Four best friends, Gordie Lachance, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio, go on journey to find a dead body of a missing boy out in the woods after hearing a rumor.
Blaine: Stephen King had based the novel on parts of his life growing up like him hanging out with his friends for one. Rob Reiner read and loved the book because he could see the childhood he had in this story and that made him want to make a movie out of it. Rob Reiner had experienced something almost similar to the character Gordie Lachance in the book. Rob feels he had gotten strength from his friends growing up and he was always looking for approval from his father.
The first person who was cast in the film was Richard Dreyfuss. Rob and Richard had known each other since they were both fifteen. They saw a lot movies with each other, talked about what they thought of them, did theater games and Rob directed Richard in a show he was on once. Adult Gordie Lachance needed to be dramatic, have a sense of humor and capture an emotional feeling. They tried a lot of people, but they didn’t have the right tone. So Rob had Richard come in and he acted out everything Rob was looking for.
Rob needed four boys between the ages of twelve and thirteen that would have the same personalities as the characters in the book. Wil Wheaton had a dull like face to him, he was very sensitive and intelligent for a boy his age at the time. River Phoenix was a down to Earth person. Corey Feldman had a lot of anger in him because of his family background. There was negative influences and difficulties in his life and he brought a lot of that into his performance as Teddy Duchamp. Jerry O’Connell had no experience in acting before, he was a wacky goofy kid and was perfectly suitable for Vern Tessio. Jerry went in to read the part of Vern and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he was behaving like himself and Rob liked.
Two weeks before principal photography began, Rob had the boys practice acting. Rob taught them how to play theater games, how to relate to each other and getting into character. They also took the time to get comfortable with each other and feel like they’ve known each other for a while. They did a lot of rehearsing for “Stand by Me”.
When Stephen King was in college there was a trestle that went across the river and people at the time would walk on it to cross the Stillwater River. In “Stand by Me” the boys are on a trestle and as the train is heading towards them, Gordie and Vern run for their lives because they are in the middle of the trestle. Rob Reiner wanted Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell to be terrified in that scene and they weren’t doing a good enough job. They weren’t scared enough and they didn’t believe that they were running away from a train. Rob Reiner lost it and raised his voice at Wil and Jerry. That got them upset and made them cry and Rob thought that was perfect so they started shooting the scene where they are running as fast as they can from the train. It was a perfect take and Jerry and Wil were so happy that they did a tremendous job. They ran up to Rob and hugged him.
The kids owe their thanks to Rob Reiner for pushing them and teaching them what it takes to give a great performance. Rob understands how an actor works because he’s an actor too. He felt like a coach directing these kids.
The swamp was shot in a real forest. They dug a giant hole and filled it up with muddy water to make it look like a swamp. The actors didn’t like being in it because the water was cold and dirty. Rob Reiner was curious to know what things in Stephen King’s book were based on real things in his life and one of them was the leaches. Stephen and his childhood friends were playing in muddy water. One of them did a handstand in the water and when he came back up there were leaches on his body. He passed out in the water after Stephen pointed out that he was covered in leaches. They pulled him out of the water and took those leaches off him.
There’s a scene where Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix are having a conversation in the middle of the night while standing guard by a tree and River gets all emotional because he’s talking about how no one suspected him of taking milk money. That was a very emotional scene for Rob Reiner and he thought it was beautifully written by Stephen King. Stephen knew somebody at school who got suspended for taking milk money during the 7th grade. He had a reputation of being a bad boy. He always got blamed even for stuff he didn’t do and he told Stephen that. Rob Reiner told River Phoenix to just think of something painful that happened to him once for that sequence.
The movie gets very serious when the boys finally get to the spot where the dead body is. Seeing that dead body makes Wil Wheaton’s character, Gordie, think about a lot of things like the fact that his father doesn’t love him. That was another emotional scene for Rob and made him remember times in his childhood when he thought that his own father didn’t love him that much, but he did love him very much. In the novel River Phoenix’s character, Chris, picks up the gun and points it at the teenagers who show up, but Rob felt it should be Gordie instead because it was his evolution.
These days the ending is really sad and hard for Rob Reiner to watch because the narrator says that River Phoenix’s character got killed at a young age and River himself passed away seven years after “Stand by Me” at the age of 23.
My rating on “Stand by Me” is five out of five stars
