CAST:
Wil Wheaton,
Rijeka Phoenix,
Corey Feldman,
Jerry O'Connell,
Kiefer Sutherland

SCRIPT:
Bruce A. Evans,
Raynold Gideon

PHOTOGRAPHY:
Thomas Del Ruth

MUSIC:
Jack Nitzsche

EDITING:
Robert Leighton

Synopsis:

Writer Gordon Lachance aka Gordie reads a newspaper article about a fatal murder. The victim is someone he knew, and he remembers the long-ago May Day weekend in 1959 when, as a 12-year-old boy, he, along with his best friend Chris Chambers and two other boys, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessia, set out to search for the body of the missing young man Ray Brower in a wooded area. along the railroad tracks near the small town of Castle Rock, Oregon...

Stay With Me is one of the most cherished nostalgia and coming-of-age movies of all time. It was based on the novel or short novel The Corpse by Stephen King, who considers it the best film adaptation of one of his works, and according to the testimony of director Rob Reiner, at the first private screening organized for King, the famous writer was deeply moved by what he saw, among other reasons which is an autobiographical story. Reiner emphasized exactly the autobiographical, realizing that the character of Gordie is actually King's alter-ego; in the novel itself, the four boys are equal characters, while Reiner believed that Gordie should be singled out as, in Henry James's terminology, the central, autobiographical intelligence of the work. The screenwriters implemented this solution in their text, and it turned out to be a complete hit. At the time, Reiner was little more than a novice director, but already with his first film, the anthology satirical rock pseudo-documentary (mockumentary) This is Spinal Tap from 1984, he showed great talent. Later, he would direct some of the key films of the period - Misery (again according to King) and Malo dobi ljudi, but Stay near me will remain the central work of his oeuvre and the film that he himself considers his best, and also his personal favorite. It is a very emotional story about four, in different ways, traumatized boys who, in a dramatic life adventure, very realistically staged, realize a deep mutual connection, but at the same time a film that simultaneously explicitly and subtly raises the question of the relationship between fiction and reality through the character of an adult writer who he recounts events from his childhood that marked him for the rest of his life, and for which viewers cannot really be completely sure whether they are real or imagined. Reiner chose the four main actors from among 300 candidates, that is, the seventy he interviewed, looking for boys whose life experience can be matched to a significant extent with the characters' experience. All four chosen, among whom River Phoenix and Corey Feldman (who had become famous the year before with Richard Donner's Goonies), played their roles brilliantly, and Phoenix and Wil Wheaton were especially impressive. Wheaton showed exceptional sensibility in the lead role, but unlike Phoenix, surprisingly, he did not have a significant career later. I remember his statement that the four very young actors then developed a true friendship, i.e. that what we see on film is not acting but reality. Stay by my side was immediately recognized as an extraordinary achievement and was nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation, while the director Reiner and the film itself were nominated for the Golden Globe. Film, direction and screenplay were nominated for the Independent Spirit award. It is considered one of the most influential films of the 1980s, and has been voted the greatest film of all time in polls.

Author of the text: Damir Radić

color, 87'