The film The Sixth Sense brought into the limelight as a director. Five films on, his The Happening , a celebration of innocence, looks set to split the critics and audiences again.
FOR A young director Shyamalan has achieved a great deal. His first five films, including The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, left, grossed $1 billion at the box office. Above, his latest film, The Happening
M NIGHT SHYAMALAN readily recalls his on
e encounter with racism. The event forms in the Indian-born director's mind with startling clarity, riding through his consciousness as if it happened yesterday. "I was about 12 years old," he smiles, "and we were in some convenience store in Pennsylvania. There was this massive white guy in front of me and I accidentally knocked his arm. He turned around and glowered, 'Back the f*** off, dot-head!' I mean, I was just a kid, he was this huge guy. I'd never felt anything like that before."
Thankfully for Shyamalan, he's never felt anything like that since, either. This bright and bubbly writer-director concedes that he is in incredibly lucky, clocking up almost 40 years in the US as an Indian immigrant with only the one racism story to tell. Many others are not so fortunate. "I am aware of that," he offers, "although, obviously, growing up Indian you are aware of the specific challenges you face. It's no wonder my father wanted his academically-gifted child to become a doctor; when I started out, you could count the number of Indian film directors working in the West on exactly no hands."
Nowadays, thanks to the likes of Shekhar Kapur and Mira Nair, the film enthusiast might be able to name enough Indian film directors to fill a whole hand, and Shyamalan certainly stands as the most notable. His five Hollywood films to date – The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and Lady in the Water – have scooped well over $1 billion in international box office sales.
Indeed, such is his contribution to modern cinema he was recognised recently by the Indian government, who awarded him the prestigious Padma Shri Award. "It's a little like a knighthood," beams Shyamalan, "and my dad, who was so worried about me becoming a filmmaker, was sitting in the front row, as proud as Punch! Actually, it was a weird experience – I was there alongside a guy who'd won the Nobel Peace Prize, with Al Gore, and the greatest chess player of all time. I felt a bit out of my league, like I was sitting in the wrong place!"
For a relatively young director – he is 38 in August – Shyamalan has achieved a great deal. He was born in Pondicherry in southern India, his family moving to the US when he was just a few weeks old. Growing up in Pennsylvania, the young Shyamalan displayed remarkable academic skills, although he reserved his greatest passion for his hobby, film. When he was accepted into New York University's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, he went to study cinema, not, as his father had hoped, medicine. After releasing two small, low-budget films he came to international attention with his Hollywood debut, The Sixth Sense, in 1999, a slick and spine-tingling ghost story that went on to become one of the most successful films of all time.
In fact, such was its impact, many believe that, subsequently, Shyamalan has failed to live up to his potential. He certainly set himself a high benchmark; The Sixth Sense, remains his most commercially successful film to date, taking almost $700 million at the international box office, and scooping six Academy Award nominations.
"That film earned me a reputation for being 'the scary guy who did twists'," he says with a shrug. "Then with Unbreakable, my second film, while it wasn't scary, it still had a twist, so I can see why these things persist, why people always say I'm the 'twist guy'. But the way I look at it, though, is that if half my films have twists and half don't, when people say, 'You always have twists in your films,' it'd be just as true to say, 'You never have twists in your films!' If you want to look for links between my films, there are other things."
Indeed, film-lovers will often point to Shyamalan's use of sound – which he describes as his "secret weapon" – or the lack thereof, while the more literary-minded might highlight his recurring motifs, like his proclivity towards the celebration of innocence. This is certainly a verdant theme in his latest offering, The Happening, an unsettling thriller that taps into the pernicious potential of Mother Nature.
"That's a terrible thing, right?" says Shyamalan. "Mother Nature as a conscious killer, the idea that you are describing an entity that may or may not have a consciousness. You're never sure if the world is conscious and sometimes I think, 'I hope not, because we're raping it!' So, in The Happening, I wanted to insinuate that the world did have a consciousness, or at least a heartless checks and balances system, a merciless one." As to whether The Happening has a twist, that is something which audiences will have to discover for themselves.
"Some people might think this a departure for me, sure," continues Shyamalan, "but there's always a need for people who are selling a movie to fit it into a genre – Jim Carrey in a physical comedy, or me doing a thriller – that's what everyone wants and expects. That's the relationship people want, but I don't just do that. That's an incorrect assessment. For me the problem has been that, with my last two movies, they've not been fitting people's expectations of what they should be."
The Happening, it is fair to say, has a lot riding on it. After the commercial success of Shyamalan's first and third films (The Sixth Sense and then 2002's Signs, which sandwich his super-cool, albeit commercially cold personal favourite, Unbreakable) his fourth and fifth movies proved both critical and commercial misfires. The fables The Village (2004) and The Lady in the Water (2006) were both lambasted by critics, who seized upon their pretension and prompted suggestions that Shyamalan is a better director than he is a writer. If only he'd direct stronger scripts, it was said.
"It's just opinions," he counters. "In fact Lady in the Water is my favourite film I've done, while The Village is my greatest achievement as a film-maker. A lot of people might say The Sixth Sense is my best, but I think that's just because it has the most fun narrative structure, and of course, the idea of life after death is such a universal theme.
"I do think people are a little harsh on my films, as if they're prejudged, but then again vulnerability is not a bad thing. You should fight hard to be vulnerable and innocent.
"In The Happening, the main character has a strong belief in innocence, that innocence isn't a naïve thing, as everyone always says it is, but that it's a choice based on knowledge. I always look for the spaces, the links. The character in The Happening is like that. Like Einstein, he sees God in the numbers. Fate will always play a hand – just look at the spaces – and I like that."
As he talks, he recalls a recent moment when a young white boy asked for his autograph. It happened when he pulled up to a convenience story just outside his hometown, Philadelphia. "I think I went in for mince," he says, "but this little kid comes running up all excited. And then it dawned on me where I was. It was the exact same place where the guy had told me to 'F*** off, dot-head!' about 25 years before. This boy could have been that racist's son! Isn't that amazing? You'll always find God in the spaces …"
• The Happening is released on Friday
