20 Things You Somehow Missed In The Shawshank Redemption

18. This Movie Feels Kind Of Familiar

Shawshank Redemption
Columbia Pictures

When turning a short story into a feature-length film, screenwriters often need to restructure and reshape the material to make sure there's enough there to make a full film. For Frank Darabont, that restructuring meant copping Martin Scorsese's 1990 film Goodfellas.

If you're familiar with both Goodfellas and The Shawshank Redemption, you won't be able to unsee the structural similarities between the two: The narration, the editing techniques, the passage of time, it's all taken straight from Scorsese and given right to Shawshank.

It's even been said that Darabont would watch Goodfellas every Sunday during the shoot to make sure he was staying on-course.

Contributor

Matthew Austin hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.