I Am Frank Darabont ...
FRANK DARABONT
The writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist on the key films and friendships of his life…
Empire: You let a movie, Law Abiding Citizen, last year, and haven’t been linked with anything since. Is it tough out there? Frank Darabont: I think between the long-delayed SAG strike, the economic collapse and the paradigm shift of what kind of movies the studios want to make at the exclusion of all else, it’s been a dead time. The town’s in a coma. We’re selling more tickets than ever, but we’re making less movies than ever. Only the big-ticket, blockbuster variety of things is getting made. It seems that the middle-class of movies is disappearing. E: I once had a conversation with Guillermo del Toro on the set of Hellboy II in which he said pretty much the same thing. FD: Guillermo and I have talked about this ourselves. You get together with your pals and say, what the hell’s going on in this town? Everybody’s puzzling. The paradigm shift is a pretty profound one. Nobody’s sorted out where it’s going to land. What number is the wheel going to land on? It seems to be a very deeply corporatized mentality now. I can’t tell you how many offices I’ve been in lately where they hand you some friggin’ toy from Japan or wherever and say, ‘can you make a movie out of this?’ It might be popular with the kids, but I don’t know how to make a story out of that. There’s a lot of us scratching our heads and wondering which direction we’d like to go. E: Which direction are you trying to go in? FD: Still trying to get Fahrenheit 451 made. That’s my Grail. Depends on finding the lead. I may be close, right now. Maybe. But it’s one of those things where the movie’s not going to be hideously expensive compared to what they’re spending money on these days, but it’s still not a cheap movie either. You do need that person you can latch onto, and you need the right actor for the role, otherwise it’s pointless. This has definitely been a bit of a journey trying to go ahead and get that made. It’s been a weird sensation to have the head of a studio, who shall remain nameless, read that script and say, ‘ohmigod, this is the best script I’ve read since I started running this studio. It’s so metaphorical, it’s so smart, I can’t possibly greenlight this!’ Which brings me back to the old joke, ‘sorry, we don’t want this, we’re only buying shit this week’. I said, why? He said, ‘How the hell am I going to sell this to thirteen year olds?’ I said, how about we make a really good movie and I bet the thirteen year olds show up? But that’s not how they think anymore. Now it’s the branded property that must give the executives some comfort level of thinking there might be a result, so they don’t lose their jobs. E: But it works sometimes. Star Trek, for example, was great this summer. FD: Isn’t it? I had Simon Pegg over the other night. We’ve become really good pals. I had a dozen friends round the table, I love to do that sometimes, and get a bunch of eclectic people together. Writers and artists like Drew Struzan and actors, and very bright people. You ply them with enough pasta and wine and you get some great conversations going. We were all talking to Simon about Star Trek and everyone really loved it. I went primarily out of loyalty to Simon. I think if your friends do a movie, you’re honour-bound to see what it is. I’ve shied away from blockbusters in the last decade or so because of SBS – Summer Blockbuster Syndrome – which is going to pay to see a movie when you know it’s going to suck, and you pay anyway. I’ve been burned too often. But I’m glad I saw this one. It was really good. E: It’s pacy and relentless and genuinely thrilling. FD: It’s clever. It’s thought out. My one complaint? JJ, dude, you gotta put Simon in the movie more. He’s so good. I’m hoping the next one has more Scotty. Chris Pine was just fantastic and Zachary Quinto blew my mind. He so nailed it. Hey, I’m not the guy railing against big-budget movies. I love them myself if they’re good. But that’s the key phrase. So few seem to be doing anything other than rehashing old ideas. E: You’ve mentioned a couple of very good friends already, which brings me to Stephen King. FD: Steve has proven to be an exceptional friend to me. God knows, as a source of stories to tell, he’s been very significant to my career. I don’t think I’m being overly modest to say that I think I have a directing career because of Steve King, because where the hell was I going to find a story as good as Shawshank to tell? Steve’s definitely been a huge influence on me as a storyteller. I feel like, from the age of 17 on, I’ve grown up reading his stuff and he’s been a very generous friend in many, many ways. What really blew me away was the fact that he came to the press junket in New York for The Mist – this is the man whose story has been adapted and that really was the limit of his involvement with the production. It’s not like he was a producer on it. It’s not like he directed the movie himself or wrote the screenplay. But I think more out of friendship to me and the fact that I had shown him a rough cut and he was really excited about the movie, he came to the press junket. You see how exhausting they are for the people being junketed and he took time out of what is actually a very busy and committed schedule to come and promote the movie with us. He spent days there in New York going through that whole process. If that isn’t the gesture of a mensch, I don’t know what is! I was very pleased and actually kind of blown away that he would make that effort. E: So it’s a friendship you value, clearly. FD: Steve’s a guy I would do anything for. He’s been so generous to me. If we’re lucky in this life, I think we have these angels who come along and mentor us or promote us or in some way provide the means to achieve things, to grow as a person. All the good positive things that someone can have an effect on your life, those are the angels. I’ve had a few, but I’d say that Steve probably has the gold star at the top of the list. I can’t say enough about him. E: You met after asking him for the rights to make The Woman In The Room, right? FD: It was originally a fan letter. I was 21 years old and I was writing basically a ‘Dear Mr. King’ letter, seeking permission to make a short film out of Woman In The Room, which I don’t suggest anybody see because it’s the work of a very earnest young filmmaker. But Steve gave me his permission and liked the result – I think his opinion was maybe more generous than my movie deserved, but he loved the results enough to give me the rights to Shawshank some years later. That letter would have been in 1980 and then Shawshank came out in 1994. So my relationship between those years was mostly correspondence and friendly enough, but more cordial than as friends. The moment I realised that maybe there’s a friendship happening here is that Steve came out to LA on one of his very rare visits to watch the rough cut of the film and there used to be a fantastic café, Sundance Café, on Robertson – no longer there – but I remember going out after the screening with Steve ad sitting there on their little patio for a few hours, having cheeseburgers with Steve and really hitting it off. It was the first time we’d had the chance to sit as guys face to face for any length of time, just chatting. It’s become a great friendship from there, still somewhat long-distance. E: Do you still, as a fan, pinch yourself that you’re friends with a guy that you idolised? FD: Email has helped facilitate the friendship quite a bit, you can fire off a ‘hey, how are ya?’ in about ten seconds. It’s bizarre to be friends with somebody like that. There’s a moment where you go, ‘man, that’s cool that I can send Stephen King an email’. But then they’re not Stephen King in capital letters, they’re just your pal Steve, who happens to be the phenomenally successful writer. E: Who were your influences as a young guy, trying to break into the business? FD: I would have to give Chuck Russell a lot of credit there. It’s not like he was, when I met him, a well-established filmmaker. He had yet to direct his first film, which was Nightmare on Elm Street 3. But it’s not like somebody was on the other side of the magic door and they plucked me out of the crowd. But in a sense he recognised a kindred spirit in me and invited me to write with him. We had our struggling years together and that was a great, enriching experience. He was making a better living than I was and I was a poor set decorator. I was making hardly any money, barely enough to keep a roof over my head. But Chuck believed in me and was always a big cheerleader and we worked very welll together and we’ve been each other’s boosters for all those years. Still are. I still love him like a brother. He’s one of the funniest men I’ve ever met and one of the dearest. E: Were there any film directors who inspired you as a kid? FD: Oh good heavens, yes. The Ray Harryhausen pictures, the George Pal movies, any movie I loved added a penny to the jar of desire. I found Kubrick incredibly inspiring when I was younger; still do. Capra. I admired Kubrick for his intellect and Capra for his heart. You can probably see the influences there in my work, though one can’t possibly compare achievements. You can see the influence trickle down into my movie-loving brain. E: Was there a moment when you realised that you wanted to be a director? FD: I have one very specific memory where the idea of wanting to be a filmmaker became a pronounced, coherent thought, that crystalline moment where out of the primordial pond of the idea, a bubble of gas rises to the top and pops. ‘Wow, I want to do this guy’s job’. That’s when I saw a movie that’s never been terribly well-heralded, which was THX 1138. I remember going to see, as a twelve year-old, the Brotherhood Of Satan, this low-budget picture I believed directed by LQ Jones [actually Bernard McEveety; Jones wrote it]. You’ll have to fact-check that because I’m 50 now and shit does slide. [We did] The second feature playing was THX 1138, which shows you how little faith the distributor had in it. I remember seeing it and having this fantastic epiphanous thrill going through me. I felt the intellect and the worldview of the filmmaker imprinted upon every frame of that movie. I thought it was a brilliant, spare, almost laser-guided view of the world. That’s when I realised that film is at its best as an art-form of self-expression. Having sat through The Brotherhood of Satan twice to see THX a second time, I remember thinking, ‘that’s what I want to do’. It was the first concrete realisation that that was what I wanted to do. E: How did you start out? FD: I started to try to write screenplays when I was 14, in Junior High. By then I was a very deeply committed Star Trek fan, because the original series was in re-runs, in syndication. That was when being a Star Trek fan branded you an oddball. My very first attempt at screenplay writing was a Star Trek script on my mother’s Smith Corona typewriter. I never imagined they’d make movies out of this thing. I wasn’t doing it with any notion of it ever possibly getting made but it was where my head was at, at that time. It was practice. E: When did you start getting serious? FD: After high school. Always working on a borrowed typewriter. My friend Bret had an electric typewriter and I borrowed it. He didn’t see it for eight months! He knew what I was up to. I have two memories: I had two best friends in high school and one of them, Kevin Rock, his father was Philip Rock, who was a novelist and had a tremendously successful best-seller called The Passing Bells, which is about World War I and its effect on the class system in England at the time. When I first became friends with Kevin, his dad was struggling, doing the Dirty Harry novelisation just to put food on the table. There was no McKee course. Aside from one Syd Field book there was nothing telling you how to write a screenplay, or what one looked like. They weren’t available to the public. If you want to see the screenplay for Bonnie & Clyde, now you can order oneonline. But Phil Rock had half a screenplay he’d tried to write as a screenplay some years prior and he pulled it out of his file and gave it to me. He said, ‘this is what a screenplay looks like’. I still have that half a script. It’s at my desk at home, where I write. I pull it out every once in a while and look at it. Then I had another great stroke of generosity from my friend Greg Melton, who helped me keep body and soul together in the struggling writer years by hiring me to do set dressing or construction. He’s since become a profoundly gifted production designer; he built the market in The Mist in six weeks. He did all the glorious design work in The Majestic, building that movie theatre from scratch. The saga of what a great production designer does – what they can bring, what they do bring to a movie can be so awesome. I don’t use that phrase like skateboarders use it! Greg’s one of my oldest pals. We were puppies together in high school. I was in that struggling writer phase in 1984, getting jobs with him in set construction, and Greg said to me one day, you need to get a computer. If you’re serious about wanting to be a writer, get a computer, which was like saying to me, you need to get a 40-acre estate in Paris. There was no way I could afford a computer. It would have cost about $1200, with a printer. It was a lot of money to me and I had no credit, either. I couldn’t even get a friggin’ gas card. Bless his heart, he said he would co-sign for me, and I went and bought this steam-driven steel suitcase with a screen yay big and it didn’t even have a hard drive. He co-signed the loan for me and I faithfully paid that sonuvabitch every month and it allowed me to become more productive than I could have been with a typewriter. It doesn’t sound like it was a big deal, but believe me, it was. When you have a friend go out on a limb and show faith in you, you know what friends are. And now working with him on set every day is one of the great blessings. My God, we’ve known each other since we were fourteen years old. He’s really got my back and I’ve got his. To have that level of trust and comradeship with somebody is a tremendous thing. Being there with a friend is a tremendous thing. E: It seems that you value the friendships you’ve made over the years. FD: At the end of the day, isn’t that what we really have left to us? All this other stuff is so transitory. The thing you can hold onto is a friendship or relationship that really matters. My favourite thing is going and having those Comic-Con dinners [Darabont hosts an annual Empire Comic-Con dinner on the event’s opening night] or having people over to the house here in LA and there are friends around the table and they’re not measured by their importance or their credits or their heat-o-meter, whatever the hell winds up passing for important these days. They’re people I genuinely like and they’re terribly interesting and are not limited to the narrow parameters of the business. You can’t decide who you’re going to be friends with. That just happens, or it doesn’t. You bumble through life and find these friendships and all you can do is be grateful for them.
