Shawshank Redemption's journey from flop to classic

The producers wanted Tom Cruise. The creek in its most famous scene was toxic. And barely anyone saw it upon its release 30 years ago. So what changed, asks Tom Fordy

- Tom Fordy

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 shit” 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.”