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Marcia Gay Harden: “But I’m a divisive leader, whereas he’s trying to be a unified leader. And that’s the interesting thing; one leader hurts community and hurts the potential for survival and the other one doesn’t.”

Thomas Jane: “Well I find it really fascinating - and I’m hoping that somebody who sees the movie points this out – is that every, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that every decision that David makes turns out to be a disaster!

Every time, by trying to do the right thing, every single time…”

Frank Darabont: “But it sounds like the smart thing.”

Thomas Jane: “Smart, logical, reasonable thing to do and every single turn, it turns out to be complete and utter failure - a complete disaster. And I just like, I love that about the movie, the story, the character – what it says about trying to do the right thing.”

Greg Nicotero: “Because he’s like the guy next door to you. He’s not Indiana Jones or anything, he just happens to be a painter. He’s your neighbor; he’s your friend that you see getting his mail, which is what is great about all the characters in the movie. There were 47 principles, I think, and 70 extras. I remember one day Frank saying, ‘Man, I’ve got so many people in this market, we must crazy.’ Because you’re dealing with, it’s not like you’ve got one room with a couple people. It’s an entire supermarket with different stories and different interactions all through the entire market. You’ve got to follow the storyline of each one of them.

It’s as if everybody in this room got sealed in and how you would deal with it. People find their niche and the interesting thing about David’s character that I, even watching him act, was like, ‘Yeah, that guy would be your neighbor.’ You watch him rise and try the best that he can. He doesn’t know all the answers, but he does what he thinks is best.”

Marcia Harden: “Well, also, there’s not a lot of, ‘Make my day,’ and Die Hard, those kind of lines, either. In fact the people who have some of the most lines - typical of that were like Frances Sternhagen. ‘I’ve got a lot of peas!’”

How does the experience in this film based on a Stephen King novel compare to your experience directing the other two films Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile?

Frank Darabont: “Night and day different, night and day different. I chose to make it night and day different because really the tonality of this particular story and movie wanted to be different. It didn’t want to have that precision, for lack of a better word. No actually, it’s a really good word; it’s a pretty precise word. There was enormous precision in the films I made in the past, very clearly thought out. You could see that the kid who grew up watching Stanley Kubrick movies made those films. There was this tremendous control and that becomes its own shackle after a while. You think, ‘Okay, screw that. I’ve played Beethoven’s Ninth with a sympathy orchestra. Let’s go play some jazz. Let’s go grab an instrument, and if we miss some notes, then that’s actually part of the point of it.’

It was a completely different 180 experience for me. For me, probably the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Win lose or draw, if it’s a hit, if it’s a flop, it’s the movie where I actually learned to love directing, truly. I never did before. I found it enormously satisfying and rewarding in a lot of ways, but I never enjoyed it because there was tremendous pressure I was putting on myself to try and achieve some ephemeral notion of perfection. ‘F**k perfection, let’s have fun. Let’s get in there and roll around in the mud because sometimes that’s fantastic.’ It feels tremendously vital to me. Some of my favorite movies have done that when they’ve been done well, done intelligently. You kind of, you let it happen instead of make it happen. It’s maybe a fine distinction between the two, but it’s the difference between night and day, really. And I dragged all these folks along for the ride and it was different for them, too.”

Marcia Gay Harden: “Emotion is messy and fear is messy, and all of that is like really a messy thing to go through. And sometimes you don’t get that same visceral feeling that you… You know like when you watch on the news the person whose just experienced the loss of their house in a fire and you can see the fire in the background and the person says, I lost everything I had,’ and you’re like sobbing because it was so raw. It wasn’t set up. You allow it to explode in a way.”

Laurie Holden: “I think it’s the rawest a lot of us have ever been. It was renegade filmmaking at its best.”

Thomas Jane: “The style fit the story. The style fit the subject.”

Frank Darabont: “Yeah, you can’t do that all the time. Some things will require that kind of precision and that kind of painterly approach and that kind of like, ‘Okay, let me think out for months in advance how I want to shoot something,’ versus, ‘Let’s find it at the moment we’re actually doing it.’ It depends on the movie. The movie will demand its own tone from all of us, in all our respective areas. But this one really just lent itself to this, and it was great. It was great. It was like mud wrestling. It was like mud wrestling – throwing bricks… I loved it.”