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Stephen King is one of the most respected storytellers of his — or any — generation. The word prolific hardly covers the man’s output, from his earliest works like “Salem’s Lot” to more recent masterpieces such as “Revival.” For decades now, King’s works have inspired dozens of movies and TV shows of varying quality. In all of those years, King directed just one of those movies himself in the form of “Maximum Overdrive,” a truly bonkers piece of cinema with a wild story behind it. At least one small part of that story involves none other than David Lynch.
King recently appeared as a guest on “The Kingcast” and discussed the film. Released in the summer of ’86, the film was based on the short story “Trucks” from the short story collection “Night Shift.” It picks up after a strange comet passes by Earth, causing trucks and other machines to come alive. They quickly begin killing people. The bulk of the story takes place at the Dixie Boy truck stop where a ragtag group finds themselves trapped. Chaos ensues.
“At that time, I was doing a lot of cocaine and I was drinking a lot,” King reflected. That explains why King has repeatedly apologized for making the movie over the years. The author further explained that Lynch just so happened to be filming his masterpiece “Blue Velvet” nearby at the same time.
“I thought I knew how to make movies,” King said. “I learned so much making ‘Maximum Overdrive.’ It was like this intensive seminar. I had this Italian film crew … because I liked the work that they had done on ‘Silver Bullet.'”
The crew, as it turned out, mostly didn’t speak English, which made production on “Maximum Overdrive” exceedingly difficult. “The only thing I learned is how to swear in Italian,” King quipped. This became an issue when a member of King’s crew, camera operator Daniele Nannuzzi, was attempting to explain why a shot he wanted to accomplish wasn’t going to work. The language barrier was getting in the way.
“I had a certain way that I wanted to move the camera and he’d say, ‘No, no, no Stephen! It cross the line!’ I couldn’t really understand it,” King explained. “The way you shoot a threesome is freshman English, and this crossing the line is like a seminar.”
David Lynch tried to teach Stephen King a key filmmaking rule
What Nannuzzi was attempting to explain was something called the 180-degree rule. I am no filmmaker, but basically, the rule says that when you’re shooting two people, you stay on the same side of 180 degrees because if you cross that line, it messes with the audience’s ability to know where characters are in relation to each other and the environment. The folks at Film Riot made a great video explaining it, that you can watch right here.
For experienced filmmakers, this is an accepted rule. For King, a writer, it was a foreign concept. Enter the late, great David Lynch, who recently passed away at the age of 78. King ran into Lynch after wrapping up filming one day and decided to run this little issue by him. Lynch did his best to explain it to King, but things didn’t exactly pan out.
“I was finished shooting for the day, and I said, ‘Can I talk to you for a minute?’ He’s wearing his trademark white shirt, he had khaki pants on, he was smoking a cigarette, I was smoking a cigarette, and I said, ‘What is this about the line?’ He tried to explain how, if you have the camera on one side, you can shoot the other side, and if you have it there, you can shoot the other. He said, ‘No, that’s not it … But if you shoot characters around a moving table, that’s really confusing.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t know, just shoot it your way.’ He didn’t know what it was either.”
The film turned out how it turned out, which was a bit of a trainwreck. King has not been kind to his work on “Maximum Overdrive” over the years, but the film has gone on to find something of a devoted cult following. “The Kingcast” co-host Eric Vespe is one such fan, which is what sparked the conversation in the first place. If nothing else, it’s pretty wonderful to imagine these two legends meeting in the ’80s to have such a discussion over a cigarette.
You can grab the collector’s edition of “Maximum Overdrive” on Blu-ray from Amazon.
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