M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
WITH THE RELEASE OF GLASS, THE THIRD INSTALLMENT IN HIS ALT-SUPERHERO SERIES, M. NIIGHT SHYAMALAN TALKS ABOUT BUILDING UP HIS OWN SUPERHUMAN DEFENSES.
The director reveals a new twist.
Few filmmakers have experienced as wide a range of praise and criticism as M. Night Shyamalan. After finding fame at age 29 with the blockbuster The Sixth Sense, followed by Unbreakable and Signs, he put out a series of misses, culminating in 2013’s widely panned Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth. But in 2015, Shyamalan surprised audiences with a twist: He released The Visit, a horror movie he self-financed for $5 million that went on to gross $65 million in the U.S., sparking a professional renaissance. The next year, his $9 million horror film Split (a sequel of sorts to Unbreakable) grossed $138 million. Shyamalan, who’s now producing a psychological thriller series starring Rupert Grint for Apple TV, explains how he regained his moviemaking powers.
Glass is the third in a series that started 18 years ago with Unbreakable, an unconventional superhero origin story. The movie was a box-office disappointment, though it was well received by critics and gained a cult following. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your younger self? You want to be this trailblazing artist, but you [also] want to be accepted. They sometimes don’t go together. [I’d] say to myself, Hey, you’re on the right track. Just keep going. Your gut is right, even though maybe the marketplace hasn’t caught up to it yet.
Why did you choose to revisit the story with 2016’s Split, which only reveals itself to be a sequel at the end of the film, and Glass, which brings together characters from the other two? When I did Unbreakable, the producers wouldn’t let me sell it as a comicbook movie, because they thought it was uncommercial. So it wasn’t marketed that way. They said, “Everybody comes to thrillers, so let’s make it an ambiguous thriller with your name and Bruce Willis attached.” I felt a little hurt by it. I was probably just being immature, and I put away the idea of making a trilogy, which I had been thinking about. Life went on. I did other movies, and I made some family fare and then I went back to thrillers. While I was making The Visit, I thought, Split will be really good to make that way, super-contained. The low-budget moviemaking was making me feel free.
How so? I’m doing these films the way I want, because I’ve paid for them. There’s a high likelihood that [the return is] going to be positive, because [the budget is] so low. That’s comforting. For Glass, I said, I’m going to put a loan up against my house. I’m setting the tone, for the actors, that it’s going to be hard, and they might not have everything they’re used to. The process weeds out people organically, because not everyone is up for that, and spurs a kind of a work ethic from everybody.
You saw success early in your career with The Sixth Sense. Newsweek proclaimed you “the Next Spielberg” on its cover when you were just 32.
What was that like? I made a movie at 20, called Praying With Anger, that failed. I made another movie, Wide Awake, for Miramax and Harvey [Weinstein], and got my ass handed to me when that failed. Then I did The Sixth Sense and wrote [the screenplay for] Stuart Little in the same year. So that pocket of “wow” was narrow. I had setbacks before and after.
Can you describe a time when you shared your creative vision with colleagues, and they didn’t like it? When I made The Visit, I felt like a film student again, and that was good. When I first showed the [script] to people, everyone said they didn’t think it was going to work. They were like, “You can’t be this irreverent, you can’t have a naked grandmother in this.” When I showed people the script for Split, everyone [who read it], even my agent, said, “No way.” I’ve been feeling that fun kind of “I’ll prove you wrong” sense when I come to people with an idea and they say no.