M. Night Shyamalan
Interview By: Harry Kaplowitz
HarryKaplowitz@TheCinemaSource.com
M. Night Shyamalan has swiftly become of the most intriguing directors of modern cinema. From the success of his 1999 debut film, The Sixth Sense, to the cinematic divisiveness to his three ensuing projects ' 2000's Unbreakable, 2002's Signs and 2004's The Village ' to the hype surrounding his upcoming release, Lady in the Water, Shyamalan has become as much of an enigma as his films have.
The actual plot of Lady in the Water, starring Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard, has been a tightly-kept secret in Hollywood, even up until the film's July 21 release date. Basically, it revolves around apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) and a young woman (Howard) he rescues from the pool who is actually a children's book character trying to make her way back to her home, against the will of mysterious creatures determined to keep her on Earth.
And that's all anyone really knows. It's an interesting topic to say the least, but for Shyamalan, it found its roots in something a little more familiar: the bedtime stories he tells his daughters.
'Part of the lure of the story was that it was so irrational. The chi of the story was so powerful in a way for [my daughters]. With that one, they were just lost in it, and they kept talking about it and talking about it,' he said. 'And then, I found that I was doing that, and I said, 'Wow, that could be'''
For Shyamalan, that spark of an idea led to the film, and that process is what he looks for in preparing his projects. But with Lady in the Water, the goal was to make a kid's film in an entirely different way.
'You know, you're always looking for that idea that you can spend two years of your life [on], and there was something about it that was very important and emotional to me ' can you convey the belief of a child in a way that's not saccharine, that you make fun of it until you stop making fun of it.'
The manic process that sprung Lady in the Water involved Shyamalan telling stories to his daughters without knowing where they were going or how they would end, and he said it was that kind of 'mania' that allowed him to realize that it would be a movie that would bring audiences back.
'You gotta be right on the edge, you know' Right on the edge of a language that feels like I'm almost letting go, that I'm almost tipping. You know' Mania, a certain mania about it,' he said.
And that mania, it seems, has become a consistent part of Shyamalan's work. Much in the same way that his films emulate the whodunit mysteries of previous cinematic eras, Lady in the Water, he says, carries on that sense of an Agatha Christie-inspired tradition that keeps audiences guessing.
'Some person said that it was the reverse of Rosemary's Baby,' he said of his newest film, while also harkening its similarities to Hitchcock's Rear Window. 'This idea of strangers in an apartment building was really powerful and the idea of finding the characters almost like a mystery, like an Agatha Christie mystery, you know' Like, who's the interpreter and who's this' You get it all wrong and then you try it again ' it's fun to learn about your neighbors.'
Despite the intrigue that surrounds his films, Shyamalan remains baffled by the wild success of his films, particularly given their background, how they so closely relate to his idea of storytelling.
'I think the things that are different about me that make my movies less accessible are not necessarily bad, and I've always been taught that they are bad, and there is a dance,' he said. 'I make independent movies that get released as blockbusters ' that's the gig. I don't know how it got here, but that's just the natural way I tell stories. There's elements of it that speak universally to people and there's elements of it that the aesthetics of it are independent by nature.'
Lady in the Water will likely have a religiously philosophical undertone, something which has become a trademark of sorts in Shyamalan's productions. But despite this motif, Shyamalan does not consider himself to be a dogmatic person.
'I'm not a big traditional orthodox religious fan, that's not my thing. Those are good stories, too, but I can't devote myself to the form of the story; these are all just metaphors, and so it should be taken that way,' he said. 'Do we believe in believing anymore, you know' Have we given that up''
And just as consistency is seemingly everything for Shyamalan, he hasn't pinned down his next directorial project just yet. He currently is working on the screenplay for Life of Pi with Oscar-nominated director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, longtime Jeunet collaborators Guillaume Laurant and Dean Georgaris.
Life of Pi, directed by Jeunet, will be the 2007 cinematic adaptation of Yann Martel's award-winning novel about a boy (Pi Patel), a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker all fighting for survival on a solitary lifeboat following a Pacific Ocean shipwreck.
