The three big Hollywood stars who were invited before Tim Robbins to play the lead role in ‘A Dream of Freedom’ | Films

‘A Dream of Freedom’ is one of those films that resist the effects of time and even get better as the years go by. Especially because it wasn’t a box office success when released exactly 30 years ago, quite the opposite.

It obtained a frustrating result (28 million dollars, a little above the 25 million budget), despite several Oscar nominations – 7 in total, including Best Film, but it did not win any awards – and was only properly rediscovered by the public, who began to give it its due value, through pay TV soon after.

Today, it is a modern classic, with behind-the-scenes stories as interesting as the plot built on Stephen King’s original short story on which ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ is based, contained in the book ‘The Four Seasons’.

One of the most unlikely ‘stories’ concerns the three of Hollywood’s biggest stars considered for the role of Andy Dufresne, the banker who goes to a soul-devouring prison in Maine, in the 1940s, after being convicted of the murders of his wife and husband. your lover. In that hostile environment, where he cannot trust the police, the cruel warden and several of the other inmates, he ends up establishing a touching relationship with Red (a character who would be played magnificently by Morgan Freeman).

‘A Dream of Freedom’ had King’s text as its signature, but a debutant director – Frank Darabont, until then the screenwriter of B horror films of dubious quality, such as ‘The Fly 2’ and ‘The Killer Blob’.

That alone was enough to keep agents away from the big fish in the film industry. But not enough to intimidate the producers or Darabont, since they already had the “no.”

Another asset was in the script itself, refined by Darabont, which Freeman, already a veteran at that time, described as the best he had ever gotten his hands on.

With the pages in tow, contact was made with Tom Hanks – at the time the greatest actor in the world, who would have two Oscar wins in a row (something very rare), for ‘Philadelphia’ (1993) and ‘Forrest Gump – The Storyteller ‘ (1994).

But he showed no interest – the fact is that he must have felt a certain regret as the star did not hesitate at the next opportunity to star in a Stephen King/Frank Darabont project, ‘A Miracle Waiting’, five years later.

Next, Kevin Costner was tried, also without success. The actor and director was riding high in terms of popularity, with films such as ‘The Bodyguard’ (1992), alongside Whitney Houston, and ‘A Perfect World’ (1993), by Clint Eastwood after also having two Oscars to call his own – those for Best Film (as producer) and Best Director for ‘Dances with Wolves’ (1990).

He was a guy with so much prestige in the industry that they gave him 175 million dollars to make the most expensive film up to that time, ‘Waterworld’, released a year after ‘A Dream of Freedom, and considered the film that gave biggest loss ever.

After that, going to Shawshank prison for a while wouldn’t seem like such a bad idea anymore.

However, according to information from ‘Vanity Fair’ magazine, the person who came closest to signing a contract and presenting himself on set as Andy was Tom Cruise. The young star was racking up one hit after another that decade, but he still lacked definitive critical respect.

Even though he is one of the best-known faces in the world, he has not been nominated for an Oscar since 1990 with ‘Born on the 4th of July’, until then the only time the Academy had noticed his talent.

‘A Dream of Freedom’, therefore, a serious project, dense drama, appeared as a great opportunity for this next step of combining commercial success with respectability. Cruise even read the script with Darabont, but then declined for fear of working with an “inexperienced director”.

He preferred that the film be handled by Rob Reiner, with whom he had already worked on ‘Questão de Honra’ (1992). “Rob replied to Cruise: ‘No, if you do it, it will be with Darabont, it’s his vision’. So, Tom Cruise no longer wanted the role,” revealed producer Liz Glotzer.

He’s another guy who must have also revised his concepts because two years later he agreed to play on a set led by a filmmaker with only two films under his belt and more history as a screenwriter, Cameron Crowe. And with ‘Jerry Maguire the Great Virada’ he obtained his second nomination for the golden statuette. Since then, it is worth noting, Tom Cruise is one of the stars who most invests in young filmmakers.

The gods of cinema wrote correctly with crooked lines (very different from the magnificent script for ‘A Dream of Freedom’, which are all in their place) and the role ended up falling into the lap of Tim Robbins, much less known than the intended trio initially, but on the rise in the industry especially after ‘The Gambler’ (1992), by Robert Altman, a thriller in which he plays an unscrupulous Hollywood producer, look how coincidental it is with the entire context we have just reported.

Andy from ‘A Dream of Freedom’, the actor makes no secret of it, is the biggest character of his career, the film for which he is recognized by people on the street.

“It’s really a huge blessing. When you’re in something that’s the most popular movie of all time, you can cross it off your bucket list,” Robbins said in an interview, no doubt referring to the No. footage ranks among the top 250 films of all time on IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base), the largest library of film and TV information on the web.

Check out the trailer for the modern classic ‘A Dream of Freedom’ below.