M Night Shyamalan has a reputation, among the studio execs, for being ‘difficult’ and a massive egotist, and yet when you meet him he comes across as a man with an uncompromising passion for what he does. If that makes him ‘difficult’ then we need more directors of that ilk: more directors like Tarantino, Rodriguez, Clooney and Soderbergh who take risks and work around the system to bring their vision to the screen, even if it doesn’t become a huge success.
We spoke to Shyamalan about his latest movie, LADY IN THE WATER, and the process of storytelling through movies and his inspirations.
SFL: How did the story come about?
M. Night Shyamalan: The story actually began with me telling the back-story to my kids but ultimately – and I only realised this as I went through the making of it – what I was trying to duplicate was the kind-of free-spiritedness that’s there when you try and tell the story to your kids. In that room there’s no editor in there and you really don’t know how it’s going to come out but it’s very beautiful. There’s this danger but somehow you finish the story and it all kind-of comes together and there’s an elegant childlike belief that it’s going to happen. I wanted that for the making of a movie, during the whole process of making a movie.
I think there’s a moment when I watch WIZARD OF OZ or PETER PAN or something where you sense that the authors have left the rules of normal storytelling and are just following a light that’s moving around and going places that they don’t even fully understand yet children can understand. There’s a thread through it all and I had felt that before, in the room when I was telling the kids the stories, you know, so for a year and a half we just kind-of followed this beautiful colour and light through this very eccentric language and world and put it down without going, “What will be the result of it?” It was just about following the light.
SFL: Hitchcock once said that if he made Cinderella people would be looking for a body in the coach. Did you think audiences would come to this film with a preconceived idea of an M. Night Shyamalan movie? Perhaps expecting to be scared rather than charmed.
MNS: You know I’ve been struggling with what to do about all. SIXTH SENSE was the first one that people got to see and it happened to be scary with ghosts and stuff like that. The next one was about comic books and it wasn’t necessarily meant to be scary so it came to be seen as a mistake that UNBREAKABLE wasn’t scary. I didn’t know that I’d been set in that vein.
I definitely like suspense, I don’t even know how to think without that, but the different colours are something that I’m naïve to, how people, in general, are going to approach the movie. It’s difficult; I have to do the opposite of what an artist does so that people can enjoy the movie I’m writing. If I sit down and I get inspired, let’s say, by a story I tell my kids I think, “What are people going to think about this?” I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate thing for an artist to do, but it’s an appropriate for a businessman to do. “Are they going to look at this only through the filter of ‘scary thriller’ and then judge it that way and think you’ve lost your mind?” Then go, don’t write that because they will think this, rather than the normal things.
Right now I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and it has such incredible magic surrealism in it but if the first thing he wrote was thrilleresque it would be like, “What is this?” To stop your hand from moving because you’re worried about the box they’ve put you in, like “He’s the funny guy” or “He’s the scary guy”. I’m not sure if it’s my responsibility to bend to that every single time. I love scary movies, by the way, and there’ll be others if they come to me, but there’ll be a lot of ones that aren’t.
I definitely think it’s hard, because let’s say there’s eighty different ways to look at LADY IN THE WATER and sixty of them will get you to a place to see it in kind-of a lyrical, parable kind of way, but there’s twenty that you came at it from that you wouldn’t get it. You would see it as only pieces that don’t work under the lexicon of what your coming to see it as. That eighty keeps dwindling down to nobody’s going to that eighty is troubling and I don’t know how to get everyone to the eighty other than taking my name off of it which is something I seriously thought about.
When I was thinking of doing Life of Pi I was very worried about putting my name on it because the ending of it – and if you’ve read the book it’s an amazing ending, kind-of a twist ending – if you put my name on it you wouldn’t have the balance of the novel. So it becomes something that I struggle with. I did think that LADY would have benefited by my taking my name off of it so at least it would signal, “please look at it from another side of language.” I wasn’t trying to do the same language, I was trying to do a new language.
SFL: Your role in this is more than just a Hitchcockian cameo that we are used to. Is this perhaps a sign that you’d like to do a “starring, produced, written and directed by…” film?
MNS: Well luckily there’s world class actors who can do that part of it for me. When I did PRAYING WITH ANGER in India, it was a real low-budget thing, I was the lead in that and I came out of that school of independent films; writing, directing and acting. I went to school where Spike Lee went to school, Woody Allen… The East Coast writer/director/actor paradigm was where I was coming from. I slowly moved into other different forms of stuff. It was always part of my upbringing and wasn’t something new to me. SIGNS, for me, was very close to the perfect balance of what I would love to do; a meaningful, small role that contributed to the emotion of the movie.
And, again, it kind of goes back to the expectations of me. Are you exceeding expectations or breaking them. I know the thing of, wear clothing and then wear that same clothing all the time. Are you the cameo guy like Hitchcock – that’s the clothing and I don’t particularly like cameos either – or are you Woody Allen? I’m not the latter and wouldn’t be any good at it. Sometimes I want to do a small role, sometimes I want to do a little bit more of a role or sometimes – like THE VILLAGE – I’m not even in it. I love to have that freedom to kind-of bounce around to whatever moves me. It’s honest rather than a calculated thing. But, again, I’m not sure if that’s just naïve on my part, that you can just treat it like a little independent movie every time and then say, “Oh, I really connect to this part, I want to play it,” and just do it rather than sitting down with Warner Brothers and saying, “OK, this is what they expect of you.” And, again, I don’t know if that’s the proper way because it’s such a Catch-22. If you make your pen hesitate as you’re doing what you do for a living, your art, then you’ve already been corrupted. But if you do it and no-one will allow anyone to see it because of the breaking of expectations then you’re not doing your art a service either. What do you do?
With this one, the struggle of a writer is something I’m obviously very, very familiar with – the feeling of not knowing, of going into a closed room and just feeling lost is a poignant thing for me. Anytime anyone writes something about a writer I just kind-of lose it. I’m always connected to the plight of that lonely person struggling to hear something.
I guess the easy answer to the question is no. LADY is the biggest role I could possibly play because of the size of the thing I was doing. It was 110 scenes and I was in 20 of them and substantially in 8 of them but that’s the limit because I’ve got to pay attention to the real actors.
SFL: A lot of writer/directors who are doing original stuff have a shoebox under their bed with stuff they’ve been working on for years but you seem to come up with a new idea after a film and follow that all the way through. Do you have that shoebox?
MNS: No. I have a bunch of ideas that I get to different status of foetus and then I abandon. I don’t know what to do about those because there’s nothing different from those than the ones that I do, it’s just I have found a way in on the latter emotionally that enabled me to continue. I only do one project for two years; concentrate on it and bring it in.
I’m trying to think of a way to do more than one at a time and the year I wrote SIXTH SENSE, I wrote STUART LITTLE for Columbia and that was very freeing. And I actually wrote something else for Miramax that year too. It was a good year because it made me let go, in a way, and I’m kind-of thinking of doing multiple ones in the future; take a couple of ideas and do them together to see if that causes any kind of letting go in a good way.
SFL: Bob Balaban’s film critic character… Are you trying to tell us something?
MNS: Ron Howard actually told me that I’m a little like Opus Dei!
Actually, there was something about requiring the movie, and myself, to let go with no safety net that was important for me as an artist. Sitting here right now I’ve never felt more free and creative and courageous; I feel like I could write anything with courage right now. Somehow I felt like doing these things and getting to the other side of them was a case of, “Don’t guard, take the punches and see if you’re still standing afterwards.” Then you know what’s going to happen from then on in the fight. The movie is about getting back to pure storytelling. Getting back to believing that the story and the storytelling has always been our way of learning about each other and learning the things we don’t know and believing in things. Even in myself it’s kind-of been sold. We’ve lost the honour of what storytelling is to us as human beings. As I was writing a movie about honouring storytelling I wanted to purge myself of all of those things that have caused us to forget that. That critic is as much me as he is anybody else.
This idea of not listening to the things that keep you safe, the patterns that have existed before, and leaving the path is a dangerous thing because you can get lost. But you have to do that to find innocence and find the purity of storytelling. These movies are about storytelling and believing in them again. When I realised this was about storytelling I knew there had to be an expert in it who’s wrong and that you’d have to overcome that person to then get to the place where he proves it is a true story.
SFL: I was fascinated by the mythology of the story. There seems to be a lot of correlation between this story and the tales of Vishnu, with the goddess born in the water and the eagle as a vehicle. Where did you get the mythology come from?
MNS: For me it was just what came out of my mouth and I tried to stay true to that, but it’s very interesting you say that because as a kid growing up and hearing all the Hindu stories, but for me it is clearly allegory. The audaciousness of the stories in Hindu culture was supposed to say, “This is metaphorical. Learn the lessons.” And as a kid I learned those lessons rather than focussing on the specifics of it and in a way that was by making the weirdest names and the weirdest characters that we could intentionally not trying to ground it so that you would have to let go at some point and just leap, like Heap does. He can’t convince anyone because the names are so ridiculous and the story’s so crazy that you’re just saying, “Please, just leap.” And it might come from that Hindu thing because it goes right in line with how I felt as a kid and I just leapt into the stories because they were so fantastically allegorical; I got the beauty of the messages from the religion.
SFL: You say you’ve never felt more courageous as a writer and certainly this seems to be the most optimistic of your films; where does that courage come from?
MNS: I’ve always made my kids aware of this distinction; courage is not, not being afraid, courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. I continually tell them that I believe in the purity of something and I want to listen to everybody about their worries and concerns about it but my job is to inspire. My job is to inspire the studio first and tell them, “Here’s my way in. Here’s why I believe this is WIZARD OF OZ,” or whatever it is I believe. And then I try to inspire the actors and the crew and then all of us try to inspire the audience. My job is to do that but also to listen. It negates itself eventually if the thing I believe in is weak. It will die based on just listening to people and hearing what they have to say. And then there’s the opposite thing where you hear it and you understand and they tell you that what they feel about it is the same thing you feel. It reinforces it.
I guess it’s like if you took a drug and you’ve tasted that high. In this way I’ve tasted the high of a pure thought and there’s almost nothing that would break that. It’s a beautiful thing and it’s a sad thing too because if I think of something and the pen goes down and I’ve fallen in love with this idea – for example when I did THE VILLAGE and I knew immediately, “These people are going to make an unambiguously moral choice that I agree with; we are going to be in so much shit.” but I just kept on writing – it’s scary. Not that I’m not usually scared, because I don’t know how else to do it, but I just can’t make a movie I don’t believe in. Even if I know it’s going to be successful. I just have to find a truthful way in.
SFL: I guess the most important critics will be your kids; what did they make of you sharing the story with the world?
MNS: Absolutely, the only time I was really, really nervous was the day I showed it to them. The last thing you want is pity from your kids! They’re super-smart and you know them so well that you know when they’re being awkward. There’ve been so many times when they get a present they don’t want and they do that look and say, “Thanks…” I was worried that I’d get so upset if I saw that look! We showed it to them during the sound check when we weren’t quite done. They came to New York to watch it and the sound broke in the first reel. I was devastated.
I’ll tell you, in their lives I’ve never seen them so transported. They’ve seen it four times – they went to a movie theatre on the weekend it opened and watched it there. And the people in the multiplex they were in went crazy. There was like a standing ovation so they called me up and told me all about it. And now they play all these games about the things in the movie. It was really a wonderful thing. We were just trying to share the purity of what happened in that room when I was first telling them the story and let it leak out. And hopefully it’s an example for their lives; to just take a leap of faith.
SFL: So was this always a children’s movie?
MNS: I always saw it as eight years old and up. I meant it to be seen as a family, together. We could never figure out how to sell that and that goes back to expectations again because of the name. It always bends that way, no matter what you say. It bends darkness. My hope is that enough people will see it that over time it will get to families. When we preview screened it we had families in there who had not had the benefit of a campaign. They knew nothing about it. The sad thing about those preview screenings is that I know it’ll never be that way for any other audience. They came with nothing other than knowing that they were seeing a movie by me. We had all families because that’s what I thought the audience was and it was amazing to hear all the kids laughing at Mr. Heep and Young-soon and all this stuff. And when the kids came out they were shaking because they’d never seen their dads cry. The fathers were really connecting to Paul’s performance and young teenage girls were connecting to Bryce as the heroine. Everybody benefited from everyone else which is why I’m such a proponent of the theatre experience. We all share from our points of view.