The Shawshank Redemption at 30: How one of 1994’s biggest flops became a cinematic classic

The producers wanted Tom Cruise. The creek in its most famous scene was toxic. And barely anyone saw it upon release. So why, Tom Fordy asks, did Frank Darabont’s seemingly doomed Stephen King adaptation grow into one of the most celebrated films of all time?

Doing hard time: Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in the celebrated ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (Shutterstock)

I remember well my introduction to The Shawshank Redemption. Someone I once knew – a true Nineties lad’s lad – handed me a VHS copy and told me it was “a beautiful film”. He was not the sort of bloke who ordinarily talked about beautiful art. But he was right. Beneath the stone walls, the brutality, and the tragedy of an innocent man condemned to a life term, The Shawshank Redemption was that very thing: a story of profound beauty.

“This was a miracle,” says executive producer David Lester. “This story was so human.” It’s incredible – no, criminal – that the film flopped when it was released on this day 30 years ago. But – just as Tim Robbins’s Andy Dufresne crawled through a “river of s***” and came out clean on the other side – The Shawshank Redemption emerged as one of the great cultural touchstones of its decade, if not the entirety of cinema history. It’s ranked on the Internet Movie Database as the greatest film ever made.

“All I know,” Robbins told Mark Kermode in 2004, “is that there isn’t a day when I’m not approached about that film – approached by people who say how important that film is to them, who tell me that they’ve seen it 20, 30, 40 times, and who are just so... thankful.”

Based on a Stephen King novella and directed by Frank Darabont, it tells the story of Forties banker Andy, who’s jailed for murdering his wife and her lover. Inside Shawshank State Prison, he befriends Red (Morgan Freeman) and whiles away the years by chiselling rocks, rehauling the prison library, and finding a creative use for pin-up posters.

The cast and crew, of course, knew how good it was from Darabont’s script alone. “It’s really quite a remarkable piece,” Lester says, talking from Los Angeles via Zoom. “I never read a better script in my life, right from the jump.”

It was something of a redemption story for Darabont, too. At the time, he was a jobbing screenwriter whose biggest credits included A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Fly II. He’d previously adapted one of King’s stories, The Woman in the Room, for a 1983 short. Darabont had bought the rights to that story for just $1 (King had a longstanding offer that allowed aspiring filmmakers to adapt his short stories for a single dollar), and came back to King to purchase the rights – this time for a reported $5,000 (£3,750) – to Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The novella was a part of King’s Different Seasons collection that also included The Body, which was adapted as the nostalgic favourite, Stand by Me.

That creek… It was perfectly sited, just beautiful – right there by the penitentiary. But we tested it and followed it – it went to a sewage treatment plant

David Lester, executive producer

King himself was unsure about how Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption could work as a movie. Filmmaker Rob Reiner, though, knew exactly what Darabont had achieved when the script landed on the desk of his production company, Castle Rock. Reiner – who directed Stand by Me and another previous King adaptation, Misery – offered Darabont a rumoured $3m if Reiner could direct it himself.

That Darabont declined the mega-money deal is one of modern cinema’s great gambles. Reiner became a mentor to Darabont. But as executive producer Liz Glotzer told Vanity Fair in 2019, Reiner would jokingly grumble that despite directing Stand by Me – and having a copy of Different Seasons on his desk for years – he’d never thought to read any of the other stories in the collection.

Reiner had Tom Cruise in mind for the role of Andy Dufresne. But eventual stars Robbins and Freeman are so integral to the film – the heart and soul of Shawshank State Prison. “Neither one of them I could find fault with,” says Lester. “And I looked at every second of the dailies.” It’s one of the films that made Freeman an elder statesman of Oscar-worthy Hollywood fare.

The friendship between Andy and Red is gradual and palpable. Cautious at first, Red spends two decades trying to unpick the mystery of who Andy Dufresne is. Their bond forms and solidifies – an organic relationship that somehow draws you in, too. But Shawshank also boasts supreme villainy: Clancy Brown as the brutal, brilliantly terrifying prison guard captain Byron Hadley, and Bob Gunton as corrupt, merciless prison warden Samuel Norton, who – far from his bible-thumping image – uses Andy’s accountancy skills to launder money.

Part of Shawshank’s irony – or, indeed, its beauty – is that the worst people are the ones controlling the prison from the perimeter, the institution personified. The men doing hard time are the ones with heart, like it’s a byproduct of being locked in there. Every prisoner maintains his innocence (“Didn’t do it! Lawyer f****d me!”), though for the most part they’re just victims of their younger selves’ stupidity. One especially pure-hearted prisoner, Brooks (James Whitmore), can’t cope with the outside world when he’s released and takes his own life – this was one of Darabont’s additions to King’s story.

Untested director: Frank Darabont on the set (Shutterstock)

Shawshank itself is crucial to the film. The prison is set in Maine, though they filmed at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. The prison began construction in 1886 and was in use until 1990. “It was worse than foreboding,” says Lester. “The courts closed it a few years before for inhumane conditions. Then it had been left to Ohio’s winters. It was a devastating environment when we looked at it – already one of the most depressing pieces of architecture conceivable, and completely in ruin inside. I walked around, contemplating what it would take just to get it back to being a s****y prison.”

Though cast and crew look back on The Shawshank Redemption as a generally harmonious experience, Lester recalls that the gloom of the prison walls made it a “gruelling” shoot at times. “It had the prevailing ambience of a building that had seen so much misery in it for so very long,” he says. “It was a penitentiary for almost a century. Those walls didn’t forget – they let that angst and karma leach out so that the whole crew working in that environment was depressed. I’m not a New Age-y person but everyone who walked into that penitentiary felt the same thing.”

There were also some tensions over the working days – an often-discussed point about the film’s production. Darabont, effectively learning on the job as a feature film director, requested multiple reshoots – which could be tough on the actors. At times, Freeman refused to keep shooting. “Anytime you have a first-time director, you have a learning curve,” says Lester, whose CV also includes Star Wars and Bull Durham. “That was true in Frank’s case, and you can’t hold it against anybody. He had every right in the world to figure it out as he went along… and he certainly didn’t blow it!”

Indeed, within the film’s two-hour-plus runtime, Darabont crafts scenes that stand up to almost anything from Hollywood history, such as Andy playing The Marriage of Figaro to the stunned prison yard. For this writer, however, the real spirit of Shawshank is captured in an earlier scene, when – during a day’s work tarring a roof – Andy smartly negotiates a case of cold beers for his fellow prisoners. It’s one of those small glimpses of humanity – the prisoners clenching the rare moments that make them feel like ordinary men. The film is so effective that you can almost taste that beer and feel the chill and condensation of the bottles.

Prison breaker: Robbins in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (Shutterstock)

In terms of the film’s legacy, its most obviously iconic moment comes when Andy (30-year spoiler warning incoming) escapes. He crawls through a 500-yard sewage pipe, spills out into a creek, and – with his arms out Christ-like – stands in the rain a free man. Cinematographer Roger Deakins has claimed to “hate” the scene because he lit it too brightly. That image, however, stands triumphantly. Not just as a great movie moment, but a cinematic goliath – instantly recognisable as the summation of everything that’s made The Shawshank Redemption resonate for 30 years. A massive helping of hope and sentimentality.

Thirty years on, the escape has been parodied so many times – and become such a cultural staple – that the element of surprise is long gone. Though it still makes you squirm when he squeezes into that pipe – as if this viewing is the one when he won’t make it out.

One great irony is that while the sewage in the pipe was perfectly sanitary, the creek was, in fact, toxic. “That f*****g creek…” says Lester. “It was perfectly sited, just beautiful – right there by the penitentiary. But we tested it and followed it – it went to a sewage treatment plant. There was no way we could use that creek as it was.” They had to build dams to make it usable, though Robbins remembered that the crew “had a shower ready for me at all times.”

Iconic: The original, memorable poster art for the film (Castle Rock Entertainment)

The Shawshank Redemption opened on 23 September 1994. Test screening reactions and reviews were strong but – from a budget of $25m – made a measly $18m in its first run. The film’s title, which now rolls off the tongue as a well-recognised classic – like Citizen Kane or It’s a Wonderful Life – has often been blamed for the film’s initial failure.

“Castle Rock wanted to put on a contest for anyone who worked at the company to come up with a better name for the movie – and nobody could, nobody won the prize!” says Lester, laughing.

It was nominated for (but didn’t win) seven Academy Awards, though the film’s popularity really spread through reruns on America’s TNT network, home video, and through personal recommendations – blokes telling one another how beautiful it is, for instance. Word, eventually, got out.