In thriller mode once again
M. Night Shyamalan gets his groove back, scaring audiences with low-budget, original flicks.
AFTER directing 11 films with a combined global take of US$ 2.4bil (RM10.6bil), earning two Oscar nominations, “winning” four Golden Raspberry awards, scoring massive critical accolades, and surviving humbling big-budget disappointments, M. Night Shyamalan has learned to unplug over an opening weekend.
The director of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable plans to spend this one like his last, in 2015, when his modestly budgeted horror film The Visit opened strong at US$25.4mil (RM112mil), on its way to US$98.4mil (RM435mil) worldwide: Checking his phone for messages and weekend numbers once on Saturday, once on Sunday, and doing his best to preserve his sanity. “That’s the way to be healthy,” he told the
Los Angeles Times ahead of the release of the twisty thriller Split, his 12th feature film, which has been stealthily collecting praise from sneak screenings across the globe. “Because if you give credence to these moments, then you have to give credence to the other moments, and those will inevitably come in your career where they hate you,” he said, laughing.
“Opening weekend is not something that I can control, even if it goes my way,” he added, matter of factly. “So I don’t put any energy into that.”
The low-budget psychological horror pulled off a surprising victory, raking in US$40mil (RM176mil) during the inauguration weekend. It retained at No. 1 for the second week in the US, with US$26mil (RM114mil). It has passed the US$100mil (RM440mil) mark globally.
Split, written and directed by Shyamalan (who also produced and shot the film in his beloved Philadelphia, where all of his original films are set), stars X-Men: First Class actor James McAvoy in a tour de force turn as Kevin, a man who kidnaps three teenage girls (led by The Witch breakout Anya Taylor-Joy, joined by Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) and imprisons them in a labyrinthine underground bunker.
As the terrified teens discover, Kevin’s not alone. Afflicted with dissociative identity disorder, he shares his body with 22 additional personalities who each want to be heard – including a trio of volatile “alters” whose scheming threatens to unleash an even more powerful, bloodthirsty entity known as the Beast.
Or, as co-star Taylor-Joy quipped: “Fifty Shades of James.”
“One of the first things he ever told me was that (McAvoy’s Kevin) was his favourite character that he’d ever written,” the actress said, recalling her first meeting with Shyamalan. “It was like, ‘No pressure!’ But Night has created this world, and he knows exactly what’s going on within it, and because of that you have the freedom to play.”
At sneak screenings around the world, Shyamalan has found Split audiences embracing his return to a genre that made him a household name in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like the moviegoers who lost their marbles over his ghostly Sixth Sense, his eerie fable Signs and his superheroic thriller
Unbreakable, audiences from Austin, Texas (where it premiered as an unannounced screening at Fantastic Fest in September) to Rome, Paris, Madrid and Berlin have responded enthusiastically.
More impressive in the age of the Internet spoiler, they’ve also kept Split’s twisty plot turns under wraps. There is, perhaps, something to root for in preserving the exquisite secrets of a classic M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Shyamalan, 46, first dreamed up Kevin Wendell Crumb more than a decade ago, long before McAvoy brought him to life on-screen in Split in alternately chilling and em pathetic fashion, shifting among multiple per sonas with varying ages, physicalities, gen der identities and ulterior motives. He’d origin ally written his villain into an entirely differe nt script before plucking him out altogether, savings him for a then-unknown cinematic fate.
The eventual genesis of Split coin cided with Shyamalan’s own career crossroads..
A few years ago, after a decade of making studio movies that disappointed eith her critically, commercially, or both ( Lady In The Water, The Happening, The Last Airb bender, After Earth), the filmmaker was forc ed to take stock of what was working and wha at wasn’t.
“I believe everything works out whenw you’re putting your energy into the right place. In the wrong place, the univer rse slaps you,” he said. “I think, in a literal wa ay, audiences can tell if I’m in a good place, ifi I’m in a bad place, if I’m in a lost place. You canc just tell. You can feel it.
“I get it! I’m a very sentimental guy. When I do kids’ movies I do them very sentim mentally, and wearing your heart on your slee ve on that stuff is dangerous.
“I can’t out-CGI people. I can’t out- -action people. I can’t out-spectacle people. That’s not how I think. What I can offer movie Goers in theaters is something unique, someth ing singular. That’s my weapon.”
He scaled down considerably from the nine-figure budgets of his critically- panned fantasy adaptation The Last Airbender (which saw the Indian American filmmakerr accused of “whitewashing” for casting predominantly white actors as characters created as Asian in the original animated series) and the Will Smith-Jaden Smith sci-fi vehicle After Earth, back-to-back special-effects spectacles that earned the worst reviews of his career.
Caught between the studio machine and his more auteurist leanings, he took a cue from micro-budget horror maven Jason Blum, producer of the hit Paranormal Activity, Insidious and The Purge franchises.
“I reached out to him years before The Visit and tried to talk him into low-budget filmmaking,” said Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions follows a model of producing genre films cheaply and independently with studio distribution partners, to often lucrative results. (Blumhouse has a deal with Universal, which is releasing Split.)
“I went to (Shyamalan’s)l’) hhouse iin Philadelphia and we had lunch and talked about it, and he looked at me a little puzzled, then sent me on my way,” Blum continued. “I didn’t hear from him until there was a rough cut of The Visit. He said, ‘I heard what you said – and I just did it myself. I made a low-budget movie.’”
Blumhouse signed on to the US$5mil (RM22mil) film as producers, and The Visit – about two children sent to their grandparents’ house who start to suspect that something’s not quite right with Grandma – put Shyamalan back in, as he called it, a good place.
“Sometimes that thing that shatters you is what makes you grow again,” he said, the words he used to describe Split – which he pinpoints as his “darkest” film – also perfectly applicable to his own career. “It’s something I think about a lot: The things that happen to us, they certainly change us. But do they make us less? Just because we’re not normal doesn’t mean that we’re not special or can’t do different things.” The self-described perfectionist seems to have found his groove again working outside of studio control withh nobody but himself and his trusted collaborattors to rein him in. He brought Blum bback to produce Split, made for under US$110mil (RM44mil). Once again he worked the way he wanted, slotting valuable time for reshoots into the end of his production schedule,, thus allowing himself a more malleable crea tive process. “This is a format that allows me to really listen to myself and go whichever way the instinct tells me to goo,” he said. “It’s freeing. I have an idea, I go shoot it.” His producers don’t have a problem with the way he works, because hee is his own producer. Just don’t call Split a comeback. “I have a different narrative, which is that when I makke thrillers, it’s all good,” Shyamalan said with a laugh, dismissing the c-word. “When I’m making kids’ movies it’s not all good.” For Shyamaalan, who’s already working up ideas fo for a Split sequel, the film’s themes of survivorhood, strength and adaptability echo the turns he’s takken to get to a place of re-energised creative autonomy. “You have to go through something in order to c ome out on the other side with thee things that you need,” he said. “Therre’s no other way to do it than by going through the fire.” – Los Angeles Timess/ Tribune News Service