Everything about M Night Shyamalan totally explained
Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan (born
August 6,
1970), known professionally as
M. Night Shyamalan, is an
Indian American writer-
director of
major studio films, known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that usually climax with a
twist ending. He is also known for filming his movies (and staging his plots) in and around
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
Shyamalan released his first film,
Praying with Anger, in 1992 while he was a NYU student. His second movie, the major feature film
Wide Awake, made in 1995 but not released until 3 years later, failed to find financial success. Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's
The Sixth Sense, which was nominated for six
Academy Awards including
Best Director and
Best Original Screenplay. He followed
The Sixth Sense by writing and directing
Unbreakable, released in 2000, which received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box office. His 2002 film
Signs gained both critical and financial success, but
The Village (2004) was a critical and commercial disappointment, and
Lady in the Water (2006) was a commercial failure receiving mostly negative reviews.
Early life and career
Shyamalan was born in Mahe, kerala,
India. His father, Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, a
physician, is a
Malayali, and his mother, Jayalakshmi (called Jaya), is a
Tamilian and an
obstetrician and gynecologist by profession. In the 1960s, after medical school (at the
Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research in Pondicherry) and the birth of their first child, Veena, Shyamalan's parents moved to the
United States. Shyamalan's mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy with him at her parents' home in
Chennai (
Madras).
Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Pondicherry and then was raised in
Penn Valley,
Pennsylvania, an affluent
Main Line suburb of
Philadelphia. He attended the private
Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy
, which his parents chose for its academic discipline, followed by
The Episcopal Academy, a private
Episcopalian high school also in
Lower Merion. Shyamalan went on to
New York University's
Tisch School of the Arts, in
Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was here that he made up his middle name.
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a
Super-8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted Shyamalan to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged Shyamalan to follow his passion. By the time he was 17, Shyamalan, who had been a fan of
Steven Spielberg, had made 45 home movies. Beginning with
The Sixth Sense, he's included a scene from one of these childhood films on each DVD release of his films, which he feels represents his first attempt at the same kind of film (with the exception of
Lady in the Water).
Shyamalan made his first film, the semiautobiographical
drama Praying with Anger, while still an NYU student, using money borrowed from family and friends. It was screened at the
Toronto Film Festival on
September 12,
1992, and played commercially at one theater for one week. His parents were the film's
associate producers. The drama dealt with a ten-year-old Catholic schoolboy (
Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (
Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included
Dana Delany and
Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as
Rosie O'Donnell,
Julia Stiles, and
Camryn Manheim.
Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child and earned 1999
Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. Only in limited release, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters.
That same year Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for
Stuart Little.
In 1993, Shyamalan married Indian
psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he'd met at NYU and with whom he's had two daughters. As of early-2008, the family resides in
Willistown Township, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site of Philadelphia.
Movies
Praying with Anger
Praying with Anger was Night's first work as a young director and was released in 1992. The movie tells the story of a young man named Dev Raman (played by Shyamalan) who returns to India to explore his heritage. During the course of the movie, Dev learns that his cold and distant father, now deceased, actually cared for him a great deal before his passing. The title of the movie comes from a moment in the film when the protagonist learns that he's able to pray to Hindu deities with almost any emotion except indifference. Upon realizing this, Raman finds he's only able to pray with anger.
Wide Awake
Wide Awake, Shyamalan's first major feature film, came from a screenplay written by Shyamalan that was purchased by the then up-and-coming independent film studio
Miramax. A provision was added to the sale that Shyamalan could direct the film and shoot it in Philadelphia. It was produced by Cary Woods and Cathy Konrad. The film starred
Joseph Cross,
Rosie O'Donnell,
Dana Delaney,
Denis Leary, and
Robert Loggia.
Wide Awake also featured
Julia Stiles in one of her earliest roles as Josh's teenage sister, Nina. The film follows a young boy's search for God after his grandfather dies, a story told quietly, driven by dialogue.
The film is similar to later Shyamalan films with a theme of crises of belief, a supernatural sub-plot, and a twist ending that sums up the ideas presented in the film. It is the only Shyamalan-directed film to date in which the director doesn't make a cameo appearance. Although
Wide Awake was made in 1995, it wasn't released until 1998 where it grossed a total of only $288,000 against a production budget of $7 million.
The Sixth Sense
Shyamalan achieved commercial success in 1999 when he wrote and directed
The Sixth Sense, a
supernatural drama about a psychologist (
Bruce Willis) who blames himself for a patient's suicide and his own broken marriage. Upon meeting a disturbed child (
Haley Joel Osment) who claims to see people who have died, the psychologist feels he's a chance to redeem himself. According to the book
DisneyWar, David Vogel of
The Walt Disney Company read Shyamalan's script and, without obtaining approval from his superiors, bought the rights to it for a high $2 million and allowed Shyamalan to direct. Vogel's bosses, disagreeing with his decision, sold the profits to
Spyglass Entertainment and kept only a 12.5 percent distribution fee for itself.
The film had a $40-million budget, and grossed over $600 million at the box office worldwide.
The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including
Best Editing,
Best Supporting Actor for Osment,
Best Supporting Actress for
Toni Collette,
Best Director,
Best Picture, and
Best Original Screenplay. The
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America awarded it a
Nebula Award for Best Script of 1999.
Unbreakable
Unbreakable is a drama about David Dunn (
Bruce Willis), the sole survivor of a train crash, and his encounters with
comic book collector Elijah Price (
Samuel L. Jackson), who is convinced that Dunn has latent
superpowers. The movie opened to mixed reviews with many comparing it to "The Sixth Sense" and noting its slow pace and somber atmosphere. With a budget of $75 million, the movie failed to make a
net profit domestically with a total box office
gross of $95 million. It went on to collect another $154 million worldwide.
Signs
Opening in August 2002,
Signs is a
science fiction drama of a rural Pennsylvania pastor (
Mel Gibson) who has lost his faith after his wife's death and regains it with his family as they witness the worldwide events of an alien invasion.
Joaquin Phoenix,
Rory Culkin, and
Abigail Breslin also star.
Budgeted at $72 million,
Signs grossed $227 million domestically and $408 million worldwide. It was the highest-grossing film as well as the highest opening-weekend gross ($60 million) of Gibson's career as an actor.
The film received a generally positive reception. Most notably of which was Roger Ebert's four-star review, stating, "M. Night Shyamalan's
Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it's over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced".
Shyamalan said in an interview with
Science Fiction Weekly that his choice of Gibson was based in part by the actor's emotional role in the film
Lethal Weapon: "I was on my parents' sofa watching the video of
Lethal Weapon, and then this guy did stuff emotionally that had no business being in an action movie. ... I completely believed the humanity of a man who was so torn by the loss of his wife that he wasn't afraid of dying, which made him a lethal weapon. ... [W]hen I wrote the movie about a guy who loses faith because his wife has passed away, I felt like that was the guy. And I also like taking an action guy and not letting him be The Guy."
Shyamalan also said that originally, there was going to be very little music in the film, but that composer
James Newton Howard's intense and emotional compositions reminded him of a
Bernard Herrmann (
Alfred Hitchcock's frequent composer) score and prompted him to change his mind.
The Village
Drawing on
Wuthering Heights after being offered to pen a screen adaptation, Shyamalan went to work on what was originally titled
The Woods.
The Village was released in July 2004. A drama starring
Joaquin Phoenix,
William Hurt,
Sigourney Weaver,
Bryce Dallas Howard, and
Adrien Brody, it tells of a small, 19th-century community run by a group of "Elders" who seem to be content in their isolation from the outside world. The village is encircled by a forest said to be filled with mysterious and threatening creatures. Even as an uneasy truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to be falling apart, one villager (Phoenix) starts to question their forced isolation.
With total production costs of $71.6 million, the film grossed $114.2 million domestically ($50 million in its opening weekend) and a further $142 million in non-USA receipts. Its successful opening weekend in America was followed by a severe dropoff of 67%, and the film is generally considered to be a commercial disappointment. Critical response was mostly negative: Desson Thomson of
The Washington Post called it "a bewildering disappointment";
Shyamalan expressed a great deal of regret in the way the film was marketed, telling producing partner Sam Mercer, while overseeing the editing of the teaser trailer for
Lady in the Water, that he'd wished for the
The Village to have been sold as a period romance with a scare only at the end of the trailer. Shyamalan is also said to have thought that the shift in the main theme of faith from his previous films to that of deception resulted in the mixed-negative response. Citing that his other movies set out to make an audience believe in the supernatural,
The Village set out to do the opposite.
The Village earned an Academy Award nomination for
Best Original Score.
Lady in the Water
Lady in the Water, released on
July 21,
2006, is a
fantasy about Philadelphia maintenance man Cleveland Heep (
Paul Giamatti), who discovers a young woman named Story (
Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool of his apartment complex. Gradually, he and his neighbors learn that she's a
water nymph who has come to "the world of man" to bring inspiration to someone in the complex. Her life is in danger from a vicious, wolf-like, mystical creature that tries to keep her from returning to her watery "blue world."
The proposal for this film was underscored by a rift between Shyamalan and Disney, the studio for which he'd made his biggest previous films. In the book
The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale by Michael Bamberger, Shyamalan said that he felt Disney "no longer valued individualism...no longer valued fighters." Shyamalan left the studio after production president
Nina Jacobson and others became highly critical of his script, which
Warner Bros. eventually produced. Critical response was again negative —
Frank Lovece of
Film Journal International saying simply, "this
Lady is the
Showgirls of fantasy film" — disparaging both the inclusion of a film-critic character (one of many elements of Shyamalan's screenplay that Disney found troublesome) and Shyamalan's decision to take such a large and personal role in the film as a writer whose work would change the world.
The New York Post wrote that the film was "dead in the water", criticizing Shyamalan as a "crackpot with messianic delusions."
Lady in the Water received four
Golden Raspberry Award nominations, three of which were for Shyamalan himself (Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay), as well as Worst Picture.
As of
September 14,
2006, the film made $42.3 million domestically and $30.5 million in the foreign box office, totaling $72.8 million. Combined production and marketing costs amounted to approximately twice this figure. DVD rentals of the film have earned it another $19.96 million as of
February 18,
2007.
The Happening
On
January 28,
2007,
Variety reported that Shyamalan showed a new script titled
The Green Effect to studio executives but no major studios were interested in greenlighting the film. A little over a month later, the same magazine reported that Shyamalan's
spec script (now titled
The Happening) had been sold to 20th Century Fox after an extensive rewrite.
The plot involves a mysterious substance in the form of a neurotoxin, released by plants to destroy the human race which, when a human comes into contact with it, results in a horrific death caused by the person themselves. The protagonist, a science
teacher named Elliot Moore, attempts to escape from the substance with his wife and friends as hysteria grips the planet.
The film is produced by Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, and Barry Mendel, and scheduled to be released on
Friday, June 13, 2008.
The Last Airbender
On
January 8,
2007, it was announced that Shyamalan would write, direct and produce the live-action adaptation of, an
animated TV series on the children's cable channel
Nickelodeon, a series influenced by Asian art, mythology and Kung-Fu fighting styles. The movie will be produced for Paramount Pictures' MTV Films and Nick Movies. The trade paper
Variety later reported Shyamalan would film
Avatar after
The Happening.
According to an interview with the co-creators in
SFX Magazine, Shyamalan came across
Avatar when his daughter wanted to be
Katara for
Halloween. Intrigued, Shyamalan researched and watched the series with his family. "Watching
Avatar has become a family event in my house ... so we're looking forward to how the story develops in season three", said M. Night Shyamalan. "Once I saw the amazing world that Mike and Bryan created, I knew it would make a great feature film."
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, M. Night will begin filming
Avatar: The Last Airbender in May 2009; he'll need four or five huge soundstages in the Philadelphia area to produce this film. On April 15, 2008, Paramount and Nickelodeon announced the official title for the film will be The Last Airbender. Also announced was the release date, July 2 of 2010. The Last Airbender is currently the only movie announced for the July 4th holiday weekend of that year.
Other projects
In July 2000, on
The Howard Stern Show, Shyamalan said he'd met with Spielberg and was in early talks to write the script for the
fourth Indiana Jones film. This would have given Shyamalan a chance to work with his longtime idol,
Steven Spielberg. After the project fell through Shyamalan later said it was too "tricky" to arrange and "not the right thing" for him to do.
Shyamalan's name was linked with the 2001 film
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but the project seemed to conflict with the production of
Unbreakable. In July 2006, while doing press tours for
Lady in the Water, Shyamalan said he's still interested in directing one of the last two Harry Potter films. "The themes that run through it...the empowering of children, a positive outlook...you name it, it falls in line with my beliefs", Shyamalan said. "I enjoy the humor in it. When I read the first
Harry Potter and was thinking about making it, I'd a whole different vibe in my head of it".
After the release of
The Village in 2004, Shyamalan had been planning a film adaptation of Yann Martel's novel
Life of Pi with 20th Century Fox, but later backed out so that he could make
Lady in the Water. "I love that book. I mean, it's basically [thestory of] a kid born in the same city as me [Pondicherry,India] — it almost felt predestined", Shyamalan said. "But I was hesitant because the book has kind of a twist ending. And I was concerned that as soon as you put my name on it, everybody would have a different experience. Whereas if someone else did it, it would be much more satisfying, I think. Expectations, you've got to be aware of them. I'm wishing them all great luck. I hope they make a beautiful movie".
Other media
Sci Fi Channel
In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media
hoax with the
Sci Fi Channel, which when eventually uncovered by the press, prompted Sci Fi's parent company,
NBC-Universal, to denounce the undertaking as "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and we value our relationship with both."
Sci Fi claimed in its "documentary" special —
The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of
The Village — that Shyamalan was legally dead for nearly a half-hour while drowned in a frozen pond in a childhood accident, and that upon being rescued he'd experiences of communicating with spirits, fueling an obsession with the supernatural. The Sci Fi Channel also claimed that Shyamalan had grown "sour" when the "documentary" filmmakers' questions got too personal, and had therefore withdrawn from participating and threatened to sue the filmmakers.
American Express commercial
An
American Express commercial directed by as well as starring M. Night Shyamalan debuted during the 2006
Oscars. The spot takes place in a restaurant with several eerie events happening in quick succession. After these events unfold, a waitress approaches Shyamalan, jolting him out of what seems to have been a daydream, and tells him how much she loves his films. Shyamalan, in a
voice-over, says, "My life is about finding time to dream, that's why my card is American Express", as he goes to a different restaurant to find other things to dream about.
Criticism
A common criticism of Shyamalan is that he's a better director than he's a screenwriter. Some critics have suggested that he'd be more successful by hiring a screenwriter to help translate his stories to the big screen. He has also been labeled a "one-trick pony" for his continuous use of the "twist" element in his screenplays. After the release of
The Village, Slate's Michael Agger noted that Shyamalan was following "an uncomfortable pattern" of "making fragile, sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic."
In recent years, M. Night Shyamalan has been accused of plagiarism. It has been noted that
The Sixth Sense resembles the
Orson Scott Card novel
Lost Boys. Robert McIlhinney, a Pennsylvania screenwriter, sued Shyamalan over the similarity of
Signs to his unpublished script
Lord of the Barrens.
Margaret Peterson Haddix considered a lawsuit after it was noted that
The Village had numerous elements found in her children's novel
Running Out of Time.
Further Information
Get more info on 'M Night Shyamalan'.
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