The Normandy D-Day sequence in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) was an addition Darabont personally suggested during his script revisions.
He is a good friend of Stephen King.
Frank Darabont has been one of Hollywood's top script doctors and rewriters since the early 1990s. The projects he has worked on as an uncredited writer include: The Rocketeer (1991), Copycat (1995), The Fan (1996), Eraser (1996), Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Majestic (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Salton Sea (2002), Collateral (2004), Law Abiding Citizen (2009) and, most recently, Godzilla (2014).
After working closely with Steven Spielberg for more than a year on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), the script was personally rejected by producer George Lucas, who took it upon himself to rewrite it to his own taste. Spielberg loved the script, but deferred to his longtime friend Lucas on the matter.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) ranks 23rd on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Most Inspiring Films of All Time.
He has directed a film selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry as being 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically' significant: The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
He was born in 1959 in a refugee camp in France; his family had been settled there shortly after the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Budapest uprising.
In his youth, after seeing George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971), he was inspired to pursue a film career.
In 2004 he was hired to write the script for Mission: Impossible III (2006); screenwriters Robert Towne and Dean Georgaris had failed to deliver drafts that were good enough. Darabont's script was to be polished by Joe Carnahan, who was initially attached to direct after David Fincher's departure. In the end, Cruise hired J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to write the script for the project.
He wrote a draft of the script for Collateral (2004).
He directed 2 actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Morgan Freeman (Best Actor, The Shawshank Redemption (1994)) and Michael Clarke Duncan (Best Supporting Actor, The Green Mile (1999)).
He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977 and did not go to college.
His first job after finishing school was working as a concession stand attendant and usher at the famous Hollywood Egyptian Theatre, where he could watch films for free.
His first novel, 'Walpuski's Typewriter', was published in 2005.
He was shortlisted to direct Hunter: Winter's War (2016) and eventually agreed to co-write and direct the film, but later backed out.
He is a good friend of film poster artist Drew Struzan.
He started out in cinema as a production assistant on films such as Hell Night (1981), The Seduction (1982) and Trancers (1984).
He sold his first script, Black Cat Run, in 1986, but it was not produced until more than a decade later, as a television film of the same name. Chuck Russell, a producer on Hell Night and The Seduction, approached Darabont with an offer to become his writing partner; Russell had become interested in his writing after reading a spec script Darabont wrote for the M*A*S*H (1972) television series. The pair began working on a script for their planned remake of The Blob (1958)...
He directed two films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).
He is in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the middle of pre-production on 'Stephen King's The Mist'.
He is currently working on adapting Stephen King's short story 'The Mist' for the screen. As of October 2004 no studio announcement had been made, but if everything goes according to plan, the final product should be released in the second half of 2006. (Source: Daniel Robert Epstein's interview with Frank Darabont http://suicidegirls.com/words/Frank+Darabont/ )
At one point he was set to remake Forbidden Planet, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest but set in space.