Shyamalan secret to being scary is in the blood
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future By Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown)
Ishana Night Shyamalan was 10. The film was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and it was her turn to deliver The Speech. When your dad is M. Night Shyamalan, the raconteur director of “The Sixth Sense,” “Glass” and the forthcoming “Old,” family movie night has rules.
“I had to get up in front of everyone and say, ‘We don’t talk during a movie, and you can’t be on your phone,’” she said recently in a group video call, her father grinning from a separate window. “In our household, movies are sacred.”
Ishana — the middle child of three, all daughters — said it wasn’t just kids’ stuff.
“We watched a lot of horror movies,” she said. “I think that’s why I have a tough skin.”
Now 21 with an affection for the macabre — and with help from a father who knows a thing or two about directing fearsome psychodramas — Ishana is entering the big leagues. She makes her debut this month as a professional director with an episode of the new season of “Servant,” the creepy slow-burn horror series on Apple TV+.
A senior at her father’s alma mater, New York University, Ishana took a semester’s leave of absence to direct the episode and the finale, one of two episodes she wrote this season in addition to co-writing another. She also traveled to the Dominican Republic last year to work as a second-unit director on “Old.”
Set in Philadelphia, near where M. Night was raised and Ishana was born, “Servant” centers on Dorothy and Sean (Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell), careerdriven parents who hire a live-in nanny for their infant son. Their pick is Leanne (Nell Tiger Free), a demure young woman whose resume masks mysterious intentions. The biggest spoiler happens in the jolting first episode, when it is revealed that the couple’s bundle of joy is actually a lifelike doll, known as a reborn, which Sean and Dorothy’s brother, Julian (Rupert Grint), encourage her to use as a way to cope with the death of her flesh-andblood baby.
This season introduces darker supernatural elements, Leanne’s unnerving return to Dorothy and Sean’s rowhouse and surprisingly absurdist humor, including a farcical riff on a home invasion. New episodes will arrive weekly through March 19, and a third season in the works.
The Season 3 writers room is predominantly female. “I’m very drawn to new voices that have not had a chance to tell a story,” said the elder Shyamalan, who goes by M. Night. “It’s not an agenda.”
Genre, terror, pizza: These are just some of the topics father and daughter Shyamalan discussed by video, she from New York and he from his office at his Pennsylvania estate. These are edited excerpts from the conversation and a follow-up email.
Q : How hnve you been hnndling the pnndemic ns n ynmily?
Ishnnn eight Shynmnlnn: We’ve had the same fears and anxieties as anyone. We live near my grandparents, and up until two weeks ago we were all together in the house. It was a magical time in the context of something scary.
Q : With renl-liye horrors hnppening, nre there beney its to exploring y ictionnl horrors?
b. eight Shynmnlnn: I use genre to talk about fears and anxieties that I’m working through. With “Servant,” I ask myself how I would feel in the nightmare situation of a loved one dying. I’m someone who believes in a benevolent universe. I find it soothing at times like this to think that through.
Q : Whnt wns it like to live nnd work together?
b. eight: I had a captive writer in the house, which was terrible for her but great for me. I’d see her in the kitchen, and I’d say “Where are the scripts?” [Laughs.]
Q : Ishnnn, how did you bnlnnce work nnd school?
Ishnnn: I took a semester off to shoot the episode, and I’ve been taking classes on Zoom. I’m inundated with creative energy on various fronts.
Q : Jo you consider “Servnnt” n horror series?
b. eight: It falls into psychological thriller or supernatural thriller. I try to live on that edge before it becomes just horror.
Q : But it’s nlso dnrkly yunny. b. eight: When I did “The Visit,” I really embraced that. It’s a cornerstone of what I strive for, which is dark humor, inappropriate humor that comes from an umbilical cord to the characters’ pain. It’s a buoyant way to talk about struggles they’re going through. Ishana has this same sensibility in her short films, which is why I knew she could do this.
Q : How much oy yourselves do you see in the chnrncters?
Ishnnn: Family pain is something everyone can relate to. It makes the show appealing and approachable. I reacted strongly to Leanne. Moving from girlhood to a world you don’t understand — that resonated with me. I don’t have parenting experience.
b. eight: You just blew my mind. [Laughs.] I’m thinking about why we are a good team, and it’s because you represent Leanne, and I represent the parents, and we can see the other side.
Q : b. eight, how much did you inyluence Ishnnn’s decision to pursue y ilm? b. eight:
I knew she would be a filmmaker, but I never pushed her into it. We’d watch a movie, and she would really connect with what we were watching.
She was able to discern what was exceptional about what we had watched.
Q : b. eight, “Old,” is set to debut in July. Whnt cnn you tell us nbout it? b. eight:
What I can say is it came from a book that Ishana and my other daughters gave me for Father’s Day. It’s an obscure graphic novel [“Sandcastle” by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters]. This book gave me the opportunity to work through things like my parents’ getting older, and how I have a photo of Ishana on my lap during “Unbreakable” and now she’s standing next to me on set.
Q : In the recent episode oy “Servnnt,” n pizzn restnurnnt cnlled Eheezus Erust plnys n crucinl role.
Ishnnn: We had a wonderful chef [on set] from Philadelphia — Chef Drew [DiTomo] — and he’s passionate about experimentation. It helped that we had this big pizza oven. There were days when you’d see all the producers come on set and ask what’s going on. [Laughs.]
b. eight: We need to do another pizza episode.
My spell-check program doesn’t recognize the word “Anthropocene,” underlining it in red, as if it’s a typo to be cleaned up and not a geological epoch to be grappled with.
The term refers to how humans have been so successful at changing the environment that we have become the dominant influence on the natural world. According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky,” how we proceed is, in one sense, full of possibility, a test of our technological ingenuity and derring-do, but it also happens to be grimly determined in one irrevocable way. Leaving the natural world to repair itself isn’t an option anymore, considering the death and suffering that would ensue.
It’s as if we’re living through an enormous trolley problem: Do nothing, and the runaway trolley will kill billions of people; or pull the lever and shunt the trolley to another track, where it will kill millions. Or maybe pulling the lever will cause the trolley to burst into flames and wreak all kinds of other destruction.
Our current predicament is the consequence not only of environmental exploitation — though there’s plenty of that. One of the ironies of the Anthropocene is how often humans have set out to solve one ecological problem only to invite a new one. Kolbert opens her book with a section on the continual attempts to control the proliferation of Asian carp, a fish that was originally introduced to American waterways in 1963, a year after the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” At the time, Americans were concerned about chemicals in the water, and the carp were supposed to offer a nontoxic way to keep aquatic weeds in check. But these carp also happen to be voracious feeders that, as Kolbert puts it, “outcompete the native fish until they’re practically all that’s left.”
“Asian carp are a very good invasive species,” an engineer tells Kolbert. “Well, not ‘good’ — they’re good at being invasive.” It’s a slip that captures the stakes uncannily well. It also suggests how Asian carp are, in one fundamental way, kindred species to our own. As Kolbert showed in her previous book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Sixth Extinction,” humans can thrive in different environments, outcompeting other species and/or destroying whatever doesn’t suit us. From one vantage point (ours), we are “good”; from another, we are a catastrophe. Reading Kolbert, I was reminded of William Gass’s novel “Middle C,” in which the apocalyptically-minded protagonist keeps rewriting a version of the same sentence over and over: “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.”
Kolbert is a writer for The New Yorker, where parts of this book have appeared. Her narrative voice is steady and restrained — the better, it sometimes seems, to allow an unadorned reality to show through, its contours unimpeded by frantic alarmism or baroque turns of phrase. The people she meets are trying to reverse the course of man-made environmental disaster, whether that might involve electrifying a river, shooting diamond dust into the stratosphere or genetically modifying a species to extinction. She says that the “strongest argument” in favor of some of the most fantastical sounding measures tends to be a sober realism: “What’s the alternative?”
The biggest and most urgent of the impending cataclysms involves climate change. Mitigation efforts — reducing emissions — won’t do anything to alleviate the greenhouse gases that are already trapping heat on our planet. The title of Kolbert’s book comes from one possible side-effect of “solar geoengineering.” Spraying lightreflective particles into the atmosphere will make blue skies look white.
One climate scientist keeps a running list of concerns about geoengineering. No. 1 is the worry that a disruption of rainfall patterns could cause drought in Africa and Asia. No. 28 is the philosophical quandary looming over it all: “Do humans have the right to do this?”