Frank Darabont hit Hollywood with the one-two punch of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile for his directorial debut and follow-up. One would think those two films would remain high watermarks for the rest of his career. However, he says The Mist was his most satisfying filmmaking experience to date.
Frank Darabont on Stephen King's The Mist
"I knew going in and even before we started because I had decided to embrace a much faster and looser style than I've done before," said Darabont. "That can be really terrific. It can be really exhilarating and in some ways liberating because it gets you out of your comfort zone of what you know and what you've done before. You're trying on a whole different approach really, so I was very eager to do it even before we started shooting. The shoot just reinforced the pleasure I was having. We wound up shooting actually very, very fast. It's like a 37 day shoot."
Expect future Darabont projects to adopt this style. "It depends honestly on the material. I don't think that this sort of fast, loose documentary approach would have been applicable to, say, Shawshank or Green Mile. Depending on the needs of any given material, I would certainly not hesitate to do it again. Only when appropriate though."
For his third collaboration with Stephen King, Darabont is realistic about the chances for a trifecta of best picture nominations. "The genre very seldom gets that kind of attention so I'm tending to doubt it. Really, the intention and purpose of the film is not quite in the pocket of that sort of thing so I don't think so. Hopefully though it just thrills audiences and does the job it set out to do."
Fans of King's novella will notice that Darabont has significantly embellished the original ending. "I didn't really change it so much as add to it. What I did was add something that was conclusive. Even Stephen King recognized that for purposes of a film, a more conclusive approach might be best. He would ask me time to time through the years if I came up with an ending yet or not. Actually, I came up with this ending based on something that's actually in Stephen King's story. It felt like a natural extension of what he was doing. I wanted him to read the script once I was done with it. My big question to him was, 'What do you think of the ending, Stephen?' He was really delighted with it. His response to me was that he loved the ending and wished he'd thought of it, which felt like it put me on some pretty solid ground. Obviously when adapting somebody like King, somebody who's work you really admire, you don't want to do something that doesn't please the author. Just on a personal level, that meant a lot to me."
Stephen King's The Mist opens to theaters on November 21st.
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