SHYAMALAN COMES FULL CIRCLE
‘Glass’ unites the lead characters of 2000’s ‘Unbreakable’ and 2016’s ‘Split’
The ultimate M Night Shyamalan twist was one no one saw coming.
After scoring a critical and commercial breakthrough with 1999’s Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense, he’s had more than his share of ups and downs with critics and at the box office. But the roller-coaster ride is reaching a new peak with a cinematic universe two decades in the making.
His latest film, Glass, out in the UAE today, unites the lead characters of 2000’s Unbreakable and 2016’s Split for a compelling and sly exercise in creating a comic book-esque universe from scratch. And Shyamalan — breaking Hollywood rules by not working with preexisting properties and making films on his own terms — just might succeed where others have failed.
Glass is the conclusion to a trilogy that Shyamalan, cinema’s unorthodox auteur, has been orchestrating since Unbreakable — with a little help from the universe.
“So many things had to go right that had nothing to do with me,” Shyamalan said from Philadelphia. “I’ve been fighting for so long to get things made in the right way. When I look back, there’s a sense of, ‘Wow — it was kind of meant to be.’”
A chance meeting with James McAvoy led to the actor starring in Split as Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder living with 23 ‘alters’ known as the Horde. A “friendly agreement” with Disney exec Sean Bailey granted Split studio Universal permission to borrow Bruce Willis’ Unbreakable character for the surprise post-credits cameo that signalled that the films occupied the same narrative universe.
And then everyone had to be game to come back and tie the trilogy together in Glass, in which Willis fully reprises his role as everyman superhero David Dunn, now older, grizzlier and moonlighting as a vigilante hero known as the Overseer.
A kidnapping sends the Overseer on a collision course with the Horde, but Glass is purposefully named after Elijah Price, aka Mr Glass, the comic book collector with a rare genetic disease who spent Unbreakable trying to prove he was the supervillain to Dunn’s superhero.
For the last 16 years, Glass reveals, Price has been wheelchair-bound and under heavy sedation at the Raven Hill Memorial Psychiatric Research Hospital, where Dr Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) seeks to treat all three men for the affliction she suspects they share: A clinical disorder in which delusional patients believe they have superpowers.
The linchpin to the series, Samuel L Jackson’s portrayal of Mr Glass has been years in the making. And so has his understanding of what Price has endured since the events of Unbreakable.
“I thought it important to show that his mind was even sharper, and his focus was more intense,” said the actor via email before Glass’ London premiere. “He’s already been imprisoned by his body for his entire life. His incarceration has focused him that much more. When he learns about Crumb and his relationship with [Dunn], he sees the opportunity to achieve his greatest goal. He goes after setting it in motion with everything he’s got.”
“It had to be these studios,” Shyamalan said of Universal and Disney, who co-produced with the filmmaker’s Blinding Edge Pictures. “And it had to be these actors. There were a lot of ‘ifs’ on the table: Will they be available? Will they want to do this in the way I want to do this?”
Shyamalan had moved on to make original tales (2002’s Signs, 2004’s
The Village, 2006’s Lady in the Water and 2008’s The Happening) but found diminishing returns swinging for blockbuster heights (2010s The Last Airbender and 2013’s
After Earth underwhelmed at the box office and were savaged by critics).
Fans — and his own stars, added Shyamalan — had been asking about an Unbreakable sequel since the film opened.
“It was actually them always saying to me, ‘Let’s make the sequel, let’s make the sequel,’” Shyamalan said with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah — I’m workin’ on it!’ I think they probably just kind of gave up on the idea that I was ever going to do it. Until I wrote Split.”
He had the idea for the Split cameo and called Willis, who “was 100 per cent for it,” said Shyamalan. The actor filmed his scene in secret in a matter of hours. Shyamalan, meanwhile, kept the cameo footage out of early screenings of the film “just to be super safe — and to [let viewers] think of the movie as its own thing. It was a very healthy way to approach it.”
While making Split, he’d let McAvoy and co-star Anya Taylor-Joy in on his plans, giving them an inkling of the cinematic worlds they’d be bridging. But Jackson had no clue that Willis’ Dunn was back in action or what that might mean for their long-ago plans. Shyamalan broke the news with a cryptic message. “Night surprised me with the idea of
Glass,” recalled Jackson. “He told me to see Split and to give him a call. So I watched Split and had no idea until the scene with Bruce at the end. When he mentioned Mr Glass, I knew that we were finally going to do a sequel and that these films were in the same universe.”
“He came out and said, ‘What does this mean?’” Shyamalan said with a laugh. “It means we’re making the sequel!”
Meanwhile, across the Shyamalanverse...
Paulson had just flown to New York with her freshly acquired 2017 Golden Globe for American Crime Story: The
People vs OJ Simpson in her carry-on luggage when a friend suggested they check out the new Shyamalan film.
“I’m a huge fan of his movies, and I always have been,” said Paulson. “I saw
Signs at the Grove in Los Angeles with Amanda Peet, who wouldn’t let me leave her house after because she was so afraid there was going to be some weird alien in the bathroom!”
“Nothing in his movies is happenstance,” she added. “Everything is really purposeful, and that’s extraordinary.”
Might more films in the Unbreakable universe be in the cards if Glass connects with audiences?
“I highly doubt you will ever see another sequel from me. But I don’t want to be an idiot and say ‘never,’ because tomorrow you’ll read that I’m doing ‘Star Wars 10’ and go, ‘He lied!’” Shyamalan said, laughing.
Sequels aren’t really his thing, said Shyamalan, who describes feeling more akin to a novelist, crafting original stories he dreams up out of his home base in Philly from his notebook of ideas.
“The challenge of original movies is that there’s no frame,” he said. “If you know it’s an appetiser, you’re taking it as an appetiser. If you know it’s an entree, you’re taking it as an entree — and you judge it that way. If I don’t tell you what you’re eating, then I say, ‘What do you think?’ It’s harder.”
“The nature of doing something unusual — I’m doing a sequel to two separate movies, from two separate generations, from two separate studios! — is the challenging part for me that makes me go, ‘OK. This dish has never been made before.’”