M Night Shyamalan has come a long way since he frightened us to death with his brilliant Sixth Sense. And it looks like he's becoming adept at keeping us on the edge of our seats. For coming up next from the brilliant filmmaker is another suspense thriller, The Happening.
As his film readies to hit the screens, we decided to find out just what makes Night tick. Excerpts:
The qualities you need to excel at telling stories
I think about that question a lot. I was teaching at an inner school in Philadelphia; it was a charity thing, an English class for kids, and I sat them down and I told them I have a mystery for you.
I am probably the highest paid writer in the world, and I wasn't even the smartest kid in my class, and I am not the strongest writer, and I had no connections anywhere in cinema, so how do you explain that? Other than luck, put luck aside for a second, so what's going on?
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Some of the kids had interesting answers like determination, belief system, all that stuff for sure. I have an answer -- I am more me than they are them. The point is, all your strengths and all your limitations, they are all part of who you are, and you should not try to be anything else. When a person speaks without self consciousness about who they are, it shines right through, it pops like a light. You are not trying to be funnier than you can be or cooler than you actually are, you are trying to be yourself, and when you do that, you erupt. The moment you try to fit in, you go into the general pot, and then it is entirely about luck, because you are in the same pot with everyone else.
About sticking with a genre
I don't stay within a genre as a defined agenda. If you love to tell 75 stories exactly the same way, then that is what you should do, because that is who you are. Staying within who you are, you will see the details, the intricacies that will make me excited about it. But if you do it as an agenda, I'm going to look away from you. But then again, if it is time to change, if who you are changes -- let's say you went on a safari and fell in love with the guy there, and it changed your life and changed who you are and you came back and you can't write about what you used to, but you want to write about this new thing -- then that is what you should do, because that is who you are now. The moment you start thinking about it, like an agenda, though, back you go in the general pool.
Making films for himself, versus for the audience
I believe you can do both. I believe you can make movies to please yourself and also please your audience -- you don't have to chose between being one or the other. I guess it goes back to what we were talking about, the chef thing, where the more I know, the more I learn and the more skills I accumulate, there is a tendency to get more rarefied in my craft and therefore become less accessible to the audience. And yet I have to honour who I am. So that is going to be a constant struggle.
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I think ET, which was one of my favorite films, is an example that you can do both. It is a drama that meant something to its maker at a personal level, and still managed to connect with a wide audience, enchant the world in terms of the writing and the entertainment value.
On casting action stars in his films
I like to cast action stars -- Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, now Mark Wahlberg -- and not let them do action. I like that kind of a bridle on the expectations of the audience. They bring a lot of energy to the screen because of who they are. You've never seen Mark in a movie like this. He is so human and sweet and funny, just an ordinary schoolteacher. He is not going to come up with a genius theory that will save the world -- he is just a regular guy, and he plays it perfectly. In Signs, I made Mel Gibson the priest and I gave Joaquin [Phoenix] the baseball bat -- I did the opposite of their typical casting. I enjoy that energy, and I enjoy that the audience knows that in some way, this film with Mel or Mark is entertaining, because they are in it, but not in their usual way, in a different way. I like stars's baggage -- only I don't use the baggage in the usual sense, I use it against the story, through a kind of juxtaposition.
I guess if you think on a practical note, if you take the five movies prior to The Happening, Lady in the Water was the only movie that lost money for a lot of different reasons -- almost a perfect storm of things. There was a scenario where Lady was going to make a lot of money; even a week before its release it was looking like doing really well. But even counting Lady, my five films are the most profitable five films of anybody in this generation. So if I was having this conversation with a financier, like Ronnie, say, I would say trust me, my voice works. I keep saying to studios, don't hire us to change our accents as auteurs, as film makers. It so happens my accent is accessible to people around the world, and that's good.
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If the next five films are not as successful as these five films, then they will have to rethink, adjust the budgets. The good news is that again, I try to make profitable movies -- my films have the same expectations as all the big tempo movies, and they only cost a third as much as the tempo movies, so I get a lot of creative freedom. Also, interestingly my movies have done 1.5 times more business in the foreign market than in the US one, so that is another safety net for the studios, they feel a lot more confident about letting me do my thing.
They know they are going to get a movie of commercial value but also of integrity, and the integrity part goes a long way, because these guys, though they are perceived as crass, they all want to do the good stuff, they want to be able to look back and say I made 75 films but in those I made these 8 films with lasting value, the ones I want to be known for. And a lot of the people pick one of the films I made for them as one of those eight films, and they want to do more of those, so as long as you can keep the right balance with your accent versus the budget, then you'll be okay.
How he copes with highs and lows
There is a perception that you might have, watching me from afar, and the one I have of myself, and these are really two different worlds. The Sixth Sense had mediocre to poor reviews; that is the reality. The audience pushed it and it came to critical attention and got nominated for various awards much later. I've learnt over the eight years or so of making movies that I have to decide whether to conform or not, and I have chosen to not conform.
So, if The Happening makes a billion dollars, I'll be happy for Ronnie and for Fox, but it won't make me love it any more or any less than Lady. For me, if there was a burning building and I could grab only two of my movies, I'd grab Unbreakable and Lady in the Water, no doubt about it. When Unbreakable came out no one got it, but it has lasted the test of time, and now people want to see the sequel.
I guess with The Happening, it will work a little bit better because the film fits more in the mould of the expectations people have of me than the other ones did. It is an extremely scary movie. In fact, I don't think I set out to make a scary movie before. There were scary aspects to my previous movies, yes, but I didn't set out to make scary movies. But this one, The Happening, this is meant to flat out scare you -- and that I think will satisfy the expectations of me, which is that I scare people.
I don't know if that means it will be accepted and the box office will reflect that, all those things. I don't buy this whole in the moment thing of wondering whether they love you or hate you, all those things. You can go crazy that way. You have a choice either to play it as -- there is a person I met who is very successful in the movie industry, who I wanted to work with, and we met, and I realised that there is a fundamental difference between me and him, which was that he wanted to win at the system; he wants to analyse it and win at the system.
There is nothing wrong with that at all. But at the very core of my belief systems, I want to change the system. I don't believe in the rules that have been set about how to do this or that. I want to do the things that are in my head, and if the rules that have been set mean I cannot do something my way, then I want to rewrite the rules. I want to be financially responsible, yes, to go back to the point we made earlier about the responsibility of making money -- but as long as I am financially responsible, I want to be able to do it my way.
I personally loved Lady in the Water. We had a pre-screening test of Lady, and it outscored Sixth Sense by one point in every category. This was before it opened -- and that rating is more accurate about how I feel about that movie, than all the hullaballoo about its release and figuring out how to sell it and all the other stuff that went on, when people were talking about me and all sorts of things.
I think critiques are so important, because they teach you two things, and one is that you can learn your craft. Like, they say it was too slow, and you think wow, I didn't mean it to be slow, I need to figure that out, that is something I am doing incorrectly. Or they can go, oh, he is naive, he shouldn't be preaching, and you think about that and you go, no, I wasn't doing that through this movie, I wasn't preaching, unless you look at it through a very weird, adjusted point of view.
I think sometimes what happens is when a movie is released, I am kind of in front of it and they are looking at me, and their expectations of me, more than they are looking at the movie -- and they, the critics, are going we like him/we don't like him, and I am trying to get them to turn their attention to the movie itself. They say okay, then, don't promote your movies, don't put yourself front and center -- but that is not fair; I have as much right to promote my movies as the superstars who promote theirs. That does not mean I am any more arrogant or less arrogant, because I am on the poster of my movies. It's what we do for our living. I will at the end of the day never totally leave making scary movies -- I love scaring people.
His personal definition of success
There is a crass financial formula, and I believe I owe my financiers that much, that I take the time and trouble to make money for them. I think resonance is the other answer to that question. There is two ways I rate a movie -- the sip test, where you taste it now and go oh, I like that. And then there is the take home test, where two days from now, a week from now, you go oh I loved that, I wish I could have that drink again.
There will be a moment when making a movie, where you have to chose between the two, whether it is the casting, or something you are writing into the movie -- like an executive said to me, why don't you just blow up the village, that will be so cool, the kids can then get on with their lives. And I said I believe in the values of that village, I want it to succeed. So at that point, I knew I was making the wrong decision for the sip test, but I believed I was going to win the take home test; the resonance of the value system -- what would you do to protect your kids, how far would you go? I hope I don't have to make that decision every time, but if I had to then I would opt for the take home test, for the larger resonance, every single time.