CINEMATOGRAPHER ADOLPHO VELOSO ABOUT OPTIMO ULTRA 12X ON “TRAIN DREAMS”
Could you please Adolpho, introduce yourself?
I’m Adolpho Veloso, a cinematographer originally from São Paulo, Brazil. I started out in film school there and, like a lot of people, began working on sets as a PA during my first year. I spent a good amount of time jumping between different departments, which was a great way to understand how a set really works and to see the different sides of storytelling. Eventually, I started picking up smaller projects as a DP and slowly built my way up.
Over the years, I’ve shot a wide range of work, from commercials and music videos to documentaries and narrative films, all over the world. About six years ago I moved to Lisbon, which has been an amazing base, even though I’m usually off somewhere else shooting.
One of the biggest turning points in my career was working with Clint Bentley on Jockey, his debut feature. That collaboration really clicked, and led to our next film together, Train Dreams.
“Train Dreams” seems to be a beautiful and deep project, can you please tell us more about this touching portrait movie?
Train Dreams is a really special one for me. It’s a quiet, emotional story that follows a man named Robert Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton, over the course of his life in the early 20th-century American West. It’s about grief, isolation, and the way time shapes memory, how we hold on to certain things and let go of others.
How did you get started on “Train Dreams”?
I feel like I would’ve said yes to anything Clint wanted to do after Jockey. I was lucky he wanted to work with me again. When he got invited to adapt Denis Johnson’s novella, he started sending me early drafts of the script, and I got to be part of the process from the very beginning.
I really connected with the story, sometimes it felt weirdly personal. It’s about this man who spends long stretches of time working away from home, surrounded by people he’s just met and might never see again, and then finds it hard to reconnect when he’s finally back. That kind of solitude really hit me. It’s basically a cinematographer’s life in a way. So from the start, it felt like something I understood on a deeper level, and I was excited to help bring it to life.
Did you have specific artistic guidelines? Did you have any constraints or specific requirements?
Clint and I always try to keep things grounded and natural, and that was a big part of the visual approach from the beginning. Even though it’s a period film, we really wanted it to feel approachable and emotionally immediate.
We made an early decision to work mostly with natural light, firelight, and candles, which definitely brought some challenges. It meant we had to be very precise with timing and always ready to adapt. That required a lot of planning across all departments, and we had to stay flexible, weather would shift, locations would change, and we just had to roll with it.
But honestly, those kinds of constraints can lead to some of the most creative solutions. We had a fantastic team who fully embraced the challenge, and that made all the difference.
Regarding camera and lenses, do you usually have a go-to package? How did you make your choice for this specific project?
I don’t really have a fixed go-to package, it always depends on the story and what kind of feeling we’re chasing. For Train Dreams, because we were working so much with natural and practical light, the Alexa 35 was an easy choice. The dynamic range is incredible, and it gave us the flexibility to shoot in tough lighting conditions, like interiors lit with a single candle, without losing detail.
For lenses, we used Zeiss Super Speeds at night and in low-light interiors because of their speed. Being able to shoot wide open while keeping the ISO at 800 helped us keep the image clean and consistent without having to bring in extra light.
For day exteriors, we went with Kowa Cine Prominars. They have this beautiful texture and the most gorgeous sun flares.
We had a couple of zoom shots on Jockey that we really loved, so we decided to explore that even more this time. We brought in the Angenieux Optimo 12x (26–320mm), which works beautifully for those super slow, subtle zooms we were after.
You made a conscious choice over the Optimo Ultra 12x in U35/Open Gate format, can you tell us more about this choice?
Yeah, we really loved the look of the Optimo Ultra 12x, especially paired with the Alexa 35. It has this beautiful smoothness, it’s sharp, but not overly sharp, and it breathes in a way that feels really cinematic.
It was also important to have a lens that performs reliably from a mechanical standpoint. Because we really embraced slow zoom-ins and zoom-outs as part of the film’s language, we wanted those moves to feel seamless and precise, and Angénieux just delivers that. It became a key storytelling tool for us.
Are there some particularities of the Optimo Ultra 12x that you enjoyed specifically?
I feel like I can always match the Ultra 12x to whatever prime set I’m using. I don’t know exactly what makes that possible, but somehow, whenever I’m shooting spherical, it just works.
As a cinematographer but also as a person with the very human aspect of it, how would you qualify your experience over “Train Dreams” ?
Train Dreams was one of the most personal and emotional projects I’ve worked on. As a cinematographer, it was incredibly rewarding, there was so much freedom to build a visual language that felt honest and lived-in. But more than that, the story hit close to home. It’s about a man who spends most of his life working far from home, struggling to reconnect when he returns, missing important events or noticing small changes that happened while he was away. That’s something I think a lot of us in this line of work can relate to.
It really made me reflect on the pace of life, on solitude, on memory. And getting to shoot it with Clint and such an amazing cast made it even more special. A lot of the quiet, human moments you see in the film already felt incredibly real as we were shooting. It was full of moments that stayed with me.
Lastly, do you have any interesting anecdotic story of “Train Dreams” to share with us?
One night while we were shooting near the Canadian border, there was this incredible northern lights event, just a completely unexpected sky show. Amazing that it happened while we were all there… except I was so tired I went to bed and totally missed it.
The next morning, everyone had photos and stories about how magical it was. You spend your life chasing beauty, and then miss one of the most magical ones because you needed a nap. Classic.
