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Is M Night Shyamalan the next Spielberg?
By: Dharam Shourie (PTI)
August 1,2002
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As his new alien flick Signs hits American screens on Friday, India-born screenwriter-director Manoj Night Shyamalan is being tipped as the next Steven Spielberg, thanks to a cover story devoted to him by the leading US magazine Newsweek.
"I don't care about the box office, I want to be a phenomenon where the audience feels some connection," the lad from Pondicherry said in an interview to Newsweek. His goal with movies is to "have a profound effect on the audience." At 31, Shyamalan is among the younger celebrities and highest paid screenwriters in the harsh, competitive and combative world of Hollywood.
Critics say Signs is based on fresh ideas, in a season when most of the movies that did well were either based on old ideas or were sequels. Signs is a science-fiction thriller with strong family bonds — subjects dear to his heart. It is about a former priest played by Mel Gibson who loses his wife in tragic circumstances and thus loses his faith. His life begins to change when crops circles suddenly appear on his farmhouse, where he stays with his brother and children.
Newsweek says like all of Shyamalan's movies, 'Signs' is obsessed with the unknown, but with themes of family, parenting and self-renewal. The film, says the magazine, is shot with the "unmistakable admonition that we must draw whoever is near and dear to us even nearer." Says his mother Jayalakshmi, a retired obstetrician, in an interview to the magazine, "I feel he should make nice movies. The latest thing — sex and that sort of thing — I am not for it. We don't have any control over what he's going to write, but I feel it should be something nice which leaves a landmark on the people who see it. Maybe a little spirituality. That would be the greatest thing," said Jayalakshmi.
Shyamalan wrote and directed The Sixth Sense, at 28. The movie starred Bruce Willis as a psychologist and Haley Joel Osment as a trembling boy besieged by ghosts. That movie grossed nearly US$700 million worldwide.
Newsweek quotes Mel Gibson as saying about the movie, "That one he did about the dead people — that was a phenomenally crafted movie. Night is uncompromising in the way he tells a story. He doesn't spoonfeed, and he doesn't pander to anyone."
Unbreakable, Shyamalan's follow-up on The Sixth Sense, which the magazine describes as sombre, misfired at the box-office but latest offering 'Signs' is a welcome return. Shyamalan's idols, the magazine says, are "unapologetically pop". Not Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa, but Hitchcock, George Lucas and Spielberg.
The scares in "Signs" call Hitchcock to mind, but Shyamalan is more akin to the young Spielberg in his careful rippling of the heartstrings, his deft touch with child actors, his fascination with the middle-class American family and his desperate desire to keep pleasing the same demographic over and over: people between the ages of 10 and 100.
Disney gave him US$5 million to write 'Signs' and US$7.5 million to direct. "Now he's attempting to turn his name into a brand, like Spielberg, so that on opening weekend audiences will converge to see not a Mel Gibson or a Bruce Willis movie, per se, but an M Night Shyamalan movie with Gibson or Willis in it," Newsweek says.
The magazine says he is obsessed with understanding why audiences do the things they do. "Last year was probably the worst year for movies for me since I've been alive," he says. "It was the worst. The quality of movies in general. We don't have to get into specifics. And what that creates is a starvation in the audience.
'Signs' will have to earn the audience's trust. People believe in honesty. They really do," says Shyamalan. "And integrity — all the way down to the choice of a sound effect."
Shyamalan was born with the name Manoj in Pondicherry, during one of his parents' trips back home to visit family. A few months later, the Shyamalans returned to the Philadelphia suburbs, where his father, Nelliate, was a cardiologist.
Though Shyamalan tends to be quite frank in interviews, Newsweek says he hesitates when asked something that might affect his loved ones or encroach on their "shared history." When asked if he drank or dated in high school, he grins nervously. "Uh, yeah. Are you gonna tell my parents? Are you gonna write that and tell my parents?"
Surely they know. "I don't think they do! You're gonna shock them. They're gonna have a heart attack!" laughs Shyamalan. While Shyamalan was at New York University studying film, he fell hard for fellow student Bhavna, whom he later married. Bhavna is now getting a Ph.D. in child psychology. Shyamalan says he proposed her with a note in a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant.
Asked if Bhavna's parents objected to their marriage, he said, "I don't know how I can talk about that... That's a shared history." Bhavna's family was from North India and his was from the South, and he was slightly younger. "But everything's cool now," he says.
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