Background

Frank Darabont was born on the 28th of January, 1959 in a refugee camp in Montbeliard, France, the son of Hungarian parents who had fled Budapest during the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution. The family moved to the United States when Frank was a child. Frank was raised in Chicago, Illinois. But with the divorce of his parents when Darabont was five, he moved to California where he lived with his father. He had a tough childhood but his love for movies never left his mind.

Education

Frank Darabont attended Hollywood High School, from which he graduated in 1977. He did not move into college because he didn’t have a desire for anything but movies.

Career

At the beginning of his career, Frank Darabont worked at the famed Hollywood Egyptian Theater at the concession stand and as a seat finder. He did a lot of weird jobs. He was a forklift operator, bussed tables at The Old Spaghetti Factory on Sunset, he did whatever he had to do. Later, Frank was a production assistant on the 1981 low-budget film, Hell Night, starring Linda Blair. He spent the next six years working in the art department as a set dresser and in set construction while struggling to establish himself as a writer.

Darabont collaborated with author Stephen King in 1983 on the short film adaptation of The Woman in the Room. His first produced writing credit was on the 1987 film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, directed by Chuck Russell. In 1994, he was a director of The Shawshank Redemption. Darabont co-wrote the script for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a 1994 film directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring him and Robert De Niro. Frank again adapted a Stephen King novel for The Green Mile which he also directed and co-produced in 1999.

Michael Sloane, an old school friend, was the writer for Darabont’s next directorial effort, The Majestic, starring Jim Carrey, was released in December 2001. He executive-produced the thriller, Collateral in 2004, for DreamWorks, with Michael Mann directing and Tom Cruise starring. 2007 saw the release of The Mist, another Stephen King adaptation by Darabont as a screenwriter, director, and producer.

Since then Darabont has focused his efforts on TV. In January 2010, AMC officially announced that it had ordered a pilot for a possible series adapted from The Walking Dead comic book series, with Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd acting as executive producers and Darabont writing and directing. He was fired in late 2011 from The Walking Dead. In 2013, he was the producer and director of a Mob City but the series was canceled after only one season. In 2014, Godzilla came out, he helped to rewrite the script for this film. Darabont joined Turner Classic Movies in 2019 to host an evening of 1950s science fiction films.

Achievements

• Frank Darabont has been one of the top script doctors and rewrites in Hollywood going back to the early 1990s. He is one of only six filmmakers in history with the unique distinction of having his first two feature films receive nominations for the Best Picture Academy Award: 1994's The Shawshank Redemption, with a total of seven nominations and 1999's The Green Mile with four nominations.
  
  Darabont himself collected Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for each film, that both based on works by Stephen King, as well as nominations for both films from the Director's Guild of America, and a nomination from the Writers Guild of America for The Shawshank Redemption. He won the Humanitas Prize, the PEN Center USA West Award, and the Scriptor Award for his screenplay of The Shawshank Redemption. For The Green Mile, he won the Broadcast Film Critics prize for his screenplay adaptation, and two People's Choice Awards in the Best Dramatic Film and Best Picture categories.
  
  Darabont was awarded the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award for his contribution to cinema at the 2012 Austin Film Festival.
  
  

Works

More photos

• film

  • Shawshank Redemption 1994
  • The Green Mile 1999
  • Hell Night 1981
  • Crimes of Passion 1984
  • The Majestic 2001
  • The Salton Sea 2001
  • Buried Alive 1990
  • Collateral 2004
  • The Mist 2007
  • Mob City 2013
  • The Walking Dead: Season 1 2011
  • Entourage 2009
  • The Shield: Season 4 2007

Religion

Frank Darabont is a non-religious person.

Views

According to Darabont, it's not a matter of going out and doing X, Y, and Z, and then all of a sudden you're a filmmaker. He says it takes instinct, talent, effort, persistence, and a belief in yourself, intangible things that either can't be learned or aren't as straightforward as walking up on a stage and receiving a piece of paper that will get you where you want to go.

Quotations: "A film career is not necessarily something you earn with your diploma at film school. A career is built on an endless chain of flukey circumstances generated by your efforts and your persistence. Luck has a lot to do with it, but you manufacture your own luck by working your ass off for it".

"If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet".

"I find Quentin's work very interesting because he does dabble so well in the nihilistic world, but yet, there's a real streak of humanity in his work. It's not about nihilism, it's about people in a sense operating as honorably as they can in a nihilistic world".

"If you look at a classic horror movie like The Exorcist, part of what makes it so scary is that it feels so damn real. If you add a layer of too much hysterical, theatrical reality, then audiences take it less seriously. But if you play it for absolute reality, then the dread and the horror - which is why we go to horror movies in the first place - is reinforced".

"The Majestic is a movie I'm very proud of and I really love. It achieved exactly what I set out to make. And I find it very moving. It's a very sweet and quaint movie. That's always a tough sell".

"The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another".

"Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique completely separate entities. Sometimes an artist rises above his source material. I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels".

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Frank Darabont’s height is 183 cm. He is bold and has hazel eyes.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Frank Darabont has to have one of the most consistent career arcs of any living film director". - Tom Shone in the New York Times.

Connections

Frank Darabont is married to Karyn Wagner.

Wife:

Karyn Wagner

Karyn Wagner was born as Karyn Elizabeth Wagner. She is a successful costume designer and has also worked in various costume departments for different movies. She is known for her work on Preacher that came out in 2016, Underground in 2016 and The Notebook in 2004.

Friend:

Stephen King

Friend:

Drew Struzan

Drew Struzan is an American movie poster artist. He is known for his work on Planet of the Apes, which came out in 2001, War of the Worlds in 2005 and The Mist in 2007.