing this.
A conversation with a sturgeon restocker gave the film its opening image. A Kootenai man restocking sturgeon at a hatchery shaped a character and gave them the opening image of a 10-foot fish hanging from a pole.
He earns the right to change a beloved book through care and research. Kwedar's sequence is to honor the work, understand its essence, then go on your own journey to what lies beneath and between the words. That meant reading logging books, loggers' journals and US Forest Service rangers' journals, then going to the place.
They read Johnson's 117-page novella as showing deep research in glancing details, such as loggers using sap to repair their hands.
Kwedar keeps an adaptation's spirit and lets the book's words go. They saw no point in adapting the novella if they changed the character or the tone, for example by making it a thriller. A scene about a man shot by his dog went in transcribed straight from the book, was trimmed, and then no longer fit the developing narrative.
Kwedar compares the change of medium to walking versus swimming: you move through the world differently.
Time on location changed how they read a text they thought they knew. They played the Train Dreams audiobook, read by Will Patton, in the car, and passages they had read many times on paper took on new meaning. A night controlled burn gave them a sense of the fire's power in the story's Nolla chapter.
Will Patton went on to narrate the film.
Kwedar treats a rough first draft as clay and keeps improving it. He cites the Rolls-Royce idea of looking at a normal car and asking how to make every part better. He quotes the line "I just took that scene and I found 74 ways to improve it."
He learned screenwriting from building bookshelves during the pandemic. IKEA shelves framed into built-ins looked bad through the frame, the paint and the trim, until more trim finally made them look good. After finishing the Train Dreams draft at the cabin, they left deeply depressed, knowing how much work remained.
He writes the whole scene, excess included, before cutting. Performance, camera and setting can later carry what the words said, and you cannot know what to cut or turn into a look until the whole excess is written. On Jockey they wrote at least half the script while filming, and much of it never made the cut.
Actors, designers and the cinematographer absorb every line, so cut material still shows up in the film even when unsaid.
Kwedar and Bentley use dialogue only as a last resort. A screenwriter mentor gave them that rule, and it made no sense until they learned it by doing. In Trans Pecos a long truck scene became one line and some looks, and it was far better.
He asks for the least you can do that gives the most. The rule does not apply to talky films like His Girl Friday and Before Sunrise.
When the scene and the writing compete, Kwedar's team lets the scene win. A voiceover about the deep history of the land and the glaciers was a favorite of Bentley's, but it did not connect in the edit. Their sound designer told them it was good writing but not a good scene.
The choice they put to themselves: do you want the good writing or do you want a good scene?
They make improvised and planned moments feel identical. Their documentary background shows in how they set up a space, such as actors feeding chickens, let it play, and shape it in the edit. The pilot Amelia, a real pilot who had never acted, replaced an awkward scripted line with what she would actually say to a passenger.
Her line "you better hold on to something" was taken by audiences as a thematic line.
Kwedar shot the book's ending, then found the real one in the edit. They shot the novella's celebrated ending, but in the edit the airplane sequence they had also shot felt like the true end. They accepted it, then built everything before it to lead there, and cut the sequence about 35 ways.
They resisted at first, saying "surely not," before leaning in. All four of their released films ended differently from what they first shot.
He treats a discovery on location as a chance to open a new beat. Production designer Alex Scholler found a basement bathroom in a theater and told them to shoot something there. That became Grainier seeing himself in a mirror for the first time in years.
The new beat raised new questions, such as how the wolf boy and John Glenn in space fit in.
He knows film cannot always carry what prose can. A whole paragraph of the book describes the wolf boy's sound. Imagination conjures it, and the screen may not match it.
Using it as the ending might have been a fatal flaw. The plane sequence expresses a similar feeling in film's own way.
Kwedar counts a film as a success only if it grows past his vision. A film that only meets the plan is not a success. It has to surprise the makers and still feel true to the intention.
He asks collaborators what is underneath the starting idea and beyond it.
Kwedar takes notes from readers who know the intent and readers who don't. His small circle includes Linda Halbert, who has read almost every draft in over a decade. Informed readers say what isn't coming across, and cold readers who ask what the film is about are closest to an audience.
Financiers and producers come later.
He treats a note as a pointer to where the work must go. Early on they took notes too personally. Now the answer is "just try it." Once you lose perspective, feedback "shakes the tree," and a scene that feels wrong may have its cause much earlier in the script.
Watching people watch is a note in itself: you can feel a lean forward or a retreat in the room.
Kwedar tuned the Train Dreams marriage by testing for too much and too little. Early cuts held too many barbs, and later ones felt too sweet. They went back and forth until the couple showed both hands that can't stay off each other and a quarrel over money at the dinner table.
Most modern films about couples lean cynical, as if they must hate each other.
He builds a playlist and mood reels while writing, then clears them away. Both directors start a playlist during writing. Mood reels pair key shots with a piece of music, like a tone poem, to name the feeling they want.
They show composer Bryce Dessner early, then pull out all the temp music so he starts from a blank slate with a common language. He has scored all their films.
Kwedar and Bentley keep a reference bank and use it to solve shots. A remembered frame from Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood fixed a bare frame on Train Dreams. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso set a curved burnt stick between camera and actor and dropped the camera low.
The stick hems the man in, like his grief. They invented it on the spot to fix a problem, and the meaning came afterward.
Kwedar gives quiet, ordinary life the weight of a heist. Falling in love or a peaceful day with family deserves resonance and respect, without schmaltz. When Grainier later meets a girl, it does not become a Hollywood romance.
One viewer left the screening in a melancholy that lasted for days, and found it wonderful.
He lets the hero break screenwriting 101 when the character demands it. The lead is passive and quiet, and early on gets swept up in a violence he doesn't condone and is haunted by it. That is the book's man, who feels deeply in ways he can't understand.
Kwedar pairs "pay attention" with "trust the process". Bentley's father kept saying pay attention, and Kwedar adds trust the process, a phrase from the prison program at the center of Sing Sing. Focus on small details like the shot list, and a big sequence or a love story will play out.
He says the process is where the life is, so make it healthy and imbue the work with the values you live by.