Anatomy of a Scene: The train chase in ‘Stand by Me’
“Train!” yells Gordie. Smoke rises above the trees that border the tracks leading up to the railway bridge. Vern turns around, and panic hits him. “Oh shit!” The two begin running before Vern falls and freezes in panic. The train can now be only 50 metres away. “Get up, dammit! Get up!” screams Gordie. This is the moment in Rob Reiner’s film Stand by Me that both transfixes and moves us.
The movie’s railway bridge scene has become its most iconic, defining its four pre-teen protagonists more than any other. Reiner transformed the scene from the one that inspired it in Stephen King’s novella The Body, on which the film is based.
King frames the moment as a daredevil move by the group’s most outwardly pugnacious character, Teddy Duchamp. Teddy tries to court danger deliberately by turning an otherwise straightforward jump down an embankment into a game of train dodging before the story’s narrator, Gordie, throws him off the tracks.
In Reiner’s version, the scene involves genuine, heart-in-the-mouth peril. Daredevil Teddy is switched up for the more childish, less confident Vern. The two boys are given over half the length of the railway bridge to run, facing a sheer drop into the gorge below, with the train coming up right behind them before they can even think about jumping to safety.
Gordie and Vern aren’t playing around. They’re about to be crushed to death. Only running like they’ve never run before will save them, as the other two, Teddy and Chris, watch on in terror, completely helpless, from the end of the bridge.
As Gordie and Vern run their hearts out, the scene cuts quickly between close-up shots of their frightened faces, a front-on view of the steam train tailing them, and a long, side-on shot showing it catching them as they cross the bridge. It then cuts between Teddy and Chris as their fear for their friends’ lives grows to a crescendo, and two final front-on shots of Gordie and Vern, with the train visibly right behind them in the background.
Just as we assume that’s it, they’re done for. Gordie pushes Vern off the side of the bridge, and the two disappear below the bottom of the screen. For a moment, we’re left to wonder, along with Chris and Teddy, as they run to the bridge’s edge, whether the two boys have fallen to their deaths. That is until we see them sprawled on the verge of the embankment just a few metres below the bridge’s end, coughing and spluttering amid a cloud of dust.
“I scared the shit out of them”
Like most of the movie, the scene was shot in Brownsville, Oregon. A part of the United States not known for its sunny weather, Brownsville blessed the shoot with 60 days of sunshine during the shoot, making conditions perfect for filming the train chase.
As Reiner explained to the Telegraph in 2011, “We used a 600mm lens that compresses the image so much that it looks like the train is right behind them.” In reality, it was nowhere near child actors Will Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell, who didn’t look the slightest bit scared in take after take. Stunt doubles were employed for the long shots, but for the close-ups, the kids had to look as frightened as mortal danger could make them.
In the end, Reiner lost it with the boys and screamed at them, “You kids are fucking this thing up!” Pointing at the cameramen having to reshoot the scene repeatedly, he added, “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.”
Reiner then threatened to kill the two young actors. “And that’s when they ran. I scared the shit out of them,” the director chuckled.
But it wasn’t all ruled by fear. Once Reiner had got the takes he wanted, the boys ran over to him and gave him a big hug. Even at their tender age, they understood that the director had only done whatever it took to get a performance out of them. And the genuine terror reflected on their faces moves audiences to this today.
