Three aMiGos

Glass, Kevin and dunn are all chained up in an asylum to work through their issues (left).

employs involves bringing Dunn,

The Collective (the correct name for all 24 personalities, according to McAvoy, “because they’re not all part of The Horde”) and a heavily sedated Elijah Price together for group therapy sessions to cure the “delusions of grandeur” that have convinced them they’re superheroes. The magnitude of reuniting Jackson and Willis for their fifth film in 25 years wasn’t lost on anyone involved.

“We fell back into the patterns we had over the years from National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon to Pulp Fiction to Die Hard With A Vengeance,” says Jackson, name-dropping landmarks in cinema history like a man discussing last night’s dinner. McAvoy, meanwhile, revelled in sharing the screen with two of his acting icons. “Sam is an absolute bloody genius of an actor,” McAvoy enthuses. “And Bruce is just this icon from my childhood. I never thought when I was watching Die Hard and Moonlighting that I would ever be sharing the screen with him.”

This scene, filmed in a cavernous “Pepto-Bismol pink” room that production designer Chris Trujillo didn’t add a lick of pain to, was the highlight of Paulson’s time on set. “I remember thinking, ‘I know what I’m looking at is iconic, do I get to be iconic by osmosis?’” she laughs. “Elijah and David are older now, and a lot has happened in their lives.” The passage of time is a crucial component of the film, with Glass featuring “moments from the era of Unbreakable that you didn’t see” according to Shyamalan in order to tell a “multigenerational story”. In picking up the pieces decades later, Shyamalan was inspired not by his genre stablemates – Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Blade Runner 2049 – but a surprising Oscar-winner.

“It’s really powerful to see those two eras juxtaposed against each other, in that Boyhood way,” says Shyamalan. “Being in my forties, as opposed to being in my thirties and twenties making movies, you feel reflective, especially as an author. And lo and behold, I’m making a kind of retrospective movie.” Shyamalan has put himself in the film both literally, as returning security guard Jai, and philosophically in the proselytising of The Beast. “The Beast is a prophet. And The Beast is really me – not the whole kidnapping cheerleaders thing – but saying, ‘Don’t let society tell you that because we were traumatised we’re less than them. We are more than them,’” Shyamalan explains. “When someone comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I’m sober.’ They, in my mind, are a higher form than me. I don’t have that discipline and vulnerability and humility. What I’m trying to say is, ‘What’s so great about being fucking normal?’”

The Beast’s philosophy can be summed up with a single line of dialogue from the climax of Split – “The broken are the more evolved.” Naturally, the choice of the word “broken” there was no accident, Shyamalan establishing The Beast and David Dunn as ideological opposites – in The Beast’s eyes, there’s no lower form of life than someone who is quite literally ‘unbreakable’. The Horde also share something in common with Elijah Price – a need to simply be acknowledged. “They’re gonna believe we exist now, right?” pleas eternal child Hedwig during Split’s Gollum finale.

For McAvoy, Kevin’s primal form was the hardest to pin down. “Even though I wasn’t as much of an animal as I am in Glass, it still was the most difficult thing for me to get my head around in terms of characterisation,” says McAvoy who,

‘BRUCE IS JUST THIS ICON FROM MY CHILDHOOD. I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD BE SHARING THE SCREEN WITH HIM’ JAMES MCAVOY

despite The Beast’s murder-y side, still sees him as “a positive force, potentially. He’s so full of compassion for anyone who’s had a tough time that he decides to become their defender and their advocate. But ultimately, the animal takes over, and he becomes the avenging angel as well. We managed to find the time for the primal, vengeful, righteous anger, that Mr. Glass cleverly taps into.”

After putting eight of Kevin’s 24 identities on screen in Split, some fleetingly, Shyamalan upped the demands on his star significantly in Glass, writing lines for 23 of Kevin’s personas, according to McAvoy (the only one left out at the script stage: verbose history obsessive Orwell). When TF catches up with Shyamalan in late October, it seems three of those identities have been jettisoned in the edit (“I need to chastise him for that one,” laughs McAvoy), leaving a still-staggering 20 in the final film. Shyamalan felt confident McAvoy was more than up to the task. “That last scene in Split where he became all those personalities in front of Casey was really hard. We went back, and we reshot it a second time to get it just right,” Shyamalan recalls. “In Glass, there’s a bunch of those moments. The climax of Split became the baseline of what you see here.”

While The Beast is “literally trying to start a reign of terror in Philadelphia” with the assistance of Mr. Glass, who wants to “show the world we exist”, this alliance of evil is complicated by the fact that several of Kevin’s identities are horrified by The Horde’s actions, including Kevin himself, making The Collective equal parts victim and villain, much like Mr. Glass himself. “You feel conflicted about Elijah,” explains Shyamalan. “You’re rooting for him, but he’s doing not-nice things. So you’re not sure who’s the villain in this movie.” Matters are further muddied by the film’s empathetic supporting cast: David Dunn has his son Joseph; Elijah has his mother; and Kevin has Casey Cooke. “Those are the big love stories of this piece,” nods Shyamalan. “To me, that is the movie. We’re doing a comic-book movie where you feel a lot of emotions when you watch these characters.”

Casey, who remained in Philadelphia following her ordeal, feels “a deep kinship” with Kevin “and understanding how someone can find the world so painful that they hide away”, according to Taylor-Joy. “Whatever the experience was that she had in Split, it gave her a sense of

strength. It saved her and made her feel like she was beautiful.” While, according to McAvoy, Casey “as one of the broken, manages to cut through the rhetoric and bombast and belief and violence” of The Horde. Joseph will once again have his conviction that his father is more than human called into question. And then there’s Elijah’s loving mother. “She has a really complex relationship with her son,” says Shyamalan. “She’s seen all of the suffering that he’s gone through, and he has these theories to make sense of the world. So she’s very sympathetic towards that. She doesn’t condone what he does, but she sees it as her son fighting for his dignity.”

After 20 years of living with these characters, through a career that has hit some euphoric highs and crushing lows, it’s clear these are more than movies to Shyamalan. “They’re very personal,” he explains. “They represent three years of my life. I’m very myopic when I make them.” Shyamalan’s investment even extends to the film’s financing, the writer/director claiming, “I don’t take any money on the movie. This is against my house. I paid for these movies… Literally, there’s a mortgage on my house right now for this movie.” The only way that was possible: working small. “The instinct was: take all the money away; make it super-limited.” In other words, don’t go into Glass expecting Infinity War-style spectacle porn.

Shyamalan also has a theory about how he was able to rediscover his mojo after struggling to connect with an audience for so many years. “Work with brand new people every time,” he explains. “So on these movies it’s the editor’s first movie; the cinematographer’s second movie; the composer’s first movie… They haven’t learned any bad habits. Everything is terrifying. Everything is hopeful. They want to do things differently – ‘I don’t want to do the same old bullshit!’ – and then I start feeling like that.” Shyamalan cites composer West Dylan Thordson, who would record Native American drums in the abandoned asylum at 4am, and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who “came a month early, unpaid” to storyboard every shot in the film, as inspirations. Though he amusingly admits “who knows whether all this is additive?” Shyamalan trusts this passion will make all the difference on screen. “I believe that when your mum makes you a meal, you feel that love. Even if that other restaurant uses the same ingredients,” says Shyamalan. “I’m never going to compete against Marvel in the money and the special effects. But in… how much care went into making the rice? I can beat them on that.”

He may not be competing like for like with Marvel, but Glass exists at a time when audiences have grown accustomed to the tone, spectacle and pace of modern superhero blockbusters, and Shyamalan concedes that even Glass isn’t the anomaly that Unbreakable remains. For example, while Unbreakable contains just 400 shots, Glass features around 675 (by comparison, Avengers Assemble sits somewhere around 2,850). “Because of the nature of some of the action, I shot more than I would normally. There’s still an 11-minute scene in [Glass] that has just 24 shots. But I’m making movies, theoretically, for everyone. So that’s the hard part.”

Whether Shyamalan can deliver on the expectations of two audiences – the half that knew who the old guy in the diner was at the end of Split, and the half who didn’t – remains to be seen. But is Glass really the final chapter in the Shyamalaverse, or does the master storyteller have another surprise sequel up his sleeve? “I would say no,” Shyamalan laughs. “As an artist, I feel like: ‘Let’s put that era to bed now, and start something really fucking different.’ I’m still making thrillers, but with the new movie, I want to try a different approach.” As for Jackson, he’s vouched to stop hounding his writer/ director from moving vehicles, claiming Glass gave him exactly what he’d craved for almost two decades. “I mean, we all want closure,” Jackson muses. “There is a conclusion. There is an end for these characters.”

Glass opens on 18 January 2019.

‘I DON'T TAKE ANY MONEY ON THE MOVIE. THIS IS AGAINST MY HOUSE. I PAID FOR THESE MOVIES… LITERALLY’ M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN