M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
His movies are loaded with surprises. But M. Night Shyamalan’s own career has been a corkscrewing, rollercoaster ride, too. As his latest, Old, prepares to make our heads spin, he talks us through the lows and the highs
As the master of the twist (sorry, Chubby Checker) returns with Old, we delve inside his mind.
MY FAMILY SAY I’m a clinical optimist,” M. Night Shyamalan says, smiling from a director’s chair at a rather nondescript location outside his hometown of Philadelphia. “I will spin everything into a positive place.”
It’s certainly an attitude suited to a filmmaker whose career has had more highs and lows over the past three decades than a ride on Nemesis at Alton Towers. Since his breakout film, The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan’s name has become synonymous with high-concept, character-driven stories that have either had him lauded for his masterful originality (Unbreakable, Signs) or denounced for his penchant for twist endings or, as some critics have deemed it, pretentious storytelling (Lady In The Water, The Happening).
2008 to 2013 was a dark period for the Indian-american filmmaker, with critical and commercial flops mounting up. But, having taken “a loan against my house” to finance foundfootage thriller The Visit, its $98.5 million box-office haul in 2015 paved the way for not just his cinematic comeback but critical acclaim on the small screen, with sinister family-mystery
Apple series Servant.
Now with Old on the way, a new thriller about holiday-goers rapidly ageing on a secluded beach, along with an increasingly positive reappraisal of some of his most maligned works, he seems to be very much back in vogue. But as Shyamalan tells us, a true clinical optimist, he’s cool with any labels the world wants to throw at him…
What’s the biggest misconception about you as a filmmaker?
That I make horror movies! I understand how that happened, because I make a mixture of genres and the most high-octane of genres is how you’re going to get defined. So, if you add 15 per cent horror into your movies, I guess you’re a horror filmmaker.
When you were promoting The Visit, you said you didn’t like that you were known as the ‘Twist Guy’.
The tendency is to be reductionary. I get that there has to be a shorthand to explain things, by the nature of saying there are twists or this and that. But it’s like me saying, “Hey, I’m gonna
throw you a surprise party, okay — it’s going to be really surprising.” It undermines the whole thing. I wonder, had I made The Sixth Sense now, would it have any impact at all? There’s so much chess-playing before I even say [what movie I’m making].
There are already a load of theories online for what the twist could be in Old.
When I think about my movies now, there’s a story that we can promote and then there’s another story that we can’t promote. That story is for when you come to watch and experience in the movie theatre.
The reaction to the trailer has been enthusiastic.
The response has been so amazing from around the world. There’s basically no superstars, immigrant accents on film, an original story. And yet we’re going up against every sequel known to man over the summer. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it’s exciting that there is still a place for originality.
We know it’s about families on a tropical getaway where they find themselves ageing rapidly and their entire lives reduced into a single day. What more can you tell us, and what does it say about where you are as a filmmaker?
It’s new for me, the idea of making a movie not in Philadelphia. To be in this vast landscape, outside all day. It’s still a contained thriller, but it’s on this beach. Mike [Gioulakis], the cinematographer, and I tried to think of things a little bit differently. I’ve done it in a slightly different headspace. There was a [film] that was offered to me called Troy and I was really taken by its screenplay that was so beautifully written as one war sequence from the beginning all the way through for two hours. [In Old], I wanted it to feel like one long sequence of a movie, and if I’ve achieved what I wanted, you’ll feel this cadence, this movement.
How long will it be if it’s a sort of one-shot film?
It’s funny you should mention this. I don’t know if there’s a math thing going on, but The Sixth Sense is 107 minutes. Unbreakable is 107 minutes, Signs is 107 minutes, The Village is 107 minutes and strangely, Old, is right around 107 minutes. We’re a little bit over and this morning, I just thought of another little trim and it’s gonna end up being 107.
Is it subconscious?
I guess the audience and I bounce off each other in a certain way. How long can I hold something: the minimalism, the quiet, the dread, and the taking you up and down? How many times can I scare you, make you emotional? There’s a cadence to that rhythm. Maybe it’s just the way my ear hears storytelling. I don’t understand it. It can’t be a coincidence — this would be five movies!
You’re working with new collaborators, too.
I’m trying to provoke myself, think in different ways and trying to be vulnerable. That’s why with Old I have a brand-new composer [Trevor Gureckis]. He’s barely done anything! I have a new editor [Brett M. Reed], a new costume designer [Servant’s Caroline Duncan]. Everything is brand-new. I’m taking risks. I grab people that haven’t really done anything; all the actors have to audition for me. I keep on trying new things to keep myself thinking new.
What was your old self like, when you first broke into Hollywood?
The first film [Praying With Anger] I shot in India when I was 21. We got into the Toronto Film Festival, and that was a big achievement. If I go back and think about my instincts as a filmmaker, I have two parts of me. The family-film part of me that’s very sincere and emotional, in terms of almost speaking to children. Then there’s the other side of me, which is very disturbing and provocative. My next movie, [Wide Awake], which I did for Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, was a difficult experience. I was still in this family headspace but then I switched and wrote The Sixth Sense. It felt easy to go dark and suspenseful. It just tumbles out of me; I can do it effortlessly.
1999 was the year The Sixth Sense was released, but also Stuart Little and She’s All That, which you wrote too. How did that happen?
I was writing them all together. Harvey [Weinstein] — we can speak ill of him now — wouldn’t let me go make The Sixth Sense. He owned my writing, so I did the rewrites for She’s All That so I could go make it. I like romcoms. Maybe there was a different world where I was the ‘Romcom Guy’.
They’re doing He’s All That. Have they called you in for rewrites?
They didn’t ask me! There’s a lot of stories that have romance in the deep centre. In fact, in Old, there’s a lot of romance. And then I wrote Stuart Little: we were having a baby, and I wanted to write a story for this child that hasn’t been born yet. So that was a wild year of writing, just me in a small, two-bedroom apartment and writing all those three movies, feeling the joy of creating and saying, “Hey, this is a children’s movie. Hey, this is a romcom. Hey, this is a thriller. I’m just loving telling stories.”
What was it like after The Sixth Sense came out?
I was writing Unbreakable on the day it opened, and I distinctly remember being at the computer in my office, reading the New York Times review, which was bad. That’ll be close to the last review I’ve read. So even at that moment, there was a sense of just putting my head down and figuring out who this guy David Dunn is. Hopefully someone will allow me to make this movie, was the headspace I was in.
But then you went to the Oscars and were being billed as “the next Spielberg” on the cover of Newsweek.
It was weird. Our movie was dumped in August, where it was supposed to die, essentially. It was too dramatic for a horror movie. Who’s gonna get this downer ending? All of these things were hanging over us. So [the success] was slowly emerging and surprising. By the time people could recognise me and were coming to see the next film, it took many years for me to understand all of that. I take it as such a gift. I tell [my daughters] to show respect everywhere we go. If a fan comes over to the table and says, “Hey, I love your movies,” I go, “They paid for one brick in our house, you show them respect.” That’s not something you take for granted.
What was that post-sixth Sense period like, making Unbreakable and Signs?
I felt great about Unbreakable and that’s not how it was received. The head of Disney at that time called me and said, “Hey, it got a C from [market-research firm] Cinemascore and the audiences just aren’t digging it.” Everything in me is saying that’s as good as I can tell a story and yet I’m getting empirical data saying the opposite. Sometimes you are not going to be in sync with cultural norms. Now that I know a lot about storytelling and understand my instincts, I tack towards that dissonant note at the end of the movie. It’s a tricky note to send an audience out on, but that open-endedness wasn’t unappealing in other countries. That was the era where I started to see my movies perform extremely well internationally. There were some really interesting things that I grappled with, even to this day, of understanding how to make stories for everybody.
Yeah. Those films were such wonderful opportunities but to make $100-million movies comes with a certain obligation. I want my freedom to be weird. I tack towards minimalism and I keep getting
You’ve talked about filmmakers having ‘accents’. Would you say you lost yours making big studio films such as The Last Airbender and After Earth?
asked to do big movies and I’m like, “You don’t want me to do this.” Now, when I get offered something, I go, “What is the lowest number so that you have the freedom that you need to make the movie?” For me, making very low-budget movies, which came directly as a response to that era, I wouldn’t have had that clarity. I had an idea for Old yesterday and I just executed it. It’s my movie, I can just do it. There was a thing I wanted so I flew to the Dominican Republic, I shot it and I put it in. That’s that. What ultimately will happen is that these movies will have a singularity to them. The crooked nose that makes you beautiful, you know? At least you could see me better.
We’ve seen you in your movies a lot. You were the lead in your debut. Why do you think there has been animosity when you’ve had bigger roles such as in Lady In The Water?
I’ll take the responsibility on that one. I killed a critic...
And I thought you didn’t read reviews anymore!
I was just kidding! That’s all, I was playing around — “Can’t you take a joke?!” Woody Allen, Spike Lee, they were the leaders for how you can write, direct, and act sometimes in your movies, but because the ideas that I’m drawn to get presented in this big way around the world it’s harder to just play a role. I remember being in the first preview of Signs and when I came on the screen, everybody reacted like, “Whoa.” So I have to be cognisant that I’m not pulling in and out of the piece. I just try to find the most organic way to be part of the movie and try to make fun of myself a bit in the process.
How do you feel about your perceived failures?
All the artists that I admire went through a very uncomfortable relationship with the standard bearers of that art form at that time. Stanley Kubrick, none of his movies were reviewed well. Emily Brontë, she died and thought she was a failure. There’s a part of me where I just have to speak the way I speak and take every hit that comes. There are millions of people watching me saying, “You’re failing,” but I didn’t even take the test that you said I failed. When someone comes and says, “You stink,” and that’s hurting me, it’s ego and I don’t need that. Please kill that part of me because the only thing I need is to be able to look at my material and say, “How do I make that character ‘explode’? What is it about a 27mm lens at this moment?” When we shot Old, we checked every format of how to shoot. We checked every digital camera, every film format, 65mm everything. Why did I choose film over digital? There’s something about the chemical process on film that captures the essence of water and the complexity of the beach. Digital tries to capture too many things and it feels cold. This is the thing that I should be concentrating on, not whether the LA Times likes me. So I’m just gonna keep on doing it, hoping I just wear them out.
And you’ve had considerable box-office success, despite mixed reviews, plus a great response to TV show Servant from audiences and peers including Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro.
It’s been wonderful. My takeaway is if I’m okay with being dissonant and the audience is feeling that, my hope is that it’s just between me and them from here on out. I don’t want to have these instincts and then feel bad about them. Where once I’m done with this story, I then let [it] go and it’s the audience’s to find and hold on to, or however they react to it. That would be a beautiful existence rather than worrying about the prizes.
But you’re cool with being the ‘Thriller Guy’ now, right?
That’s an interesting thing that you’re bringing up. That has changed. This pull to do all types of genres, that feeling of, “Hey, I don’t want to commit to this,” has changed. I have found that — let’s call this era of films The Visit, Split, Glass, and now Old
— there’s so much breadth in there, that I can do the comedy, I can do the romance, I can do the drama, and it’s still a thriller. There’s a lot of movement.