The Shawshank Redemption was the film that kicked off Frank Darabont's career. Before his work on this film, Darabont had been mainly involved in smaller works, especially in the horror genre, assisting on such films as Hell Night, The Seduction, and Trancers.
Darabont's first work as a director was a short film adapted from Stephen King's The Woman in the Room. Although Darabont was not happy with how the film turned out, it led to a close association with Stephen King, who gave him the "handshake deal" rights to Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, a novella from King's Different Seasons.
Eventually, Darabont made good on his deal with Stephen King by writing and directing The Shawshank Redemption, beginning work in 1992. For the movie, Darabont received a budget of $2.5 million from Rob Reiner, who had previously adapted Stephen King's The Body, another novella from Different Seasons, into the 1986 film Stand By Me. Reiner desperately wanted to direct the film, and offered Darabont between two and three million dollars to do so, but Darabont refused, saying, "you can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money and, you know, die without ever having done the thing you set out to do."
In addition to directing the film, Darabont also wrote the screenplay over a period of 8 weeks. He compared the story to other "tall tales" of Hollywood yore, such as the work of Frank Capra, films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life. In an interview on the occasion of the film's 20th anniversary in 2014, Darabont said of his process as a director, "These guys had already developed a friendship and an effortless chemistry by the time we had started shooting, I was always on the outside of that, and I was content to be, because the bonding really had to happen within the cast. I just needed to let that happen and to be smart enough to point the camera at them. A smart director gets out of the way of that and keeps the train going."
