“I learned a lot of my values growing up watching movies. Of course, they made a lot more movies like that then than they are currently.”
Frank Darabont
In the Q&A with Frank Darabont at the Zürich Film Festival he was asked if the DVD sales from The Shawshank Redemption were his safe security in old age and he replied, “It’s so not.” He went on to explain as a young screenwriter and new director he made a deal that wasn’t meant to make him rich in his old age. (Keep in mind he was offered a lot of money to let Rob Reiner direct the film. Reiner had just directed A Few Good Men, and Darabont had never directed a feature film.) Money was not the bottom line for Darabont, and he expounded on that fact that safe security in old age is ultimately not the point of making a film.
“It’s not what happens when I’m old, it’s what happens after I’m gone. Do people still hear the voice of that story being told a hundred years after I’m dead. I mean, that’s really what cinema is for—I don’t care what Frank Capra’s bank account was when he died. I care that It’s a Wonderful Life moves the shit out of me. They’re never going to talk about your bank account when you’re dead, but they will talk about maybe the movies you left behind if you really cared about what you did.”
Frank Darabont
File that one in the folder marked, “You can’t take it with you.”
