M. Night Shyamalan, the Indian-American filmmaker - who developed a strong reputation for telling strange supernatural stories with films like Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs - has seen plenty of failures.
M. Night Shyamalan, the Indian-American filmmaker - who developed a strong reputation for telling strange supernatural stories with films like Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs - has seen plenty of failures. After The Last Airbender and After Earth bombed both critically and commercially, the director went back to the drawing board and returned with The Visit, a” found-footage” horror film that paved the way for Split, his comeback film.
“I had the story of The Visit in my journal of ideas,” Shyamalan told Deadline recently about getting his groove back. “I kind of guarded it as my creative secret weapon that I had. I was waiting to do it, because I knew I could do it very small. It was always burning a hole in my journal.”
The director is back at the top of his game with Split, a thriller in which James McAvoy has several personalities and one that collected nearly 275 million dollars worldwide.
“If I said to you, ‘I’m going to pitch you a movie, OK? It’s a movie about abduction, child molestation, there’s cannibalism, some very dark things happen,’ and then I said, ‘and it’s going to be a box-office phenomenon,’ you’d just be like, ‘What? That’s not possible.’ But taking that risk is what it’s about,” he told Deadline. “I’m saying, ‘I’m going to dig very deep, we’re going to go very dark, and then we’re going to come out of it. And after going that deep, and that dark, coming out again will feel like a rocket ship to people, emotionally.’”
What that means is that his next film, Glass will draw from Split and Unbreakable. Said the filmmaker: “I’m going to approach it the same way I approached The Visit and Split, with the same kind of philosophy—that this is the budget, I’m going to fund it, and we’re going to make it for that number. If we can’t afford it, then I can’t use that person, or I have to rewrite that scene. Just put those limits on myself, and for a reason—to come up with a type of film that, in its genetics, feels like it is ideas-driven and not money-driven.”
