Frank Darabont and Morgan Freeman on ‘The Shawshank Redemption’s’ Journey from Flop to Classic

When The Shawshank Redemption premiered 30 years ago this week, it seemed like it had all the makings of a box office hit.

After all, it was based on a novella by one of the world’s best-selling authors, Stephen King, so it seemed there was a ready-made fan base interested in seeing it. Indeed, another story, The Body, taken from the same 1982 collection, Different Seasons, was made into a hugely successful film, Stand by Me, in 1986. Writer-director Frank Darabont thought the story was so cinematic that he bought the rights to his own adaptation in 1987. “I found that story, Stephen King’s story, so gripping, really, and so moving, that for me it just felt natural as a film,” he told Stuart Maconie on BBC4’s The DVD Collection in 2004.

The novella tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a man convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and how, through his friendship with fellow inmate Ellis “Red” Redding, he survives and ultimately triumphs over the brutal conditions at Shawshank Prison. And Darabont found the perfect place to replace the unforgiving, gothic prison. The Ohio State Reformatory opened in 1896 and operated until 1990, when it closed amid allegations of inhumane treatment of prisoners. Filming there added a genuinely grim atmosphere to The Shawshank Redemption. “You can’t have a place like that without a real sense of foreboding and despair seeping into that stone,” Darabont said. “And everyone felt that, everyone in the cast and crew felt that. So it was a very oppressive place to film. People would say you could feel sadness in that place or you could feel ghosts in that place.”

The show also featured two renowned actors. Tim Robbinswho plays Dufresne, received two Golden Globe nominations last year for different roles, winning in the Best Actor category for his role in The Player. Morgan Freemancast as Red, he had already been nominated for two Oscars at the time. He had also recently appeared in Clint Eastwood’s 1993 Western, Unforgiven, a film that, in addition to being a box office success, won four Oscars.

And as the prison drama wound down, early buzz was incredibly promising. The film’s producer, Liz Glotzer, said the response from audiences to test screenings had been incredible. “They were the best screenings ever,” she said Vanity fair in 2014. So, understandably, hopes were high when The Shawshank Redemption was released in September 1994. Then, as Freeman told the BBC’s Graham Norton Show in 2017, “it flopped at the box office.” Darabont told Macona that the film “struggled to find our audience, to get people to come see it.” Ticket sales for its initial theatrical release were distinctly disappointing, recouping only $16 million of its $25 million budget in the U.S.

The film’s release date meant it faced stiff competition for audiences’ attention. The Shawshank Redemption came in the middle of Tom Hanks’ hugely successful Forrest Gump blockbuster franchise. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festivalwas released just a few weeks later. The films were not only commercial and critical successes, but became pop culture phenomena. Their quotable dialogue, striking imagery, and music-machine soundtracks generated a ton of media coverage, and each offered talking points about the state of America at the time, overshadowing the more introspective plot of The Shawshank Redemption.

Of course, the bleak premise and lack of female characters may also have made it a less obvious choice for moviegoers than the popular hits that had already come out this summer, like The Lion King , True Lies , Speed ​​, and The Mask . Although the Academy praised the film, nominating it for seven awards, including Best Actor for Freeman and Best Picture, it ultimately nothing came of it. Forrest Gump was the big winner of the night, taking home six Oscars, Pulp Fiction winning the award for best screenplay.

Freeman himself attributed the film’s initial box office failure to its name. “I think the only real marketing that movies get is word of mouth,” he told The Graham Norton Show in 2017. “Even though people went to see The Shawshank Redemption and came back and[said]’Oh man, I saw a really great movie, it’s called… um… Shanksham? Shimshawnk?’ A woman once saw me in an elevator and said, ‘Oh, I saw you in Hudsucker Reduction.’ So if you can’t get the word out, it just doesn’t work.”

But “The Shawshank Redemption” was supposed to have its own redemption bowbecause it found new life on video. With its release on VHS, the story of human resilience, friendship and the power of hope resonated with audiences who had missed it in the cinema. “We became the most rented video film in 1995. Just boom, boom. And then this word of mouth among viewers just started growing and growing and growing,” Darabont told the BBC in 2004.

Since 1997, frequent airings on cable television have helped it reach an even wider audience. When Darabont appeared on the BBC in 2004, The Shawshank Redemption was repeatedly featured on “greatest” lists, including being named Best Picture.never win an Oscar“In vote by BBC Radio Times. Listed on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) Top 250 Moviesvoted for by regular users, currently sits at the top of the list above The Godfather. “And the really strange thing is, that momentum never seems to die down. It just kind of keeps going. Which is great. It’s a really fantastic excuse for a movie, right?” Darabont said.

During those first 10 years after the film’s release, the rapid growth of the Internet resulted in growing fan communities discussing and deconstructing the film’s themes and imagery online. One popular theory at the time was that The Shawshank Redemption was religious allegory and that Dufresne’s enigmatic figure represented Jesus Christ. But the film can be – and has been – interpreted in many ways, including that it is anti-religious or even that it represents the form of Jean-Paul Sartre existentialism.

The BBC’s Maconie asked Darabont if he had the story of Christ in his head “even remotely” while making the film. “Yeah, kind of, kind of, the religious parable, the parallels came to me, but not really to the extent that they were read into it,” Darabont said. “You know, all of a sudden I read something like, you know, Tim (Robbins) has a line in it where he says, ‘Well, and I’m using this library to help a dozen guys get their high school diplomas,’ and all of a sudden the symbolism of it becomes, well, it’s the Twelve Apostles! And I think, ‘Man, that never occurred to me, that never occurred to me in a million years,’ but that’s the fun of making a film that has some interpretation.”

Perhaps the greatest subsequent validation of the enduring popularity of The Shawshank Redemption and the fans who supported it was its addition to the Library of Congress in 2015. US National Film Registry which represents “important cultural, artistic and historical achievements in the field of film production.”

“My deepest thanks go to all those who selected it for inclusion in the National Film Registry,” said Darabont, “and, most of all, to the audiences who have embraced our film and kept it alive all these years.”

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