Frank Darabont Was Happily ‘Dragged’ Out of Retirement to Direct Two ‘Stranger Things’ Final Season Episodes: The Series ‘Has So Much Heart’
Exactly 30 years after “The Shawshank Redemption,” director Frank Darabont is helming his next massive project: Two episodes of blockbuster series “Stranger Things 5.”
Darabont famously stepped away from filmmaking after his short-lived TNT series “Mob City” that aired for one season in 2013. His last film was 2007’s “The Mist,” adapted from a Stephen King novel. Now, “The Green Mile” helmer is explaining why he came out of an 11-year retirement to direct two episodes of the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things.”
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“What really dragged me out of retirement was that my wife and I really love this show,” Darabont told The Daily Beast about the viral Netflix sci-fi series. “Our content now is so filled with horrible people doing horrible things for greedy reasons but ‘Stranger Things’ has so much heart. That positivity is something I really responded to.”
Darabont added about whether or not he will return to directing, “Who knows? I haven’t missed the business but I have missed being on set with creative people. … It may well be one and done, but we’ve still got time.”
Darabont developed “The Walking Dead” adaptation for TV in 2010, but was fired in the middle of production on Season 2 in 2011 over budget issues. The former showrunner filed a lawsuit against the AMC production in December 2013, claiming $280 million in damages over allegedly being denied rightful profit participation. Darabont went on to create show “Mob City,” which aired in 2013.
“The Walking Dead” alum Sarah Wayne Callies said during Jon Bernthal’s “Real Ones” podcast in 2022 that AMC alleged that Darabont was “[in]experienced as a showrunner, and he’s unprepared, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
However, Callies disagreed. “To me, it just felt like an assassination,” Callies said. “This motherfucker, one month before we started shooting Season 2, dropped six completed scripts in my lap and said, ‘You can learn these lines. They’re not going to change.’ And they were wonderful. This might be a controversial thing to say … you cannot beat his writing. You can’t. And there are some really good people who’ve been writing on that show since, and I got a lot of love and respect for them. Nobody writes like Frank Darabont. That’s a whole different level.”
Darabont is a three-time Oscar nominee, and his filmmaking gravitas no doubt will add to the cinematic structure that “Stranger Things” executive producer and director Shawn Levy had teased for Season 5.
Levy said during the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in November 2023 that the final season will be “epic in its cinematic scope” especially, with episodes clocking in at close to two hours.
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