Redeeming the Writer:

A Conversation with Frank Darabont

By Stu Kobak

         Every decade seems to bring an explosion of new faces to filmland. They surface as if created by some underground crashing of atoms. They burst from a pile of old video tape boxes having absorbed every frame of stored film to touch them, al la Quentin Tarantino; or they’re born with a video camera protruding from the head, a filmmaking ship ready to raid the rough seas of Hollywood, like Robert Rodriguez. It’s an ode to instant recognition played over and over again at the film festival circuits. An army of untried warriors emerges camera in hand to revitalize the film industry. But not every filmmaker is another immaculate conception. Some develop slowly, moving through the system, in some sense a throwback to studio days of yore. When 39 year old Frank Darabont erupted on the film scene big time in 1994 as writer and director of The Shawshank Redemption, the soft downy beard of immaturity may have been long gone from his face, but behind the intense gaze of the artist were years of hard work climbing the industry latter.

     Darabont’s success prior to The Shawshank Redemption has been primarily as a writer, with a specialty as a script doctor, although he did direct the cable movie Buried Alive in 1989. Frank shares screen credit for the script of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. "Oy, my Waterloo, my worst experience. Actually, the script was great, the movie was a mess. You can’t really judge the script based on what you saw on the screen. It got rephrased and messed with every inch of the way. Cumulatively, the effect was the movie is quite a bit different than the screenplay that I wrote. So I was very, very disappointed and I was very proud of the screenplay." Darabont wasn’t first out on the Frankenstein screenplay. "I came in because of my love for Shelley’s book and I felt that the screenplay as it stood had veered far afield from Shelley’s books and I was anxious to get back closer to the book. I was proud of that script. I think that was every bit as good as Shawshank. You ask me for my best work in features and I’ll pull out those two scripts, Shawshank and Frankenstein and hand them to you. I think what it boils down to is that the director there had a different idea than the writer did. Of course, mine is an absolutely subjective opinion, I’ve met people who thought it was absolutely brilliant. I was surprised by that. "I’ve asked myself many times, when you have a good script, why do you have to mess with it. I don’t want to come off sounding sour grapes. I have been treated well as a writer, but those occurrences have been rarer than my other experiences." My comment that a director likes to put his stamp on a screenplay elicited this response: "That may not be wrong, but then again, in all fairness, no two people think alike, and what one person, in this case the writer, sees as correct is maybe not going to be correct for the guy behind the camera. I don’t believe sets out to make a bad movie or to deteriorate a good script, it’s just that they think differently. That’s, of course, the danger in having the writer and director be a separate person. Sometimes that collaboration works. You’ve got a writer and a director thinking right along the same lines and that’s something really special, or you’ve got a director who can really improve what’s up there. Ego may have something to do with it, but there is this factor of just seeing things differently. A director has to walk on to the set every day convinced he’s making the best version of the movie that he can."

     Frank Darabont grew up mostly in LA from the age of twelve, and before that he bounced back and forth along the coast from San Francisco and back to LA. "I was living in Chicago until the age of five on the immigrant side of town. I was born in France in a Hungarian Refugee Camp. My folks split Hungary when the Russian tanks rolled in 1956 and I was born three years later. It may be easy to leap at the idea of growing up in the shadow of Hollywood as a direct inspiration for a career in films, but Darabont isn’t so sure where the impetus to seek out his fate came from: "I don’t know particularly. I think these are things where you’re born with an ingrained love of something and I think I was born with a love for what I’m doing now—basically telling stories mostly as it applies to film"
     The writer/director went to the movies every chance he could as a kid. "I loved movies when I was a kid. That, of course, really influences you, that more than anything makes you want to do it, if that’s your goal, your aim. More than movies for me, it was also books. I’ve always loved story telling, but books always had a special place for me. People pick their own path. Who knows why. I was just bound and determined to do this for a living." Were there any particular inspirations for Frank Darabont as a kid? "This is going to sound like a glib answer, but its not. Every movie that I ever saw that grabbed me, transported me, that told me something. I loved David Lean, I loved John Ford, I loved Kubrick. I also loved all the bad B monster movies. I’ve got a few Mants(Dante’s take-off on monster movies) in my background. I’m up at two o’clock in the morning watching Attack of the Mushroom People. This is really cool."
     Breaking into an industry as seductive as film has got to combine elements of determination and luck." . ‘Let me give you some of the background of it. It was an ongoing process of trying to find the path, which isn’t easy and there’s no prescribed path to take I should point out. After I graduated high school I was working whatever jobs I needed to survive, to make ends meet. A turning point for me was when I hired on my very first job in movies. I was hired as a production assistant on a movie called Hell Night, this really bad low budget movie starring Linda Blair. It was 1980, three years after I graduated high school. I worked that gig and then I did another production assistant gig the following year and then I moved into the art department. The art department is also called the set department where you are responsible for the sets and the locations. Anything that you see on the screen that is part of the environment is the job of the art department; that involves building sets, moving walls, bringing in couches, painting shit on the walls, whatever that entails. And that was a fabulous experience for me. I did that for six years. In the art department I was a set dresser. I always angled for the set dresser’s job which was the least sought after job. But it was the one I wanted the most because as a set dresser you’re always, always on the set. You’re in the eye of the hurricane. You’re right at the director’s elbow. You’re tweaking the set for every shot. As such you’re in perfect position to observe and absorb the process of filmmaking. It’s the best film school that there is if you want to be a director. It was great experience. The other advantage that it provided me which a normal nine-to-five gig never did, is that every job had an expiration date on it. I’d go and I’d work six weeks, two months, work my ass off around the clock and when I was I done I’d have enough money in the bank to stay home for a month and write. I was never one of these guys that can come home after working a nine hour day and sit down and write, I just can’t, so I’d buy myself a month of time and focus all my attention on writing. As soon as the bank account bottomed out, I’d get on the phone to my pal Greg Melton who was an art director by then and say, Greg get me on the next show, I’m broke and so I could work another one."

"Somewhere along the way I acquired an agent, a particularly good one, willing to put the time and effort into developing a new writer’s career, which is quite rare. His name was Alan Green, to whom Shawshank was dedicated by the way. Like only nine years after graduating high school I started working as a writer and haven’t stopped since."
     "During that time I was not just writing solo but I was also writing as a partner with my friend Chuck Russell(director of The Mask. Funny enough Chuck was the guy who hired me to be a PA on Hell Night. He was production manager. If you would have asked me at the time if Chuck Russell and I would still be hanging out and writing scripts together years later I would have looked at you like you were crazy. I’m not even sure if I liked the guy when I first met him," related Darabont with laughter in his voice. "Somewhere along the way we became pals, we became writing partners and we struggled as writers together as well and that paid off in 1986 with my first produced credit which was Nightmare on Elm Street III, which Chuck and I wrote together and he directed."
     Speaking about friend Chuck Russell’s hit movie, Darabont said: "I loved The Mask. I thought it was just a hoot. It’s really funny because The Mask and Shawshank came out the same year and you can see how wildly different those two movies are and they completely represent these wildly different sensibilities that Chuck and I have. The Mask is pure Chuck Russell. Shawshank is pure Frank Darabont. You wonder how the hell we ever worked together, but for some reason we really did have a good collaboration and we still do. Chuck’s great strength is what I call ‘the big wacky’. He brings out the wilder ideas, the great ideas to get big scenes out of me. On the other hand I play anchor to Chuck Russell and kind of ground him in human character things as we go along, so it’s a great balance."
     Russell did not get credit for the writing he did on The Mask as Darabont relates: "There was an arbitration that unfortunately Chuck lost. The Writer’s Guild arbitration always stacks the deck against the director, particularly when a rewrite happens. It’s understandable because they want to protect the writer from being ripped off. But then again, I think there are some unfair cases because Chuck did do a substantial rewrite that he's uncredited for. He’s too much of a gentleman to mention that, but I’ll mention it on his behalf. Arbitrations are funny things. You win some, you lose some. It all depends on somewhat nebulous guidelines provided by the Guild."     

     The unqualified success of The Shawshank Redemption is a major plateau in the career of this film artist. "I don’t know if there is necessarily like one turning point. I think there are constant turning point as you go along. It’s a bit of an organic on-going process. I mean, Shawshank certainly was a turning point . That’s been a nice turning point. Ultimately I don’t know what the result of that is because it’s still quite recent. I don’t know where that will take me, but it’s lovely to have the opportunities that it’s provided."
     Talking about The Shawshank Redemption is a pleasure, as you might imagine, for its director. I asked Darabont if he would call Shawshank a dark fairy tale. "Actually, I think I would call it a very light fairy tale. I think it’s a very uplifting film...I mean I goes through darkness certainly. You can’t reach for the light without going through darkness. Even back when I first read it in 1982, I thought my God, what an uplifting and moving and inspiring thesis on reaching for light. For me, that’s what it was all about. Consequently, I was very surprised in this day and age of Natural Born Killers some people complained about the violence in my movie. Come on." Though there is violence in Shawshank, the director does not feel that it’s exploited: "I don’t really think that it’s glamorized in the way Hollywood sometimes has a tendency to glamorize violence. In a way it’s very objective."
     Darabont can spend hours at the typewriter totally focused on his work. He even forgets to eat with coffee as the riving force. It took him a compact eight weeks to write the wonderful script for Shawshank Redemption. When directing Shawshank Frank found the task extremely physically taxing, but he was up to the task.
     Shawshank has very heavy narration, It’s an element that can sink a film, yet it works wonderfully in Shawshank, cashing in on the magic of the mellifluous tones of Morgan Freeman, who plays Red. "The narration gave me pause when I was writing the script. Like halfway through I suddenly froze and said ‘Oh my God what am I doing.’ Because people do sometimes bitch about narration. When it doesn’t work it really doesn’t work. Like Blade Runner. Blade Runner always struck me as an example of narration put on not as an intrinsic integral part of the story telling but somebody’s idea of a Band-Aid so the audience understands what the hell’s going on. At times I found it intrusive to an extreme, particularly when Roy Batty dies and there’s Ford watching him in the rain and he’s had this amazing little monologue about what he’s seen and experienced in his life and then he dies and it’s so emotional and then that stupid thudding narration kicks in. "I don’t know why he saved my life there, maybe he just didn’t want to die alone,..." I know all this shit. I don’t need to be told and have the emotion of the moment undercut. For the most part I can sit there and watch the movie either way with or without narration. But maybe that’s a reason not to have narration, if you can watch it one way or the other. In Shawshank, the novella was written by Stephen King in the first person. It had sought of very amiable folksy feel to the narrative as if Red himself were telling you the story. Red’s voice was so present to me in the book I really couldn’t imagine the movie without that voice. It just seems very intrinsic to the story telling. Nevertheless, as I was saying, halfway through the script I froze up...am I really misusing this...are people gonna like hate this because narration can be intrusive. I am guilty of telling rather than showing. So I had this momentary crisis, and then, as if a sign from God, I sat down and turned on HBO and it was the cable premiere of Goodfellas and I sat there with my jaw in my lap. I hadn’t seen the movie in about a year at that point. I loved it when I saw. When I saw it on cable it was like a sign because that movie is nothing but narration and the movie couldn’t exist without it."

There is a segment in Shawshank when one of the prisoners, Brooks, is released after spending much of his life behind bars. It is a long interlude depicting his exposure to "outside" life, and though I liked it and felt it worked, I wondered if Darabont ever had given serious consideration to losing it or cutting it down. ""Absolutely not. That’s the heart of Shawshank. That’s what it’s all about. I thought the Brooks segment worked best the way it was." In fact, with the foreshadowing by the Brooks interlude of Red’s later journey from prison, Darabont did tighten the later segment.
     I wondered whether that final scene with Red and Andy on the beach made Frank feel good knowing that he was going to deliver something to the audience that would really make them feel good. "Oh God yes. Well isn’t that really what filmmaking is. It’s about feeling an emotion and being able to communicate it to other people. That’s the heart of it. Yeah, it felt great. It felt great the first time we showed it at a test screening even though we were showing our work with temp sound and everything, to see the audience kind of lifted out of their seats at the end of that movie."
     Darabont acknowledges the fear that goes along with showing a film to an audience for the first time: "It’s the worst night of your life. You’re convinced that you’re having a heart attack. You’re sweating bullets. You know, it’s a work print and that alone drives you crazy. You’ve stolen the music from other movies, there are a million sound things that have to be attended to. It’s the worst possible technical way you can show a movie to an audience and you just suffer through every inch of it. The audience tends to be responding to it on an emotional level and that’s what you need a test screening for and that’s why it’s valuable, to see what works and what doesn’t."
     The preview process can be a dangerous trap for a filmmaker. The temptation to change an artistic vision, to mold it to what the audience wants and expects is enormous." That is a danger of course. My own personal experience on Shawshank, it was very valuable. It really told me that the movie was working and it pointed out, painful though it was, when parts of the movie weren’t working. There’s nothing more valuable than having somebody point to that something doesn’t belong there. You can sense it when you’re there(in the preview room), you can hear the audience breathing, you’re so in tune to every little ripple in the audience. It’s great when you agree with it and it’s great when the studio is not using the test screening process as a club to beat a filmmaker over the head with." Darabont was very happy working with Castle Rock as his studio and felt that Shawshank was protected by them and he was given absolute freedom to create.

Darabont doesn’t get out to the movies as much as he’d like, but he is a certifiable laserphile. The director plays his 800 plus disc collection through a Pioneer Elite CLD-97 and a Pioneer Elite 60" rear projection television. "This is kind of an interim system because what I’ve been hoping for is a Runco 900 projector with a Faroudja line doubler. I’ll be checking into it probably next year. For now I’ll just settle for the system I’ve got. I’m renovating my house at the moment and just a ton of money’s going down the chute. I just felt weird to spend that kind of money to get that system. The best I’ve seen is the Runco with the Faroudja. That was the closest thing I’ve seen to projected film. It was amazing."
     "I am not quite as demented about sound as a lot of people seem to be." Frank doesn’t have a surround sound system for now, though he will invest when he does his projection system. "I tossed on Apocalypse Now, you know the helicopter scene and it just kind of blew me out the wall. I’ve got a Pioneer, their big Kahuna, a 97." Apocalypse Now is one of Frank’s favorite lasers. "That is a really amazing transfer. That is a great disc. It’s not only a great war film, it’s a great piece of opera, and it’s also a great piece of introspective soul searching. I love the Aliens Special Edition that restored the missing material because I thought most of it was fabulous." The Mask, naturally, is another laser disc that Darabont thought looked really terrific. There are still some unopened lasers that Darabont is looking forward to ripping the cellophane, like The Howling: ""I love it. It’s great, it’s great. In fact I’ve kind of gotten to know Joe Dante a little bit and I always compliment on it when I see him. It’s one of those movies I’ve really seen that kind of effects work, amazing stuff. It may be old hat now, but if you think back it was amazing then. They had a problem finding the negative for the laser disc release, which is kind of extraordinary to me."
     "I’m looking forward to is the director’s cut of The Wild Bunch. It’s one of my favorites. I’ve been bitching about a decent version of the director’s cut, widescreen, and now there’s coming out with that thank God. There’s a movie that Sidney Lumet made called The Offence starring Sean Connery. An absolutely fantastic riveting film. Oh God I wish somebody would put that out."
     Director Darabont feels that the laser disc medium is a great learning tool for filmmakers. "I’ve stepped framed through certain sequences just to see how they were shot. The sequence in The Deer Hunter when they escape from the POW camp, when escape from that hell hole and they’re playing Russian roulette and De Niro turns the gun on their captures and there’s that incredible shoot-out...it happens so fast and it’s so powerful and so visual and you know everything that’s happening on some sort of almost subliminal level. It’s absolutely brilliantly shot." There are times when the writer consciously avoids certain films on laser. "When I was writing Frankenstein, I was not, very distinctly not, looking at other Frankenstein movies. I didn’t want that to pollute my process. With The Fan,(Darabont did a rewrite on the new Tony Scott movie.) I watched some baseball movies, if for nothing else to get a sense of the visual mythology that’s possible with a baseball film."

   Like every laser lover, Darabont has some pet peeves about the industry. "Laser rot would have to be number one on my list. It would seem they could do something about that. Another peeve of mine was that they would always release these films pan and scan and then later on they would come out with the letterbox so you have to buy it twice. Nowadays, they come out with it simultaneously both ways. But that hasn’t solved the special edition pet peeve, which is how many .......versions of Terminator can I buy. It’s nuts. They’ll do the original. Then they’ll do the one with the restored cut. Then they’ll do the one with the restored cut and the commentary. There could be seven versions of Terminator 2 out there. Give it to us once or twice, don’t give it to us seven times. It makes me crazy."      
     Speaking of multiples, Shawshank may be reappearing with additional materials included. ""In fact we’re talking now of possibly doing a special edition of Shawshank. Hopefully, it will happen. It wasn’t like some sneaky plan to sell you two versions of it, but I have to say there have been times when I thought, ‘there’s a conspiracy going on here. Now there’s this version of the thing.’ On Shawshank, certainly the commentary track is something people have been asking for." Will Darabont be recruiting any other principles from the movie to participate in the special edition? "Actually, I think it would be great to do it as a group effort. A couple of interviews couldn’t hurt and I wouldn’t mind showing a few of the deleted scenes."
     "The published screenplay for Shawshank is going to be out in October and on of the things that I decided to with it is kind of along the lines of what people do with a special edition laser disc, which is kind of examine what went on in terms of how the script start out and how the movie wound up. What’s the difference between what’s on the page and what’s on the screen and more to the point, why. What I did was I wrote a fairly involved addendum to the actual screenplay that describes scene by scene why stuff changed. It was a tremendous amount of fun to write and I think it’s something that folks are going to really enjoy. It was great to look back and examine the experience at your leisure."
     Laserphiles seem united on many fronts including their hatred of television commercials and impolite theater audiences. ""Commercials are really the devil’s work. I hate ‘em. I remember doing a direct to cable movie back in ’89, Buried Alive, for USA cable, which is commercial cable, so sure enough, every ten minutes, you try to sustain mood or build mood, you know it was a thriller and building mood is a delicate thing and every ten minutes along comes this "Lucky Dog" ad—come on, give me a break." Much of Frank’s theater going is at Director or Writer’s guild screenings. "You have a better chance for a decent audience. You know that you’re going to get a technically well projected film. You know people aren’t going to be talking, chatting, throwing popcorn throughout the thing. When I go to a theater I like to concentrate on the film that’s in front of me. Chuck Russell and I did The Blob. It’s a fun movie. We still get fan mail on it. You remember the scene in the theater where this one guy is sitting behind our main characters, talking through the movie. You notice that he’s the first one that the Blob eats. That’s my commentary on people who chatter through a movie. Wishful thinking on my part."
     "Once I’m done with The Fan, I owe Castle Rock two scripts that I’m going to be writing that I’m attached to direct. I’ll either be doing one or both depending. One is adaptation of another Stephen King novella called The Mist, which is probably one of the scariest hundred pages ever written. So I am going to get back to my roots and do a horror movie somewhere down the road. The other one is a Robert McCammon novel called Mime. An absolutely fabulous writer. I think he’s only had one thing adapted and was an episode of the Twilight Zone revival that William Friedkin directed."
     Any traps that were sprung when making Shawshank. "Every day is a set of traps that one needs to guard against. I think tops on my list is the self doubt trap. You go in with the best of intentions. In fact I was talking to Robert Benton(Nobody’s Fool, etc.) about this. We were both on a European press junket with our respective films in February, the feeling like a failure syndrome because you go in with these very keen ambitions and then the day always winds up as a set of compromises in one way or another because you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what you want to do. Benton put it into words when he said that’s why every day of shooting feels like a failure. This coming from him. Okay, so I figure I’m in pretty good company. But what Shawshank taught me was that it’s not a bad thing necessarily if you don’t have enough hours in the day you wind up thinking on your feet and relying on your instinct and sure enough the thing can turn out pretty well in the final analysis. So maybe next time I won’t be feeling like such a failure every day."