STAND BY ME’S TRESTLE CROSSING

One of the most famous scenes in Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic Stand by Me sees our four kid heroes – Chris (River Phoenix), Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) – gingerly set out to cross a 100ft-high railway bridge that spans a river. Naturally, the train arrives when they’re at the midpoint and a terrifying race ensues.

‘When I was in college, there was a trestle that went across the river,’ says Stephen King, whose 1982 novella The Body acted as vivid source material. ‘One of the rites of passage at that time was you had to go out and cross the still water on the trestle.’

Set in the late 1950s of King’s youth, Stand by Me strings together several such autobiographical adventures by having the four boys hike along 30 miles of railway track to see a dead body (as a toddler, King’s own playmate was struck by a train and killed). En route, they battle leeches, a junkyard dog, emotional epiphanies and a gang of older, flick-knife-wielding boys, but it’s the train trestle that’s the standout set-piece, sure to have viewers sweating and shaking and bellowing encouragement as Gordie and Vern are chased down by the thundering steam engine.

Shot on the McCloud River railroad bridge that spans Lake Britton in California (the trestle’s still there, but is now part of a walking trail since the railway was closed in 2005), the scene, perilous as it appears, posed zero danger to the kids. The train had actually only just reached the start of the trestle when Wheaton and O’Connell were jumping off at the other end – Reiner and DoP Thomas Del Ruth used a 600mm long-focus lens to compress the image and create the illusion that the boys were about to be squished.

One problem: without any real jeopardy, the young actors couldn’t muster the requisite fear. After several flat takes, Reiner stepped in. ‘I told them, “You kids are fucking this thing up. You see those guys? They don’t want to push that dolly down the track any more. And the reason they’re getting tired is because of you.” I told them if they weren’t worried the train was going to kill them, then they should worry that I was going to. I scared the shit out of them.’

‘It was the only time Rob raised his voice,’ recalls Wheaton. And, boy, did it work – the actors’ tears are real, the scene is a classic.