'Audiences are smarter than we are'

Films by Manoj Night Shyamalan always generate a lot of curiosity. And as his Lady In The Water prepares to hit theatres next week, who better to give us a glimpse than the director himself?

Shyamalan spoke to the BBC's Tom Brook on Asia Today. The interview will be aired on BBC World on Friday and Saturday at 10 pm IST. Here is a sample of what you can expect.

Brook: Lady in the Water... what are the basic ideas in this film?

Shyamalan: That's a large question -- finding your voice, finding your purpose. The structure of the movie was supposed to be constantly changing and evolving and blossoming, so that maybe at the one hour part it actually starts revealing what kind of movie it is. It becomes a kind of Agatha Christie mystery in some ways, as it starts to a whodunit kind of feeling and then the whodunit changes again and blossoms into kind of a fantasy. And it keeps on opening up into this larger and larger genre.

Brook: You appear quite a lot in this film. Do you think it's important that South Asian faces to appear in big budget American films?

Shyamalan: It's not about South Asians just in and of themselves. I love portraying a world that is more diverse. Not for agenda, it's just that that is my world. That's my world so if I'm making honest movies, that's my world. And certainly I've had a lot of white people in my movies. So I have nothing against them. But it was nice to have a moment where you can play a guy. Not necessarily an Indian guy, just a guy. And that makes a big difference because it changes norms. It changes norms for people that maybe never had a neighbour who was an Indian guy. They always think of people as, you know, the Korean person or whatever, and in the movie there's all kinds of levels of immigrants in the building.

Brook: Most of your films do have an inspirational theme in them. Why is that content important to you?

Shyamalan: I have an optimistic outlook on life. I remember I made my second little movie that nobody ever saw and it didn't even get released really. And I remember the reviewers just bashing me for kind of the naive point of view and I still have that naive point of view. It's more complicated now but it still ultimately thinks that people are good.

Brook: Your relationship with Disney fell apart or it...

Shyamalan: It changed, let's say. We are loving from afar.

Brook: Why is Hollywood so shocked when revelations occur about a fractious relationship between a director and a studio?

Shyamalan: No one wants to write the story of 'everything's going well. Everything's going well guys.' Or the story of 'he's a good guy...'

Nobody is interested in that story so there needs to be some problem, you know? What I'm relieved about is, you know, every movie that I make at least, I don't know about other filmmakers, is torturous. It's just an up and down torturous battle where you lose faith. You lose faith in everybody and everything and you fight through it. And it's nice to know that people know the struggle that's involved in making movies and maintaining your voice so, you know... I tried to make my movies, especially this movie; on building blocks of integrity and so it's nice to see people involved with the fight of that.

Brook: Ultimately, though, a studio is your paymaster. Don't you have to obey the paymaster?

Shyamalan: I've said this many times: I believe that this relationship between artists and business works best when the artist inspires the businessman. When a businessman says 'you know how we can make a lot more money with Lady In The Water is if you cut out that scene,' that's not going to fly with me. But if that same person said 'I get lost in the movie at this point and it's because of this scene and this is why I got lost creatively,' I would seriously consider cutting the scene. You need to come from an artistic point of view. Because ultimately I believe, and a lot of people don't agree with me, that the audience is smarter than we are and the better product that we put out the more they're going to come.

Brook: And what makes your work have such popular appeal? Because you hear about art house directors, so called art house directors, having these very complicated screenplays but they generally don't fly with a mainstream audience. Why do yours work that way, do you think?

Shyamalan: I think that everybody kind of has a certain natural place that they fall without trying too hard. Everybody falls naturally into what they do. And naturally, it just so happens that I like (Stanley) Kubrick movies and I like Michael Jordan, Seinfeld and cheeseburgers. Those are naturally my likes, and so the art form will naturally have those two, kind of, almost unrelated things to them. And so I don't have to go 'what would audiences want?' I love universal themes. I love to talk about life after death or about, what's in the sea or what's in the forest. Those things, those things are what grab me.

The interview will be aired on BBC World - Asia Today, Weekend Edition on July 21 and 22 at 2200 IST.