As many times as the movie is played on cable TV, you may have memorized the dialogue from The Shawshank Redemption. You probably know the movie was directed by Frank Darabont, based on the Stephen King story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.” But there’s a lot of things about how the film came to be that you don’t know. They are fairly interesting things, like:
5. Darabont wrote the script in eight weeks before pitching it to Castle Rock Entertainment. He decided to drop the “Rita Hayworth” part of the novella because actresses sent their resumes in for consideration thinking it was a Rita Hayworth biopic. During the casting process, Darabont even received a call from an agent who represented a supermodel; he swore the script was the best she had ever read and that she’d be perfect for the (non-existent) part of Hayworth.
9. Originally, all of Morgan Freeman’s voiceover was recorded before any of the film was shot. The fact that much of it syncs up to the onscreen action (see: the scene on the roof where the inmates drink beer) isn’t simple editing. Darabont would play back the recorded voiceover on set during each take for the actors to specifically play off of the audio. But the audio quality of his voiceover was too poor to include in the movie due to tape hiss, so Freeman had to re-record the entire voiceover in post-production.
12. None of the close-up shots of Andy’s hands or feet are Tim Robbins. They’re director Frank Darabont.
There’s plenty more movie trivia about The Shawshank Redemption at mental_floss.