Frank Darabont and Morgan Freeman about The Shawshank Redemption’s path from flop to classic

When The Shawshank Redemption was released thirty years ago this week, it seemed to have all the makings of a blockbuster.

After all, it was based on a novella by one of the world’s best-selling authors, Stephen King, so it seemed like a ready-made fanbase would be interested in it. Another story, The Body, from the same 1982 collection, Different Seasons, had been turned into a hugely successful film, Stand by Me, in 1986. Director and screenwriter Frank Darabont believed the story was so cinematic that in 1987 he bought the rights to adapt it himself. “I found the story, Stephen King’s story, so compelling and so moving that it was as natural to me as a film,” he told Stuart Maconie on the BBC4 program The DVD Collection in 2004.

The novella told 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 the brutally harsh conditions of Shawshank Penitentiary and ultimately overcomes. . And Darabont had found the perfect location to replace the merciless, Gothic prison. The Ohio State Reformatory had opened in 1896 and operated until 1990, when it was closed due to allegations of inhumane treatment of the prisoners. Filming there would add an authentically grim atmosphere to The Shawshank Redemption. “You can’t really have a place like that without there being a real sense of foreboding and desperation sinking into that stone,” Darabont said. “And everyone felt it, everyone in the cast and crew felt it. So it was a very oppressive place to shoot a movie. People would say you feel the sadness or you feel the ghosts.”

The production had also attracted two critically acclaimed actors for its leading roles. Tim Robbinswho played Dufresne, had received two Golden Globe nominations the year before for various performances, winning Best Actor for The Player. Morgan Vrijmancast as Red, had already been nominated twice for an Oscar at the time. He also came off his performance in Clint Eastwood’s 1993 western Unforgiven, a film that not only achieved box office success but also won four Oscars.

And when the prison drama ended, the early buzz was extremely promising. The film’s producer, Liz Glotzer, said the audience response to the test screenings was incredible. “I mean, they were the best screenings ever,” she said Vanity fair in 2014. So expectations were understandably high when The Shawshank Redemption was released in September 1994. Then, as Freeman told the BBC’s Graham Norton Show in 2017, “it hit the box office”. Darabont had told Maconie that the film was “having trouble finding our audience and getting people to show up.” Ticket sales from the initial cinema screening were clearly disappointing, only managing to recoup $16 million of its $25 million budget in the US.

The timing of the film’s release meant there was intense competition for viewers’ attention. The Shawshank Redemption was released in the middle of the hugely successful theatrical run of the Tom Hanks hit Forrest Gump. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d’Or at the film festival Cannes Film Festivalcame out just a few weeks later. These films were not only critical and commercial successes, but became pop cultural phenomena. Their quotable dialogue, striking cinematography and jukebox soundtracks generated a lot of media attention and each provided talking points about the state of America at the time, overshadowing the more introspective storyline 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 high-profile blockbusters already released that summer, like The Lion King, True Lies, Speed ​​and The Mask. Although the Academy did recognize the film and ultimately nominated it for seven awards, including Best Actor for Freeman and Best Picture it got away with nothing. Forrest Gump turned out to be the big winner of the evening and won six Oscars Pulp Fiction win one for best scenario.

Freeman himself was credited with the film’s initial failure. “I think the only real marketing that movies get is word of mouth,” he told The Graham Norton Show in 2017. “Although people went to see The Shawshank Redemption and came back and (said), ‘Oh man, I saw you this really great movie called the… um… Shanksham?’ A lady saw me in the elevator once and said, ‘Oh, I saw you in the Hudsucker Reduction,’ so if you can’t get it across well, it’s just not going well.”

But the Shawshank Redemption would become its own redemption arcas it found new life in the home video market. With its release on VHS, the film’s story of human resilience, friendship and the power of hope resonated with audiences who had missed it in theaters. “We became the most rented video of 1995. Just boom, boom. And then the word of mouth from that audience started to grow and grow and grow,” Darabont told the BBC in 2004.

From 1997 onwards, its frequent broadcasts on cable television helped it reach an even wider audience. By the time Darabont arrived on the BBC in 2004, The Shawshank Redemption was appearing repeatedly on ‘best’ film lists, including Best Picture.never having won an Oscar“in one poll by the BBC Radio Times. Listed by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) with top 250 moviesVoted by regular users, it currently sits at the top above The Godfather. “And what’s really crazy is that the momentum never really seems to have died down. It’s just kept going. That’s great. It’s really a fantastic vindication for the movie, isn’t it,” Darabont said.

For the first decade after the film’s release, the rapid rise of the Internet saw growing communities of fans discuss and deconstruct the film’s themes and images online. One theory that was popular at the time was that The Shawshank Redemption was a… religious allegory and that the enigmatic Dufresne character represented Jesus Christ. But the film can – and has been – interpreted through different frameworks, 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 “even remotely” in mind when he made the film. “Yes, in a way, the religious parable of it and the parallels kind of occurred to me, but not quite to the extent that has been read into it,” Darabont said. “You know, suddenly I read something like, you know, Tim (Robbins) has a line in there where he says, ‘Well, and I’m using this library to help a dozen guys get their high school diplomas,’ and suddenly the The symbolism of that becomes, well, that’s twelve apostles. And I think, ‘Boy, that never occurred to me, never in a million years did that occur to me,’ but that’s the fun of making it for me. a film that has something to it.

Perhaps the biggest confirmation of The Shawshank Redemption’s enduring appeal, and the fans who championed it, came in 2015 when the Library of Congress added it to the US National Film Registry which represents “significant cultural, artistic and historical achievements in filmmaking”.

“I extend my deepest gratitude to everyone who chose to induct it into the National Film Registry,” Darabont said, “and especially to the audiences who embraced our film and kept it alive all these years.”

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