A TRIP ALONG THE `GREEN MILE'; KING STORY BECKONED HANKS TO THE JOURNEY.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

Ask the people involved with the Death Row drama ``The Green Mile'' to tell you what the movie is about and you'll more than likely receive a puzzled expression, followed by several moments of hemming and hawing and then a pretty ambiguous answer.

``What is this film about?'' asks its star, Tom Hanks, as if he's just now sorting it out himself. ``Look, I'll be damned if I know. I'm not sure. I think that in a lot of ways, it's like a lot of the great myths that communicate the complexities of being a human, the way really good folk tales were before they got turned into Disney cartoons. It's a great paradox to be a human in this world. There. That is what the movie is about.''

Members of the movie's high-powered ensemble each have their own fuzzy takes on the subject:

Michael Jeter: ``It's about human relationships and last things.''

Michael Clarke Duncan: ``It's about an inner light that shines in everyone.''

David Morse: ``It's . . . um . . . got a universality. I don't know . . . it just touches you.''

Filmmaker Frank Darabont puts it this way: ``It's a Christmas Death Row movie set in the 1930s South. We've got Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, happy dancing mice and a man's head bursting into flames. What's there to understand?''

Maybe all you need to know is this: Darabont is doing the Stephen King prison thing again. And that's good news for all those people who voted ``The Shawshank Redemption'' as one of the greatest films ever made (higher than ``Citizen Kane'' and ``Lawrence of Arabia'') in a recent Internet Movie Database poll. (``That's the best pat on the back a director could receive,'' Darabont says.)

Compared to ``Shawshank,'' Darabont had considerably more source material this time from which to work. King released ``The Green Mile'' in 1996 as a six-part serial, a Dickens-inspired gambit that had its share of difficulties but also one great advantage.

``In a story which is published in installments, simply put, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out,'' King says. ``That is an appeal that I suspect only the writer of suspense tales and spooky stories can fully appreciate.''

After adapting ``Shawshank,'' King's 100-page feel-good prison novella, five years ago, Darabont waited (and waited) for another project to direct. He did some script doctoring (most famously for ``Saving Private Ryan'') and was offered a number of ``Die Hard rip-offs.'' (``Why they would think I was their man, I have no idea,'' Darabont says.) But nothing struck a chord until he received a phone call from King.

``We were just kind of catching up with each other when he said he had this idea he had been kicking around,'' Darabont says. ``And he gave me a 30-second pitch, laying out the basic framework of `The Green Mile.' I was really captivated by what he was saying and told him to give me first crack at the screen rights if he ever wrote it.''

King did, and Darabont found himself back in familiar territory.

``Repeating myself with another prison movie did give pause for thought, but just briefly,'' Darabont says. ``It was just too good. I couldn't say no.''

After Darabont wrote the screenplay, many actors found themselves thinking the same thing. Hanks was the first to come on board, playing a compassionate Death Row prison guard who befriends an inmate who possesses a mysterious and miraculous gift.

``I kind of looked at the screenplay with a jaundiced eye because nobody could describe the thing to me,'' Hanks says. ``Then I read it and, much to my surprise, found myself agreeing to do it. It's just a great story. If my job is to go and make things that are unique, then this is it.''

With a string of eight consecutive critical and commercial hits, Hanks' name has become the closest thing Hollywood has to an official seal of approval. And the rest of the cast fell easily into place. Morse, Barry Pepper and Doug Hutchison (playing the heavy) fill out the Mile's guard unit; James Cromwell portrays the sympathetic warden and Bonnie Hunt is cast as Hanks' wife. Graham Greene, Sam Rockwell and Michael Jeter play the inmates and newcomer Michael Clarke Duncan portrays John Coffey, the huge man (and convicted murderer) with the strange powers.

In the novel, the African-American Coffey stands 7-feet tall and fills a doorway without much room to spare. The list of actors matching that description is a short one. Enter the 6-foot-5 Duncan. While making ``Armageddon'' together, Bruce Willis advised the one-time bodyguard to read King's novel. Willis then called Darabont and told him, ``I think I've got your John Coffey.''

``The whole movie hinged on this role,'' Darabont says. ``So I spent months looking for the right person. And there's something about Michael . . . he walks into a room and everyone is ready to vote him into office. You can see his soul shining through his eyes.''

Adds Hanks: ``Michael has a personality that matches his size. He's on the other side of the charisma spoke. For someone who was making, really, just his second movie, he turned me into a big fan.''

That kind of generosity is typical of Hanks, whom Morse describes as an atypical star, someone ``who believes good things happen between two people and not just by yourself. He's not a guy who believes the movie is just about him.'' Hanks also catered meals for the cast and crew on Fridays (In-N-Out burgers and sushi were favorites) and even staged a fireworks show one night in Nashville.

``Spielberg told me that Tom would spoil me for other actors, and he was right,'' Darabont says.

The generosity became important because Darabont went several weeks over schedule in the six-month shoot, making everyone more than a little exhausted in the process. As Hanks delicately puts it: ``It felt like it took two years to make. Frank has very specific ideas, and we shot a lot of film until he got exactly what he saw in his head. The man has no life, you have to understand that.''

``I am a perfectionist,'' Darabont says. ``I'll be the first to admit that.''

He's also a self-described ``long-winded bastard.'' ``Shawshank'' clocked in at two hours and 22 minutes; ``The Green Mile'' comes in right at the three-hour mark. Darabont has been downright prickly on the subject of length, going so far in one interview as to say long movies should be abolished in order to save wear and tear on film critic Leonard Maltin's posterior. But he admits three-hour films can be daunting for audiences.

``If I hear a movie is three hours long, I think, `Oh, golly. Do I really want to go see this?' '' Darabont says. ``And the answer is - and I'm not comparing movies here by any means - if the movie is `Schindler's List' or `Titanic,' yes, I'm there.''

Darabont acknowledges that executives at Castle Rock and Warner Bros. weren't happy about the film's length, going so far as to accuse him of ``losing his mind.'' But an enthusiastic test screening in Scottsdale, AZ, apparently eased their fears, and the arguments evaporated.

``Nobody sets out to make a three-hour movie, but a film has its own organic length, whether it's three hours or 90 minutes,'' Darabont says. ``I've seen a lot of one-hour-50-minute films that felt like eight hours.''

While ``The Green Mile'' has been generating perhaps the best buzz of any holiday prestige release, the hard-to-sell similarities to ``Shawshank'' remain a bit sobering. Both films are difficult to describe, set in a depressing environment and run long at a time of year when people put a premium on their time.

So why should ``The Green Mile'' fare any better than ``Shawshank,'' which was generally ignored by audiences during its theatrical life?

``This one has Tom Hanks,'' Morse says.

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4 Photos

Photo: (1 -- 2 -- cover -- color) The longest `Mile'

Movie's stars contemplate the meaning, making of `The Green Mile'

(Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan)

(3) Tom Hanks, left, Jeffrey DeMunn and David Morse are Death Row guards at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in 1935 in ``The Green Mile.''

(4) Tom Hanks, left, with Michael Clarke Duncan in Stephen King's 1935 Southern prison drama, ``The Green Mile.''