Rob Reiner still living for old-school Hollywood

I didn’t have what he was having but my lunch with Rob Reiner, director of When Harry Met Sally ... and so much more, left me with a bigger smile on my face than a working lunch should. People say you should never meet your heroes, but Reiner is one of my heroes and, in this instance, the people are wrong.

As a director, Reiner had one of the longest, and most golden, runs in history: This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally ..., Misery, A Few Good Men. With his production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, he helped produce many of the most enduring films of their time: In the Line of Fire, City Slickers, The Shawshank Redemption, Lone Star, Miss Congeniality. If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, and went to the movies a lot, few people will have shaped your cultural landscape as much as Reiner.

Also, he is a genuine political champion. He co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which was instrumental in overturning the ban on same-sex marriage in California. He also successfully campaigned for higher taxes on cigarettes in the state, to be funnelled into prenatal care and young childhood programmes. So you will not be wildly surprised to learn he is now — along with his equally impressive 96-year old father, US TV comic and actor-director Carl Reiner, a prominent voice against President Trump. By rights, Reiner, raised in enormous privilege, should be an entitled, spoilt schlub. Instead, he’s one of the hardest workers in town and, at the age of 71, is still fighting for the country to be better.

“So you come from London? You know, I spent time in London when I was making The Princess Bride,” says Reiner before he has even sat down.

Reiner loves talking about his movies the way people enjoy talking about their kids. When I ask if he got a kick out of seeing how Stand By Me was one of the main references in the first series of Stranger Things, he looks a little bewildered, says he heard about that, but never watched the show. The only time he acknowledges his legend is when he mentions that scene from When Harry Met Sally ... was recently voted one of the funniest scenes of all time in a movie poll. “Amazing,” he marvels.

Reiner acknowledges that his movies occupy a special place in the public’s heart, and I ask if he thinks that is partly because Hollywood doesn’t make movies like them any more.

“It’s a different time now and studios are making big event pictures and franchises and sometimes an R-rated comedy. So everybody who wants to make movies about people, politics or relationships has to find independent financing, and that’s what I do with Castle Rock Entertainment,” he says.

Tellingly, Castle Rock was sold to Warner Bros in 1993, which is around the time Reiner stopped directing movies that have lasted in the way his early ones have.

“I mean, I’m making the movies I want to make, but it’s not with the same kind of support system that I had, and so it’s much more difficult,” he says. “Studios are looking for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and you’re not going to get it with a little movie.”

Reiner grew up among entertainment royalty. His father, Carl, was one of the biggest figures in US TV in the mid 20th century and Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar and Norman Lear were all regular guests in the Reiner home. Reiner credits his father for teaching him how to prevent head swell: “I saw the way my father dealt with people coming up to him, and he just acted like it was normal.”

After achieving his own TV success in the 1970s when he starred in the sitcom All in the Family, Reiner moved into film directing in the 80s. But it was not until his third movie, Stand By Me, that he felt he’d truly made his name.

“Spinal Tap was satire, and I love satire, but that was something my father had done. And The Sure Thing was romantic comedy and he had done those. So Stand By Me was the first thing I did that was purely an extension of myself, and that meant a lot to me,” he says quietly.

It was also the beginning of Reiner’s long alliance with Stephen King, who wrote the short story, The Body, on which Stand By Me was based. King liked the adaptation so much that Reiner was the only film-maker he would allow to take on his beloved novel Misery. The two have since worked together on The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne and The Green Mile, and Reiner named Castle Rock after the town where many King books are set.

“I’m always interested in the script and the story, and Stephen King is a great American novelist. We’ve tended to stay away from his more supernatural books, but in everything he writes, the characters are great, the dialogue is great and the storytelling is incredible,” he says.

Another writer of pitch perfect dialogue is Nora Ephron and I tell Reiner that I think the reason When Harry Met Sally ... is still so loved, aside from being so funny and true, is that it is fair on both genders. “Right, exactly. In order for it to be good, it had to be honest on both sides. Nora taught me how she sees men and how she sees me and that’s what I got from her more than anything, aside from the fact that she’s so funny,” he says, slipping between the present and past tense when talking about Ephron, who died in 2012.

When the film had its UK premiere, Princess Diana attended. “She laughed and laughed! And she leaned over to Billy and whispered: ‘I’d be laughing a lot more but I know everyone’s watching me.’” According to Reiner, she later asked for the movie to be sent to Kensington Palace so she could watch it with her friends, and laugh without restraint.

Ephron later said she based the character of Harry on Reiner, who was at the time divorced after his marriage to Penny Marshall ended. During pre-production of the movie, he spotted a copy of Premiere magazine with Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover. “I’d met her a few months before, she seemed like a nice person, and I read she was getting divorced, so I said to Barry Sonnenfeld [When Harry Met Sally ...’s director of photography], ‘I’m going to give her a call.’” Sonnenfeld nixed that: “You’re not going to call her, you’re going to marry my friend Michele Singer,” he declared.

They have now been married for almost 30 years and have three “really great” kids. Meeting Singer convinced Reiner to hastily change the ending of the film. “Originally, Harry and Sally didn’t get together. But then I met Michele and I thought: OK, I see how this works,” he grins.

Reiner and Ephron went on to work together again on Sleepless in Seattle, in which Reiner plays Tom Hanks’s friend.

It is impossible to mention A Few Good Men, a film about the dangers of power without legal checks, and not discuss the US’s current political situation. “We’re in a place right now where democracy is on very shaky ground, in America and all over the world, and the autocrats’ playbook is to sow confusion and insecurity and blame other people for everyone’s lot in life, and then the autocrat comes in and says: I alone can fix this. It happened in Britain with Brexit, and we know how that was funded, and it’s the same playbook with Trump,” says Reiner.

As it happens, his wife Michele is a photographer and back in the 80s she took the photo of Trump for the cover of his self-mythologising book The Art of the Deal. “So she has a lot to atone for,” says Reiner with mock severity.

Reiner has been an energetic anti-Trump tweeter, but he knows that on social media he is singing to the choir.

“I try to have a real conversation that isn’t throwing propaganda around. But no one wants to have that,” he shrugs.

It is time for Reiner’s next appointment but before he leaves I ask one final question: aren’t massively successful Hollywood producers and directors supposed to be egomaniacal monsters? What went wrong?

“Ha ha! It’s true. But I want everyone around me to feel comfortable and happy. And then I can come into work and be like: ‘Hey, I get to spend today with these people today! Isn’t that great? Aren’t I lucky?’”

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