The movie "The Shawshank Redemption", released 25 years ago, is an "American costume drama" with a solemn, old-fashioned rhythm. Played by Tim Robbins, Andy Dufran, who was wrongly convicted of killing his wife and her lover and was sentenced to life in prison. Morgan Freeman plays lifelong best friend Redding.
In The Shawshank Redemption, people have been seeking redemption and freedom for decades. While movie reviews were mostly positive, the premiere weekend didn't even make $1 million, eventually reaching about $25 million, which wasn't close enough to marketing costs and upfront budgets.
Today, however, The Shawshank Redemption has surpassed 2008 champion The Godfather with more than 1 million votes and become one of IMDB's 250 most popular films. Readers of the British film magazine Empire ranked The Shawshank Redemption 4th in the 2008 "500 Greatest Films of All Time" selection. In 2011, The Shawshank Redemption won the BBC's most popular film polls.

As Morgan Freeman put it: "Wherever you go, people say, 'The Shawshank Redemption' is the greatest movie I've ever seen!' Tim Robbins also said: "All over the world, everywhere I go, people say, 'That movie changed my life.'" ’”
How could such a 142-minute prison movie use "life imprisonment" to influence the world and thrill a Nobel Peace Prize winner? To borrow a phrase from the movie, "Geology is the study of stress and time." It's true! It's stress and time. ”
screenplay
Screenwriter and director Frank De la Bonte now owns a Spanish villa in los Angeles' Los Angeles area of Los Angeles (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie also lived here). But in the 1980s, before Mr. Dellabont could be nominated for an Oscar, he was just another bankrupt follower in Hollywood. He wrote his name on the director's chair, "I don't have any career, I rely on small-budget films to survive!" He said. But Drabante, a fan of "fanatical and loyal" Stephen King, had the illusion of turning one of the author's stories into a movie.
Not many novelists' work shines like Stephen King's in the hearts and minds of many film studios. The famous director Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, based on his novel, aroused strong resentment among writers. However, Stephen King likes to grant the rights to short stories to some obscure directors for $1. In 1983, d'Albant, in his 20s, gave Stephen King a dollar to shoot The Woman in the Room, one of the few amateur short films based on his work, and the author loved it. But What Drabante was really obsessed with was The Shawshank Redemption, and his ultimate goal was to make a feature film. But when his resume was enough to support his wishes, he found Stephen King again.
Drabante was blessed by Stephen King and began to adapt The Shawshank Redemption. The 96-page novel is nothing like a movie, primarily Red's reflections on Andy, who is also a prisoner. Even Stephen King "didn't know how to make it into a movie", and he himself was "not ready", drabent said.
Five years later, he still has to write scripts for other films to make ends meet.
Dellabante "wanted to respect the original", mimicking the novel's narrative thrust in his script, even quoting some dialogue word for word. The other plot points are entirely his invention, which makes the theme of the film more distinct. In Stephen King's story, a small character, Brooks, dies peacefully in an old man's home. The film, on the other hand, uses poignant montages about Brooks' inability to appear outside on parole and his subsequent desperate hanging. De la Bonter condenses several of Stephen King's jailers into the corrupt warden Norton, who eventually blows his head out instead of reviewing his crimes with the Goddess of Justice.
The late great director Hitchcock reportedly said, "To make a great movie, you need three things: the script, the script, and the script." Robbins said of the adaptation that De la Bonte completed, "It's the best script I've ever read." Freeman said that even if it wasn't the best script, it would definitely be at the top.
It took 8 weeks for Delabonte to complete the first draft of the script, and his script was fortunate to land on the desk of Liz, a producer of "prison fans." "For some reason, I like to read books about prisons," she said.
The history of prison movies dates back to the earliest days of Hollywood, with genres such as The Big House, Cool Luke, Barbiloon, and Escape from Alcatraz. But prison movies never really made money, which made Liz want to quit the genre. It wasn't until the Drapant script piqued her enthusiasm and she was so engrossed in it that she said, "I don't need to read it all," she said, "That's the best script I've ever read." ”
Determine the director
Luckily, director Rob Reina (who, according to Delabont, was "the founder and godfather of the studio") "flipped through" the script. The screenwriter was then given an almost impossible bid to refuse: Reyner was rumored to be directing The Shawshank Redemption himself for $3 million.
Rayner himself dug into different chapters and found inspiration when he adapted his novella Body into the Oscar-nominated film Walk With Me in 1986. By the '90s, after the success of "Walk with Me," "Harry and Sally," and especially 1992's "Few Good Guys," Reina seemed to see movie star Tom Cruise as Andy Duffron in The Shawshank Redemption.
Born in a French refugee camp fleeing Hungary after the 1956 Revolution and later growing up in Los Angeles, Drabante was tempted. "In my struggling writer's days, I barely managed to afford rent," he said. He said that if he could direct "The Shawshank Redemption", no matter what its final profit was, it would put De la Bonte at the top of the profession. Liz confirmed that Delabonte was "very bitter" about the offer. It was as if he were to screw the screws, and if he gave up his job as a director to Rayner, he would fund any other film he wanted to direct. Surprisingly, despite being only 33 years old, despite having "a lump of money" in front of him, Despite having a "lump of money" in front of him, Delabonte preferred to direct his own script.
However, as his reputation as a "gentleman" shows, Rayner instead became a mentor to Derabonte. "I find it interesting that Stephen King's 'Walk with Me' and 'The Shawshank Redemption,' two of the most talked about adaptations, are from the same novella, and they don't rely on classic horror or supernatural elements to tell the story," Reina said. In a strange way, they expose Stephen King's delicate observations and descriptions of characters and dialogues as a writer.
Film casting
After the director was in place, the casting phone rang. The narrator of Stephen King's story was a white Irishman, hence the nickname "Red (Red)". "My brain started thinking about some of my long-standing favorite actors, like Gene Heckman and Robert Duval," Drabant said. For one reason or another, none of them were available. In the end, producer Liz didn't consider race, but instead suggested that Morgan Freeman play the role.
Beginning in the 1970s, Freeman served as the host of the company's "Easy Reader" program at the American Public Broadcasting Corporation. Freeman said That The Shawshank Redemption was definitely an exciting script that he wanted to play no matter which role he played.
Then, there's the choice of the protagonist, Andy Dufran. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Kevin Costner passed the audition primary. The director liked Cruise, and Cruise liked the script for the film, but he was reluctant to accept the direction of an unknown director. Cruise had considered it, but the premise of his signing was for Rayner to direct. But after the producers told him that the director would only be De la Bonte, Cruise decided not to act.
Freeman insisted on suggesting Tim Robbins. Unlike some movie stars who are surprisingly short, actor-director Robbins holds a lesser-known Oscar record: the Award for Best Supporting Actor. By the early '90s, Robbins had emerged from small roles in Ship of Love and Top Gun. His journey to star began with Durham's Bull in 1988. In 1992, Robbins won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor for his role as a Hollywood studio executive in the film Playboy, and Newsweek called Robbins a "popular figure."
He rode his bike to the test set and spoke passionately about the hedge fund financiers who had been pushed out of Manhattan, like andy, as he played.
Robbins used his A-list star status to insist that De la Bonte's inexperience (he had previously directed only one film for television, Buried Alive), could be compensated for by experienced cinematographer Roger Deakins. The cast was enriched by Bob Gunton, who was primarily a stage and television actor at the time as the hypocritical warden Norton; Clancy Brown, who had played Sean Penn in Bad Boys as Captain Hadley the sadist; and veteran actor James Whitmore, who played brooks, a beloved old criminal.
Filming location
Shooting locations is often a tolerable affair, and Shawshank Prison's schedule is particularly brutal: Workers work 15 to 18 hours a day, six days a week, at the former Ohio State Correctional House in Mansfield and on nearby construction sites, including huge cell blocks.
A bakery in Mansfield now sells replica cakes from this Gothic prison. Today, the prison has become a tourist attraction for Pilgrims to Shawshank Prison. But in 1993, the prison was closed three years ago because of inhumane living conditions, "a very desolate place!" Drabante said. Robbins added that the film employs ex-prisoners who share personal stories similar to those in The Shawshank Redemption, as well as stories of prison guards acting violently and throwing people off their roofs.
Robbins later recalled: "It wasn't uncomfortable to be there for three months because Andy was full of hope inside. But sometimes when I'm shooting, these stories really affect me. The "back sour" scene in the movie is also Robbins' favorite: the film opens a little more than half an hour ago, and Andy has been in prison for two years. Andy risked being thrown off the roof by Captain Hadley just to get some "soapy water" for his cellmates. At this point, his character changed from victim to a whole new legend. The prisoners drank beer on the sunny prison roof, and Andy himself was no longer the point.
Freeman said the scene was filmed on a "very, very difficult day." "We're actually asphalting the roof. And tar does not remain hot and sticky for a long time. It dries and hardens, so you're really working. For different shooting angles, you have to do it over and over again. ”
The scene, Drabante recalls, was a complex "technical problem" because he had to match the camera's movements very precisely with some of Freeman's pre-recorded narratives, requiring one shot after another. "Then I remember we shot well. I turned around, and there were tears streaming down my face behind me. Freeman said: "At the end of the day we were all exhausted and it was very exciting when the actors could finally sit down and have a beer. ”
When asked about the tensions on the set of The Shawshank Redemption, Robbins simply flashed his notoriously mysterious smile. And Freeman said: "Most of the unhappiness stems from DellaBonte's repeated requests for a remake, but my answer is no, I don't want to waste time. The performance itself isn't hard, but doing something that doesn't make much sense over and over again tends to diminish energy. ”
Commenting on his film debut, De la Bonte said: "I learned a lot that directors really need an internal barometer to gauge the needs of any actor. ”
Drabante likens the pressure of major photography to being "beaten with a stick", as constant artistic compromises make "shooting every day feel like failure". But while editing, Liz said, a film ran for nearly two and a half hours in its most streamlined form, with the first edit being "very long." One scene the producer insisted on keeping was her original idea: Red and Andy reunited on the beach in Zwatanejo, Mexico, after being released from prison. The ending of Delabont's original story is as vague as the story of a novel — Red is on a bus hoping to go to Mexico. De laBonte saw Liz's ending as commercial and sentimental. However, she said that if the aim is to bring them together, why not let the audience see their happiness?
Released and awarded
When the film was released on September 23, 1994, expectations were high. And in Hollywood, there's a tradition of asking filmmakers to drive from theater to theater on premiere night, standing behind crowds and watching audiences laugh and cry at all the carefully constructed moments. Liz recalls that she and Delabonte went to Hollywood's "coolest" cinema, built in the 1960s and located on sunset strip with more than 900 seats, but was empty at the time. Liz blamed this on the "bad Los Angeles Times Review," while Freeman blamed the film's initial failure on the title "Redemption."
Fans will remember Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump, two other films released in 1994, but their fates are diametrically opposed. Both films quickly became cultural phenomena — cited, imitated, and eventually swallowed up global box office receipts — while the films Freeman began to call "amazing" were left with little attention.
But in early 1995, The Shawshank Redemption received seven nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. However, the film was snubbed on Oscar night, which was an important night for Forrest Gump. But when it was released on VHS shortly after the Oscars, the award gave Shawshank a second life. It made the original novel the most popular book of the year.
Later, American Cable got the rights, and through television, the real "resonance" between "The Shawshank Redemption" and its audience began. Freeman said the film's popularity "is not overgrown." "It's an oak tree or something like that, growing slowly."
summary
Essentially, it's a rare film. As Robbins puts it, "It's a movie about two men's friendship. Freeman went a step further: "For me, it was a sincere friendship. Andy and Red's relationship on the screen, after decades of cultivation, has gradually become the most intimate friendship on the movie screen."
Like "Nowhere is home" in The Wizard of Oz, Shawshank's quote is now part of a beloved conversational vocabulary. "Be busy living or busy dying!" Freeman says that's certainly the one that resonates the most. You know, you don't want it for you