Inspiration

Eventually, Frank Darabont got the ball rolling on the script, though quickly found he was unhappy with how he was approaching the story.

The director felt he was doing the audience a disservice by "telling instead of showing" with Red's narration, and was ready to start from scratch.

However, after watching Martin Scorsese's 'Goodfellas', Frank felt as though it would be OK to keep the narration in.

He recalled: "I couldn’t imagine the story working some other way without that voice. And I thought, okay, it’s got to be narration. Half of what’s interesting about the story are the insights of this man. So I started writing it, and I got really freaked out halfway through. I suddenly thought, oh my God, I’m breaking the rule. I’m going to be damned to movie hell. I’m telling instead of showing. I’m relying too much on it. As if a sign from God, I turned on cable that night and it’s the premiere of 'Goodfellas'. And I thought, 'this is a really great movie and it has a lot of voice-over.' It had been about a year since I had seen it in the theaters, and I sat and watched it again. And I thought, 'I’m a piker, man, I’m a stingy little man when it comes to narration compared to these guys" [Nicholas Pilleggi and Martin Scorcese]."

As for the narration itself, that would be the first of Morgan Freeman's many he has become famed for.