Five years after writer/director Frank Darabont´s acclaimed debut The Shawshank Redemption received seven Oscar nominations, he´s finally made his second film: The Green Mile. Not that he´s picky or anything. “I was offered a lot of things after Shawshank but nothing that I found very inspiring,” explains Darabont. “So it was really waiting to fall in love. It´s like, don´t get married until you really fall in love. Thank God Stephen King is out there!”

The King connection was a big part of Darabont´s reason. Just as Shawshank was adapted from one of his short stories, so too The Green Mile is an adaptation of the writer´s hugely successful 1996 serialised novel of the same name. Not only that: like Shawshank, it´s a period prison drama. But there any similarities between the two films end. Set in Louisiana in 1935 on death row - a place known to guards and inmates alike as ‘the green mile´ because of the shiny green linoleum that leads from the cells to the electric chair - Darabont´s new film is a complex mix of fantasy and thriller.

Overseeing the three occupants of death row are four guards, led by Tom Hanks´ Paul Edgecomb. The killers are a mix: a Native American played by Graham Greene; a Cajun (Michael Jeter); and a wild young psychopath, superbly played by Sam Rockwell. Then a fourth prisoner arrives: John Coffey, a seven-foot black man who has been convicted of the shocking murder of two young girls. But Edgecomb and the other guards soon come to realise that their new inmate is no ordinary convict: he is a man who possesses unusual and extraordinary powers.

“Thank God Stephen King is out there... He´s a hell of a story-teller!” Frank Darabont

The mixture of suspense and the supernatural is classic King. “He’s a hell of a story-teller. He’s old-fashioned - in the best sense of old-fashioned,” says Darabont, who is patently a huge fan of the writer. “I find his work very absorbing,” he explains. “He has a way of really involving you in the worlds that he presents. His characters are particularly compelling: there’s a real thread of humanity in his work. He’s been dismissed by literary snobs as a populist - I mean, heaven forbid we should have a plot! - but they said the same thing about Dickens.”