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MALVERN,
Pennsylvania—He describes the experience of making
Lady in the Water, the biggest flop of his career,
as something akin to stripping off all his clothes and
running outside to have the world collectively laugh at
him. But in a good way. M. Night Shyamalan, the
37-year-old film director who shot to fame with The
Sixth Sense in 1999, is not talking about
large-scale humiliation but rather personal
empowerment—the freedom that comes from giving up
concern about other people’s expectations. “My hope for
the movie was a personal one,” he says. “I’m sick of
feeling like I hope the cool people like me. I hope the
teachers like me. You know that thing you do when you’re
in school? And you’re in your mid-30s and you go, ‘I’m
sick of feeling this way.’ And you kind of like have
this urge to take all your clothes off and run outside
and say, ‘Make fun of me. Are we done? Is that it? Good,
let’s go on with our lives.’
“That
really is what happened and I feel like I’ve been
cleansed in some way.”
Just
weeks before the opening of Shyamalan’s new movie,
The Happening, a phantasmagoria of paranoia that
arrives on Friday, the director is sitting in the
private dining room of Creighton Farm, his little
equivalent of Skywalker Ranch. His business offices and
editing suite are set in a colonial stone home on this
bucolic spread of Pennsylvania land. Across the walls,
in chronological order, are the posters from his movies,
from the little-seen early ones—Praying With Anger
and Wide Awake—to the better-known—The Sixth
Sense, Signs and The Village.
Shyamalan occupies an unusual place in the pop-culture
pantheon. He’s a writer-director, an auteur of popcorn
films, who has turned his own idiosyncratic brew of
horror, psychology and spirituality into a global brand.
Most of the directors who’ve come of age with him have
divided themselves into two camps: the entertainers and
the artistes. The entertainers—Gore Verbinski, Sam Raimi,
Doug Liman, Christopher Nolan, Bryan Singer—have almost
all gravitated to big franchise fare, the juggernauts
that Hollywood prizes most, such properties as
Spider-Man, Batman and X-Men. The artistes, most of whom
write, include Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, David
O. Russell and Quentin Tarantino. Most have made
occasional missteps into insular self-importance and
almost none has reached as broad an audience (nor made
as much money) as Shyamalan.
The
downside is steep
UNTIL
now, Shyamalan has gotten a lot of approbation—and
flak—for having a foot in both camps. He’s received two
Oscar nominations, but when he misfires, the fan base
goes ballistic rather than simply wrinkle its nose in
disappointment, as might happen for another director.
And, oh yes, like Alfred Hitchcock, Shyamalan puts
himself in small roles in most of his movies—though his
acting is less inspired than his filmmaking.
If
Shyamalan had been just another writer-director trying
to tell original stories, Lady in the Water,
released in 2006, would be considered just another arty
misstep on the tortuous path of originality. But the
film, a fractured fairy tale about a water nymph sent to
awaken a mortal to make the world a better place,
engendered outright vitriol. As Manohla Dargis wrote in
the New York Times, it was unclear what the nymph was
trying to get the humans to hear, “the crash of waves,
the songs of the sirens, the voice of God—until we
realize that, of course, we’re meant to cup our ear to
an even higher power: Mr. Shyamalan.”
The
director’s distress was amplified by the fact that he’d
cooperated with a tell-all book by Sports Illustrated
writer Michael Bamberger, The Man Who Heard Voices:
Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy
Tale and Lost. The words “and Lost” were
added to the paperback edition after the film failed
commercially. Although the book is fairly sycophantic,
Shyamalan is portrayed as veering between arrogance and
self-doubt with a huge chunk of monoobsession thrown in,
not unlike so many other directors.
In
truth, he comes off infinitely more humane than most of
the directors that appear in, say, Peter Biskind’s
Histories of Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and
Down and Dirty Pictures. But one incident recounted in
The Man Who Heard Voices became notorious—playing
out in newspapers and magazines across the country.
That’s when Shyamalan broke off with his long-time
corporate benefactor, the Walt Disney Co., after
executives expressed concerns about Lady in the
Water.
Not only
was it unusual to have an actual airing of creative
differences, but the moral of the story ran counter to
the myth of the filmmaker as the guy who teaches the
bean-counters about risk and ingenuity. In this case,
the suits turned out to be right. The film was flawed.
Schadenfreude careened around the studios like the metal
ball in a pinball machine.
Now, in
retrospect, Shyamalan cops to a certain amount of
innocence in letting his personality all hang out. “He
didn’t misquote me or anything like that. We both were
naive in terms of thinking that being open is the best
way. Don’t play the game.”
The
media contretemps was stressful and upsetting, but he
tries to be stoic about the vicissitudes of
Hollywood fame. “The love-hate relationship that goes to love for a while and goes
to hate for a while and then goes back to love....You
can let yourself get snapped and break in that process,”
he says. “I’ve watched so many friends going through it.
People I admire have gone through it, you know, on much
worse scales. The only answer I’ve thought of in terms
of how to handle the [fallout] is be truthful of myself
and consistent as long as they let me make movies.”
And he
has one more mantra: “Don’t ever fall to the temptation
of ‘I’m going to chase you as my audience,’” he says,
noting, “As soon as you do that, the system broke you.”
Chalk it
up to inspiration
ONE
could think of The Happening as a calculated
rebound from Lady in the Water, a genre-movie
chaser as a safe follow-up to a risky film that flopped.
(Indeed, Shyamalan will soon have his own franchise—he’s
about to embark on an ambitious three-picture cinematic
rendition of the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar:
The Last Airbender.)
Yet,
Shyamalan insists he doesn’t operate that way. In fact,
he wrote The Happening before Lady in the
Water was even finished.
He was
driving to
New York City, which is a couple of hours from where he lives in
Pennsylvania. “You get into a kind of hazy half-sleep.
And this idea kind of bloomed and it was big. The plot,
like you could feel it. Sometimes the thing that makes
me make a movie is a character. Sometimes it’s a scene.
And sometimes it’s a structure. And this one had a
structure to it which is really, again, another really
wonderful moment if it happens.”
The
image in his head was a lot like the one that is on the
poster, a forbidding road with abandoned cars and people
mysteriously absent. “It’s 90 minutes of just straight
paranoia,” Shyamalan says, like Hitchcock’s The Birds,
in which birds inexplicably begin attacking human
beings. It’s one of those movies where the less you
know, the scarier it is, and The Happening begins
with a bang: People stop frozen in
New York City’s
Central Park and then begin inexplicably killing
themselves with a kind of stunned matter-of-factness. Is
it an airborne toxin? Global warming gone vicious? The
mass psychosis spreads like a virus through the
Northeast, sowing numbed panic as humans scamper to
outrun the threat.
It’s
Shyamalan’s first R-rated film and it was the studio,
20th Century Fox, that encouraged him not to stint on
the violence and blood. “Night has an uncanny gift at
exploring the recesses of the human psyche,” says
outgoing studio vice chairman Hutch Parker, and in this
film, particularly, “the psychology of fear. We felt
that the R rating would allow Night to go beyond the
limits he explored so far, breaking new ground for
himself and for the audience.”
Yet, the
terror is wrapped up in a reconciliation drama between a
young couple played by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel.
“It’s a normal day in their kind-of-troubled marriage,”
Shyamalan says. “And then this thing happens on this
day. And if you got to the point where you knew in the
next minute you were going to be dead. You both know it;
you’re not fighting it anymore, it’s a fait accompli.
You get one last conversation. What do you say to each
other? That’s what the movie ultimately is about.”
And what
would Shyamalan say at such a dire moment to his wife,
Bhavna, whom he met when he was still at NYU? He says he
would not try to be too profound. That’s the Shyamalan
twist to this particular story.
“I
probably would have a real casual conversation,” he
says. “One last laugh. One moment about the irony of
life...that what we thought was so important was so, so
not important.” |
