The Shawshank Redemption

Daisy's story is below the poster.

Although the setting was in Maine, most of the exterior scenes were filmed at the defunct Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which closed as a prison three years before the movie was shot. That was a big change for Daisy who often made films in more exciting locales in Europe or in sound stages in Hollywood.

However, because it was too difficult to get the correct lighting and sound equipment into the actual prison cells, most of the prison interiors were shot on a sound stage specially created in an abandoned manufacturing plant nearby. Daisy was used to that.

Working with Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins was enjoyable because both in character and in person, they were calm and reassuring. James Whitmore was nice, too, although he was a little remote during the actual shooting. That may have been because he had a crow named Jake with him and wasn't sure what would happen if Daisy got too close to the bird.

Daisy didn't really care about Jake one way or the other. She did get excited during one scene near the start of the film when one of the inmate's lines was, "Fresh fish! Fresh fish!" She was disappointed to learn that was prison slang for new inmates.

Unlike Daisy, Jake was not an experienced actor and would squawk whenever he felt like it regardless of the script. In the library scene, Tim Robbins had studied Jake's speech patterns ahead of time in order to figure out when to get his line in so the crow's almost incessant squawking wouldn't drown him out.

The crew was very careful in scenes involving Jake because the American Humane Society monitored the filming of the scenes involving crow. Jake was fine, but the scene where Whitmore's character Brooks fed it a maggot surprised everyone including the director.

They thought that the Humane Society was there for the welfare of the crow, but the Humane Society only objected to that one scene because it said that it was cruel to the maggot and insisted that only a maggot that had died from natural causes could be used.