Behind the Scenes The Shawshank Redemption Darabont 1994 with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman

A lot of people, more than any other movie I've done, have come up to me about that movie and and it's not just, hey I like that movie, you were really good in that movie. It's that movie was important to me or that's my favorite movie of all time. Everywhere I go and people who have seen it react to it fondly. I've gotten mail and I still get mail from people who say, gosh your movie got me through a really bad marriage and a really bad divorce, or it got me through a really bad patch in my life, or it got me through a really bad illness, or it helped me hang on when a loved one died. There's something about the movie that helps lend some courage to people who need it. I do recall very clearly, once upon a time, 2 30 in the morning, North Hollywood. Frank and I are in some supermarket, you know, looking at potted meat product or something, and he is considering the task of having to direct his first feature film, which was almost a Chucky film. And we're wandering up and down the aisles of the supermarket and he's going, I don't know, do you think I should take this? You think I'll get another chance? Should I just grab this now? Should I do it? And I said, well, what else have you got on? And he said, well, I've almost finished up this adaptation of this novella by Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, a more magnificently clunky title could not be imagined. And he said, I'm going to see if anybody's interested in buying it. I think the ambition, the aspiration to direct was really something that I was born with. Making films since childhood seemed like a glorious thing to me. That's indeed where I drew a great deal of my inspiration growing up was from the films that I saw. I love Capra. I grew up with Capra and I grew up with Norman Rockwell. There's a part of me that is completely captivated by those kinds of storytellers who would tell those kinds of tall tales. Some of the best tall tales I've ever heard came out of Frank Capra. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is nothing if not a tall tale. It's a Wonderful Life is an even taller tale. No, you have Shawshank Redemption, which I've described really not as a prison movie, but as a sort of tall tale. I can see exactly why it appeals as widely as it does. A lot of it has to do with Stephen King, whatever his problems as a pro stylist. There aren't that many, to be honest. He is a born storyteller who knows how to satisfy an audience. For some reason, that has not always worked with his movies. There are some terrible movies out there. There are some great ones like Pet Sematary and The Shining. This one is probably the purest expression of Stephen King, and that has a lot to do with it. Stephen King book is a bestseller months before it's even published. One thing Stephen King has always needed insofar as the translation from the written word to movies is an adapter that is up to the task of not losing the thing that makes King's fiction essential to so many readers. I think he found that person principally in Frank, because Frank is such a faithful adapter of these things. He really holds the written word in high regard. Castle Rock was the first place we sent the script, and the only place we sent the script. I'd had enough experience at other studios as a writer to know how damaged this material might get. Their company actually was founded upon the success of Stand By Me, directed by Rob Reiner, and that was a very delicate material that they captured perfectly. When I read the script, I remember I got to about page 80 or 90, and I couldn't finish it because I loved it so much. I loved these people, and I was so worried it wouldn't pay off or it wouldn't be satisfying. I remember I had it all weekend, and I didn't want to know if it didn't turn out okay. What happened was the script got Xeroxed and went around every actor in Hollywood, and we got besieged, and that took it to a whole other level. He and I were getting calls from people at our homes, on cell phones. It was very bizarre. It took on a life of its own. There were stars who were interested in it. Tom Cruise was interested in it. Nicolas Cage was interested in it. Frank had written something that was powerful and well-crafted, and as soon as that hit the water, fish were moving in, right? You read a script, and you have a certain kind of reaction to the script, powerful reaction in the case of the Shawshank Redemption. Just from reading the script, it's like, yeah, I really, really, really would like to do this. The characters written by Steve King was actually a white Irish guy, so I'd known the story for years with Red as a white Irish guy in my head. When we were casting about, somebody suggested Morgan Freeman. Once I got over my preconception of what the character was, which was drawn from Steve King, it became such a good choice. Indeed, I think he's become indelible in the role to the point where I don't think people could imagine anybody else really doing it. Tim, we came to because of, we'd looked at about four or five of his films, one of which was Jacob's Ladder, and we really thought, this guy can do it. He was very enigmatic, and Andy needed to have that. I think that it was a sort of a love relationship between Red and Andy. It did go deeper than just friendship, but you develop these kinds of relationships in life and death situations. How many working class, construction worker kind of guys have come up to me on the street and said, that's Shawshank Redemption, man, that's a great film. Because I think, especially American males, we don't get that model in films, that there is a real chance to have an emotional bond with another man that is a significant, important part of your life. I love good character actors. They're the unsung heroes of movies, and I grew up seeing so many films and loving so many of these wonderful faces and presences. Yes, the stars of the film are important, but the supporting cast is equally so. One of the very cool things that Frank does, I mean, you watch his films and it doesn't matter which other character in the scene you watch. There's a life, there's a history, and an involvement. There's something going on. You look at the dinner table scenes in Shawshank, and it doesn't matter where you aim the camera. Everybody is playing that game. In the novella itself, there are actually three wardens, and I think that part of the genius of Frank's script is that he collapsed those three wardens into one individual, and I think it really gives the screenplay more of a kind of mythic quality to it. Because King is a man of his period, of his generation. The worst villain of that generation is Nixon, and you get that with Bob Gunton in this, who is explicitly Nixonian. We're supposed to be icons. We're supposed to be the worst of the worst, and Andy is the best of the best. We personify whatever we need to personify. It's the Joseph Campbell mythic hero who rides into town. The stranger rides out of the desert, cleans up the town, and rides away. Sets things right, you know. Well, that's what Andy does in Stephen King's story. Not just changes the environment, but also fundamentally changes It would make me sound smarter if I said that we, you know, analyzed it and we were afraid, because we should have probably, but I think that the emotion we all felt for the script kind of overwhelmed it. Imagine reading a plot synopsis of this, because a plot synopsis of the movie would be terrible. It would just be two people in prison in the 40s, you know, and what happens to them, because you can't really summarize up the feeling of hope that you get from watching the We did all say to ourselves, the only way this movie is going to find an audience is if it's unbelievably well executed, and if it's medium, we're sunk. If you had a scene in that prison, you felt in your pores the weight of that place, and it was like a character looming in every scene. We had this kind of tour, so you could see it fully, even the condemned parts of the prison we went into, and looked at these really tiny little cages that they kept those men in, and I always have a visceral reaction to being inside a real prison. When I hear the door close behind me, I have this twinge of realization that they could decide not to open it again, you know. I remember walking into this cell block with my son, who was about three or four at the time, and he said, Daddy, I don't want to be here. I said, why not? He says, this is a really sad place, and he could feel just this incredible weight of many years of pain and suffering that had gone on in this place, and it was palpable. You could really sense it. It had a theatrical quality, which I loved, because, I mean, to accent anything, you've got to go with the top a little bit, and the gothic quality was what attracted me. I was here in 1987, and I had been stealing the supply of my drug habit, and very similar to the fresh fish scene where Red said, the worst night is the first night. It truly was here. Where we're at now, this was the second floor, and below us was where, at that time, they had kept some of the prisoners in solitary confinement, or those who needed extra restrictions, and they would try to figure out who you were by your cell number, or if they could find your name. Chaos is a good way to describe it. It was a bustling place when it was operational. Live with inmates, live with voices, yelling, screaming. When we went down them steps, the first floor, and we start going by these guys that say, they want to **** you, rape you, you're going to be my bitch in a cell. It's only going to cost me a carton of TMs, this and that. I said to my, I looked up at the Lord, I said, I know the ways you raised me, Lord, but if anybody ever puts their hands on me, and says, I don't care what it takes, I'm going to kill them. Now, I was six foot four, weighed 190 pounds. That's the scariest I've ever been in my life, and I've been a lot of places, because the stuff these guys yell, and what they want to do to you, it's beyond belief. They would call out your name, and very early on, they begin screaming things such as, you got to kill yourself, and get it over with, you're not going to make it, you can kill yourself, and get it over with now, and within a few hours, they started chanting, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, and it was as if the entire six floors on this side, every cell was chanting, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself. I took a tour, and the people said, how was it in here? What was it really like? I said, I'll answer it to you in one word. They all looked at me, I said, it was fucked, because a lot of people would take that word, oh, a nasty word, and everything, but that one word encompasses everything that could have happened in there. I think coming here sometimes sets my compass to let me know where I've been, where I'm at now, and I often, when I think about this place, I'm very grateful. They had a liaison officer who actually came to me at one point and said, do you want, you know, do you want to sit down and talk to any of these guards? And I said, listen, I don't know if you've read this script, but the last thing you want me to do is say that I base this on the Ohio State Correctional Officers, because I'm an awful, awful person. I asked to be put in solitary confinement for a while and see what that felt like, and you know, of course, you know, mine was just a sensorial experience, wasn't really a truly life-altering, you know, I'm not going to tell you anything tremendously significant happened in there, because I always knew I was going to get out, but it gave me the opportunity to listen to what the sounds are, and to get a feeling of what it must be like to live for this one little square of the outside, that that's your life. Mansfield was completely trashed when we moved in there. It had been decommissioned, I think, two years before, and I think every ex-con had come back and smashed something. When the movie was made, the prison had closed, had been closed for a couple years. Actually, the making of the movie postponed a date with the wrecking ball. Mansfield's a relatively small town. We don't have Hollywood here very often. They came into town, they were here for several months, they lived here, they became part of the community, the actors, the crew. You had a chance to actually watch them filming, because they would go downtown and film in the square, and film along Main Street. Everybody around town was excited about possibly being in the movie, and possibly launching a career in Hollywood, so aspirations of being a movie star were a buzz all throughout Mansfield, Ohio. Some call it a casting call, while others refer to it as a cattle call. The latter name may be more appropriate for Wednesday's audition for Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. I mentioned to the crew that I would like to have a little party, and they said, well sure, what would you like to do? I said, well, I'd like to play an inmate. So, they finally came with the idea, I was an inmate, but I wasn't in prison guard. The casting call was scheduled from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., but due to the overwhelming turnout, no more names were taken after three. Hey, I think I got it already, man. Just look at us, that's the way we act. Just regular acting, man. Reporting for WMFD, I'm Laurie Carto. The pipe was constructed into the hillside near the prison. It was right by a little creek. Now, the creek is, I didn't, I don't know what that creek was, you know, that was the scary part. We got a local, I don't know what he was, a chemist, to come along and test the quality of the water, and he said, this water's absolutely lethal. He said, no one should go into this water. The instruction coordinator said, should we tell anyone on the crew this? I said, this is a fantastic location, and it was perfect. I don't know where we're going to find anything else, and I mean, I don't know whether we should go on film saying this, poor Timmy, think, my god, I could have got typhoid or something. It's a farming community, so you have to be careful in creeks and farming communities, because it could be just filled with, you know, cow urine and feces of another kind. In post, they argued for a very long time over the ending to the story. If you were to end the movie where the story ends, you would end it on the shot of the bus going away with Morgan Freeman, Red, in it, in search of Andy. To me, that was the perfect ending for that story, and indeed, in a sense, by extension, the perfect ending for the movie, so that's the way I wrote it. It ended on a note of hope, but not fulfillment, and when we met with Castle Rock, they said, you can't do this. You can't have these guys talking about getting back together. It's kind of like a love affair, and not have them reunited. You're cheating the audience of this. He'll tell you, but that it would be pandering to an audience somehow, that it was like the Holly, you know, because it came from me and I worked for the studio, it was automatically like, well, that's the, you know, the glossy Hollywood ending. I shot this little ending on the beach, where you actually do see them get together, and I thought, you know, after two hours and 20 minutes of hell that these guys have crawled through, this huge sort of emotional experience we've taken the audience on, we may owe them the catharsis of seeing these men rejoined. He was suspicious about us. You know, we were the suits, and we said to him, basically, you have final cut, although it's not an illegal document. We give you final cut. We won't make you do anything you don't want to do, and I think that allowed him to feel free to make, to try things. He could shoot it and know we weren't going to force him to put it in the movie, and that's why we did that, and of course, I think he knew right away when he shot it that he wanted to use it. When they do get together in Mexico on the beach, I can understand that that could go the wrong way. You could see them hugging. You could see them crying. You could see them talking together. You could see a terrible shot of them on their fishing boat, you know, reeling in fish or taking tourists around the bay or something. That would have been horrible. Actually, I think it still kept very downbeat. The main thing when I see that ending always strikes me is that Morgan Freeman smiles, and it's not just a small smile. It's a really big, toothy smile. To see him in that position, you know, sleeves rolled up, just looking really relaxed, smiling, it's such a shock because he's never been like that. Even when he was released from prison, he was still depressed, and to see him happy, that for me is the major moment in that ending. It had many of the trappings of a real Hollywood premiere, including Klieg lights and limousines. The film's director, screenwriter, Frank Darabont, and producer, Nicky Marvin, were welcomed with a standing ovation and the keys to the city. They didn't give the final thing of how it ended, didn't give that away until just the very end, which is really great, so it kept it really spellbinding. I think it was beautifully done. It was very artistic. Ever since Jaws came out, the high concept movie, the 80s sci-fi movies, the action adventures, the special effects, we've become used to that. We've become used to those being the movies that everybody talks about, that everybody goes to see, especially over the summer. This doesn't have any of those things. Audiences absolutely thought that this was going to be a bleak experience, that it was a prison movie. No one knows what a Shawshank is, and Redemption sounds religious, so who's going to come and see that? I've had Shinkshank, Reduction, and what is that, Scrimshaw thing you did? Then you hear it's a prison movie. It's like, oh yeah, great, great. Eight security guards are going to go see this film. We thought we were robbed, and we thought we should get all this attention. It was slipping by. The Golden Globes came, and it didn't get the 25 nominations we thought it deserved, and we couldn't believe it. That's why when the Oscars were announced that year, it was just a great victory for Frank and for the movie. When you're up there with these other films as Best Picture, and we got nominated for seven Academy Awards, didn't win a single one, but the seven nominations sent the message to people. People were running to the video store and renting it. Every time I checked, the video stores were saying, we're out of copies. People are renting them like crazy. That's what saved us. When someone sees that movie, they feel like they have to make someone else go see it, and they feel compelled to sell it to their friends. That's how it's really taken on its own life. Our audience is 15 to 24. It's a young audience. You don't think that they're going to like this because it's not aimed at them. It's not sold as a teenager movie, but it's incredibly popular. The film amazingly did 320,000 units on video rental in the US, which is kind of out of whack with the box office result. We were the most rented videotape of 1995. I mean, more than any other film. Each month, we get constant reorders, which means that it's going to go on for a long time as people discover this picture. The Internet Movie Database has provided me with some sort of legitimacy, I guess, because the people who log on to this get to vote for their all-time favorite movies. There have been times out of a list of 250 movies when we've been in the top spot of people's all-time favorite films. It blows my mind. The Internet Movie Database poll has been running for 11 years now. During that time, we've accumulated over 10.5 million votes from nearly a million film fans worldwide. Shawshank's currently number two in the poll. Sometimes we swap places with The Godfather or Star Wars or, you know, my God, I'm looking at this list. I don't think we've ever really been less than fifth place on this list of movies. It's not the kind of poll where whatever's number one at the box office can shoot right in there and become number one. To some extent, it's already stood seven years of historical voting and is still there up at number two with, you know, no sign of anything really coming close to it. You see movies that were unsuccessful in their initial releases that have become some of the top movies of all time. Two of them in particular, Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life, were both bombs when they came out. And for some reason, they became over the years more and more renowned. I think what Hollywood movies do and stories in general, they give us a facility to experience and express that which we oftentimes shy away from. And for that reason, I think that movies can be a very profoundly spiritual experience. Hollywood Jesus reviews movies from a spiritual point of view rather than doing what so many others, well, every other reviewer does, you know, how well the director did or how good of a story it was or who did the best acting job. Instead of doing that, it looks more for the inner thing that happens with people when they watch a film and it dialogues about that. I didn't see Shawshank when it came out. I think my story is pretty much like everybody else's. Someone told me about it and I thought, wow, what an interesting title, Shawshank Redemption. Sounds actually like something I might be interested in. I went down and I rented it and I could not believe what I was watching. I think the main thing that it does show is that our generation today, particularly younger people who are listening to modern music and watching modern films, have this desire that there is something more than what they're in right now. They have, I guess you'd call it the postmodern idea that the things around us and the material things that we gain are not the only thing there is in life and that there has to be hope. There has to be something better than what we're in right now or else life is not worth living. I got one letter from a kid who dropped out of college and was just, didn't see any reason to live and was actually, you know, thinking of committing suicide and saw the movie and decided not to. Saw the movie and decided to go and embrace life and see where life could take him. Wow. That's stunning. I've met people who've seen that thing 30 times but they were going through profound changes in their life and it helped them work through it. Film is therapy. Shawshank Redemption gives you hope. You can go on. You can go forward. That's what I think is going on. What do you think of Andy as a Christ character? I love the part where Andy was telling Rhett about Zewateneo and that it was a place where they had, their memories, they would not have memories. It would all be, wasn't it like the ocean? The ocean has no memory. The ocean has no memory and you know that's like when we come to Christ, you know, our sins are forgiven. We, Christ does not remember. God does not remember our sins. Rhett was attracted to him just the way Christ woos us to himself. There was something about Andy that, that caught Rhett's spirit. Did anybody see new birth in the, in the show? Earl and I were talking about that. Yeah, the scene where he's going through the sewage pipe as he's breaking out and he's going through this just long scene of treading through this sewage and then they have a scene where he breaks through the sewage and he plunges into the river there and it's kind of like not only a baptism but a new birth type of experience and when he came out of that his hands were lifted up and it was like that sense of great freedom that he had broke through. It's like Andy never saw the walls because he had hope and it's the same for us. If we put our hope in Christ, the walls that are around us, we don't even need to see them. We can be, we can be far beyond them. We all come under the spell of Andy. None of these people are the same afterwards, you know. There's a great moment when, when Redd talks about how hope is a dangerous thing and Andy won't buy that. When he played that music, the opera, I loved that scene, you know, and all those men, you know, in their prison walls and all of them saying, you know, we're in here because of somebody else and everyone in here is innocent. He sacrificed, I think, a month in the hole or something to give them that, you know, that moment of transcendence and, and lifted them up beyond the walls. All of this distilled, this whole arc can be seen in that, in that, in that one sequence in, in Shawshank when he, when he plays the record for everybody in the prison, it changes the environment. It puts a completely new tone into things. Andy has done so much to make himself known to the guards, for the guards to like him, for the warden to like him and basically he throws it all away just for this record, just to play it, just to listen to it, just to play it to everyone else, just to get that sense for a few moments you are free and you're soaring. It's poetry and it's stayed poetry through all of the travails that these stories have to go through, from the time it's a, the novella to the time it's on screen. That's one of the high points, that one, but Shawshank Redemption always gets the top spot. A lot of people are in prisons of relationships, of jobs that they hate, of lives unfulfilled, and have given up hope. And what this movie was saying to them was, it might take a while, it might take some time, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel and if you have the patience and the belief, you can make it there. You can transpose that story into, you know, the kid that's having trouble in school, or a marriage, a marriage that's on the rocks or, you know, relationships or careers. It allows people to see that they can get out of the prisons they've created for themselves.