Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, has words for the millions of people who believe his 1994 prison drama is the greatest film of all time. “I think that’s a little crackers, to be honest, especially when you think of the other films on the list.” He means films such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Lolita, Vertigo and foreign-language contenders like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

But, hey, pointy-headed film critics can have their high­falutin’ crushes. There’s no getting round the fact that The Shawshank Redemption, which stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, is consistently being voted the best film ever in all sorts of readers’ polls. It currently sits atop the 250 best movies of all time on the world’s most popular cinema website, imdb.com, as it has done for most of the past decade. Darabont, who is both slightly bemused by and immensely proud of its astonishingly deep resonance with audiences, points to a framed cover of Empire, the popular British movie magazine, on the wall behind the desk in his office. Empire’s readers have also voted Shawshank their favourite film of all time.

What gives? How has a film set mainly in a bleak prison, in which women are barely glimpsed, by an unknown first-time director, adapted from a little-known Stephen King novella, become such an enduring crowd-pleaser? Shawshank tells the story of the friendship of two prison inmates, Andy, played by Robbins, and Red, played by Freeman. It’s a film that can make strong men — including the rugby star Jonny Wilkinson, who loves it — blub like babies and insist that they will change their lives pronto. Devotees quote its life-affirming mantras: “You can get busy living or get busy dying”; “Fear can keep you a prisoner. Hope can set you free”.

What makes Shawshank’s remarkable staying power even more intriguing is that it barely made a splash when it was released in September 1994. Small-town reviewers liked it, but sophisticated big-city critics were snooty. Kenneth Turan, of the Los Angeles Times, in a review that still makes Darabont wince — “downright hateful”, he calls it — said that the film “makes us feel we’re doing harder time than the folks inside”. The Washington Post observed: “The story becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.”

“Films that play their cards from the heart are often viewed as not hip enough to like,” Darabont counters.

The film’s box office was disappointing. It took only $18m when it was first released. Darabont says he was nonplussed, because he knew how much people liked the film when they saw it. A few months later, it had a second lease of life when it was unexpectedly nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, best actor for Freeman, best cinematography for Roger Deakins and best adapted screenplay for Darabont. Unfortunately, it won none, and the nominations brought surprisingly few new people into cinemas: it made only $10m more when it was rereleased. “I couldn’t understand why, even with seven Oscar nominations, we still couldn’t beg people to come to the theatres,” Darabont says. “I think because it was a ‘prison movie’, people didn’t really want to sit through what they thought was going to be a bummer.”

By the time The Shawshank Redemption was out of cinemas, a few weeks after the Oscars, it had made only $28.3m at the US box office. It had barely recouped its production costs of $28m, less than half the total spend once prints, marketing and Oscar campaigns have been paid for. And that might have been the sorry end of it.

Fifteen years later, sitting in his spacious office in a Spanish-style house in Los Feliz, just east of Hollywood, Darabont clearly relishes his memories of his first and best-loved film. A large, enthusiastic and engaging man, with a deep, sonorous voice, heavy-lidded eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, a bald pate, a long, angular nose and a greying goatee, he favours loud Hawaiian-style shirts and loose white cotton trousers. He gets up to pad around the room in bare feet, a born storyteller.

Although they didn’t meet until around the time he made Shawshank, he says he had been in contact with Stephen King since the early 1980s. In 1983, he had directed a short, The Woman in the Room, adapted from one of King’s short stories. The bestselling author, as he has done with a number of aspiring film-makers wanting to adapt his stories, allowed Darabont an option to make the film, for only $1. King was pleased with the result, and in 1987 Darabont optioned another King story, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption — again for $1 — which he always hoped would be the first feature he’d direct. By the time he did, he had become a successful screenwriter, whose credits included A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Why did he want Shawshank to be his directorial debut? “The love and hope and optimism to be found in even bleak circumstances really spoke to me,” he says. But why? “Probably because of a lot of personal experiences. Coming to these shores as a child of refugees who had left their homeland with just the clothes on their back.”

Darabont’s parents had fled Communist Hungary in 1956. He was born in a refugee camp in France. The family came to the USA on a boat soon after. When he was about five, after his parents had split up, Darabont, his mother and brother settled in LA. His father ended up in San Francisco, working as a machinist for United Airlines. Darabont attended Hollywood High, where he says he spent most of his time doing theatre. After school, he managed to get a job as a PA on Hell Night, a low-budget movie. He then worked for a number of years as a set dresser. “That was my film school,” he says. “As a set dresser, you learn a tremendous amount. You see a lot of directors working with a lot of actors, the good and the bad.” All the while he was writing, in the hope of becoming a director.

Darabont says that once he had finished the Shawshank script, it was surprisingly easy to get the money, from a company called Castle Rock, part-owned by the director Rob Reiner, which had a deal with Columbia Pictures. The casting of the two leads was, Darabont recalls, “an amazing piece of luck”. Particularly the suggestion, from an executive at Castle Rock, to cast Freeman as Red, when the story, and Darabont’s script, had him as a white Irishman. Darabont is amused that Red is being played by the black actor Reg E Cathey in the new West End stage adaptation at Wyndham’s Theatre: “The notion of him ever being white and Irish is long gone.”

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