Biographie

The D-Day sequence at Normandy, in Steven Spielberg's Il faut sauver le soldat Ryan (1998), was an addition that Darabont himself proposed during script revisions.

Good friends with Stephen King.

Frank Darabont has been one of the top script doctors and rewrites in Hollywood going back to the early 1990s. Among the projects he has performed uncredited writing on include: Rocketeer (1991), Copycat (1995), Le Fan (1996), L'Effaceur (1996), Il faut sauver le soldat Ryan (1998), The Majestic (2001), Minority Report (2002), Salton Sea (2002), Collatéral (2004), Que justice soit faite (2009) and most recently Godzilla (2014).

After closely working for more than a year with Steven Spielberg on a script for Indiana Jones et le Royaume du crâne de cristal (2008), the script was personally rejected by producer George Lucas who had taken it upon himself to rewrite the script to his liking. Spielberg loved the script, but deferred to longtime pal Lucas on the matter.

Les Évadés (1994) is ranked #23 on the American Film Institute's 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time.

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. [Oct. 1994, "Premiere" magazine]

[on Quentin Tarantino from an interview in Creative Screenwriting] 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 the nihilism, it's about people in a sense operating as honorably as they can in a nihilistic world.

[on Stephen King from an interview in Creative Screenwriting] We have a joke now - because the first two films I directed were period prison movies - that my directing career will stall unless he writes another period prison story.

[on his rejected script for Indiana Jones et le Royaume du crâne de cristal (2008) (aka Indiana Jones 4)] Steven [Steven Spielberg] was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Les Aventuriers de l'arche perdue (1981). That's really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you're working on as much as I love the "Indiana Jones" films. And then you have George Lucas read it and say, "Yeah, I don't think so, I don't like it". And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts. You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say, "Enough of that".

If you look at a classic horror movie like L'Exorciste (1973), 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.