“The Shawshank Redemption”’s Triumphant Escape Scene Found Tim Robbins Filming in a Creek Filled with Real Cow Poop

“Actors can be real troopers sometimes,” director Frank Darabont said of the scene recently

Thirty years after The Shawshank Redemption opened in U.S. theaters on Sept. 23, 1994, director Frank Darabont revealed the lengths Tim Robbins went to in portraying the film’s hero.

In a recent interview marking the film’s 30th anniversary, Darabont told The Daily Beast that he cast Robbins to play Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and incarcerated at the titular Shawshank Prison, at the suggestion of co-star Morgan Freeman. Darabont said the Bull Durham star went so far as to put himself in “solitary confinement” in an effort to understand what his character was experiencing.

“Not overnight though,” the director explained. “After an hour or two he said, ‘OK, that’s enough’ and I don’t blame him.”

When it came to filming Andy’s triumphant escape from Shawshank, however, Robbins came a lot closer to his character’s experience. The sequence saw the character crawling through a sewage pipe, and in the film’s narration, Freeman’s character recounts how Andy “crawled through a river of s--- and came out clean on the other side clean.”

Not so for Robbins, whose iconic scene in the rain outside the prison was shot in less than sanitary conditions.

“It’s a glorious moment, right? Everybody feels their soul being uplifted,” Darabont said of the image of Robbins with his arms outstretched in the rain. “Meanwhile, we were out in this horrible little creek that was filled with cow poop.”

“They had to dam the creek to get the water level up and pour sterilizing stuff in there so Tim wouldn’t get some horrible disease,” the director continued. “Actors can be real troopers sometimes because sliding out of that pipe into that muck was so gross. To convey that incredible moment while covered in cow urine? It’s amazing.”

Related: Tim Robbins Remembers 'Beautiful Gesture' Made by Mom That Stayed with Him His 'Entire Life'

Darabont also looked back at the film’s trajectory from relative box office disappointment to cult classic in the years after its theatrical release.

“It was kind of a marginal failure in 1994, yet it became the most rented video of 1995. I think that was for a number of reasons, primarily because it was nominated for seven Academy Awards,” he said. Those included a nomination for Best Picture, a Best Actor nod for Freeman and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Darabont, who adapted the film from Stephen King’s 1982 novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.”

“We didn’t win a stinking award, but it really piqued people’s interest,” Darabont said.

Darabont, who went on to write and direct two more Stephen King adaptations (1999’s The Green Mile and 2007’s The Mist) and recently came out of retirement to direct two episodes of the final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, credited that interest and frequent airing on TV with The Shawshank Redemption’s staying power.

Related: Tim Robbins Is 'Open to the Idea' of a Film Reunion with 'The Shawshank Redemption' Costar Morgan Freeman

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“It kind of put it in the same category as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca,” he said. “Not in terms of quality, but once you get played regularly on television, audiences can really discover it and that’s what happened to Shawshank.”

“It is a movie about hope. It’s about redemption and how we can improve the world around us,” Darabont continued. “I’ve gotten letters from people who have seen the movie and it changed their lives. That’s a profound legacy.”

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