Warner Bros.
Hope. It’s a hard thing to hold onto at the best of times, let alone infuse into a movie. Not just any movie either, but one that regularly appears on lists of the greatest movies ever made. However, against all the odds, it’s something that filmmaker Frank Darabont managed to do with his life-affirming classic The Shawshank Redemption.
“The movie’s like a Rorschach test,” suggests Darabont, speaking to us as his enduring prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman turns 30 years old. “People can project their own traumas and difficulties onto that film and gain some uplift and encouragement from it, and that’s pretty cool. It’s not a feeling you get that often as a filmmaker,” he adds. “To have even one of those in your life is a real gift.”
Helping fans overcome odds is a rather apt legacy for Darabont’s 1994 drama. An adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, it tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a wrongly imprisoned convict and the only innocent man in Shawshank State Penitentiary. It’s here, locked inside this brutal and unforgiving institution, where Andy meets fellow lifer Red (Freeman) and has his relationship with hope put to the ultimate test.
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