m. night shyamalan interview (with sidebar on movie mermaids)

7/28/2019 M. Night Shyamalan interview (with sidebar on movie mermaids)

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BY FRANK TOVECESPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

ollywood's darkNight of the soulsteps into a dar\faded littleconferenceroom at theWaldorf-Astoriawhere sad,chipped tables, crumpled linenand a half-empty, stemmedwater glass could have come outof one of his films. For writer-di-rector-producer M. Night Shya-malarl the room fits the mood.Shyamalan made the somber,slow-moving but big-moneymovies "The Sixth Sense," "Un-breakable" and "Signs," plus thenot-so-successfi.rl "The Village,"for Disney. He's switched stu-dios, after the very public break-up ofwhat he describes as a"parent-child" relationship.Now, Warner Bros. is releasinghis Philadelphia phantasmagoriaabout awaternymptr, "Lady intheWater," Friday."I hadn't really cracked it yet,"Shyamalan, settling no, concedesof the "Lady in the Water" scripthe showed Disney executives.They were left unimpressedand, per the just-released biogra-phy "The Man Who HeardVoices: Or, HowM. Night Shya-malan Risked His Career on aFairy Tale" by Michael Bamberg-er, weren't showing him thedeference he felt he deserved.After one bad meeting, the booksays, he broke down in tears."It was getting there," he saysnow of the script. "I was excitedby the ideas of it and was, like,wanting to show them, y'know?And the didn't reall get it.


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S TIMES PHOTO,/ JENN]FER S. ALTMAN

The-v were willing to make it,"Shyamalan goes on. "Theyoffered me the money to makeit. And I iust said to myself,'I'mnot gonna be able to pull this off.I won't be able to make a goodmovie if I know they don'tbelieve in it.'My movies aregonna succeed or not based onmy ability to have a clean pointofview and inspire others. Andso if the people around me arecorrupting it, I'll never reach it.I'll always be wounded. It'llalways be unfinished."Shyamalan's movies are amatter for his believers. "I wantthem to own the movies," hesays - not in a DVD way, not atfirst. "I want them to defend me.Idon't need to defend me. Thefans go and defend the movies.They need to go defend andargue them, and do battle overthem, on the Internet. It's theirsto own."That's good, because the waythe admittedly emotional Shya-malan defends himself is to haveBob Balaban, in "Lady," play afilm and book critic who suffers,surprisingly, a petty and vindic-tive fate in a movie the filmmak-er says is about eternal themes.Shyamalan's movies aren'talways reviewed well. Despitehis box-office successes (the$40-million "The Sixth Sense"grossed $293.5 million domesti-cally and $3793 million abroad),Shyamalan sees himself, para-on my ability to have a clean point of view and inspire others," says Shyamalan.


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Paul Giamatti and water nymphdoxically, as an outsider, a cultmoviemaker for the masses."I looooove the cult feeling!"he says. The critically savaged"The Village," he says, "had acult feeling to it. So did'Unbreakable,' and to someextent'Lady' [does] as well."Perhaps. "Lady in the Water"stars Paul Giamatti as Cleve-land Heep, the superintendentof a classic movie apartmenthouse, where everybody knowseverybody. Haunted and dispir-ited - metaphorically, that is;he doesn't see dead people -Heep discovers an ageless,ethereal young woman (BryceDallas Howard) living in aspace beneath the pool. A spacefilled with water. Amphibiousand English-speaking, she is a"nar{," a Shyamalan-concoctedform of water nymph, whosename is Story.Metaphor alertThe movie has story aplenty,startiag with a long voice-overexplaining how the worlds ofwater-women and land-menseparated eons ago, and menmade war, and forgot to listento nature, but every so often anarf comes back to deliver animportant message. Aad that'sall before the title credits.Shyamalan later offers reams ofback story and made-up folk-lore about narfs, scrunts andtartutics.Heep must discover thecommunity's Healer and Guildand whatnot in order for Storyto deliver her message andavoid the wolflike scrunts

tryilg to keep her from return-ing to her "Blue World.""He's an eccentric," Giamattisays of Shyamalan. "He's mak-ing eccentric movies. I mean,they're commercial movies. Butthey're eccentric. They're verystrange. I thought this was avery weird idea," he says of"Lady," "and if you could pull itoff, it would be amazing. Ididn't know if he could.I thinkhe does."Man with a Y:sionAnd whether he does or not,the movie is decidedly Shyama-lan's own vision "At the begin-ning ofthe process," co-star

Howard says, "I came in like,'Oh, I'm gonna be a good littleactor and do all this researchabout fairy tales, and have allthese opinions, and presentthem to him in a way that's likediplomatic and wonderfirl.'And, of course, he was listeningand collaborating, but as Istarted then listening to himand not trying to be impressive,I went,'Oh. I just kinda gottashowup.'. . .. What Iwantedto be for him was just someonethat was going to allow thatvision to manifest."Shyamalan"s visions began inchildhood, when the son of two6migr6 South Indian physicians

was given a Super8 moviecamera. Entranced, he mademore than 40 scripted homemovies, then attended NewYork University" s star-studdedfilm school. With money fromfamily and friends, he shot hisfirst movie, "trraying WithAnger" (1992),while still astudent. It played the TorontoFilm Festival and one week in atheater.Shyamalan followed with thesemi-autobiographical'TVideAwake," about a Catholicschoolboy seeking God. Shya-malan isn't Catholic, but hisSee MOVIES on C8

Bryce Dallas Howard find themselves in trouble deep in "Lady in the Water" opening Friday.

ri.rl; ome of M. Night"t.if, Shyamalan'sixrirfl'most notablefilms include:Praying tUtrh Anger(1992)tUlde Awake (1998)The Slrth Sense(1999)Unbreakable (2000)Slgns (2002)The lllll4e (2004)lady ln the Water(2006)

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Haley Joel Osment in "TheSixth Sense"


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He sees wet peopleMOVIES from C6parents sent him to Philadelphia's Waldron Academy,where the movie was shot, and the Episcopal Acade-myhigh school, because of its stiff academics. Filmedin 1995 but only released three years later by Miramax,"\Mide Awake" tanked. Yet Shyamalan staged a bid-ding war for his next spec script, "The Sixth Sense,"and insisted on directing.That twist-endingghost story, starring Bruce Willisand Haleyfoel Osment, became a worldwide phenom,raked in best picture, best director and best originalscreenplay Oscar nominations and made Shyamalan ahard-to-pronounce household name.Success didn't necessarily change him; the filmmak-er, who's married to psychologist Bhavna Vaswani andhas trvo daughters, has always been a confident pontifi-cator. As editor ofhis 1988 high-school yearbook, hegave himself a frrll-page mock-up of aTime magazinecover headlined "Best director. NYU grad takes Holly-wood by storm."

Sure, it's all storytelling, right? And "Lady in theWater," he says, is about just that. "It is a very irratio-nallypersonal movie to me," the storyteller says."There's something irrationally pure about it that'sreallywho I am."


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Fish out of waterymphs, mermaids, naiads . . . whatever you callthem, they have a history in the movies. Someexamples:

rrThe Fisherman's l{ightmare"Some of the first filmic water nymphs weren't sonice - they condemn a poor fisherman to be, ironical-ly, burned alive in this 1910 silent horror short.Annette KellermanAustralian Kellerman, a championship swimmerand aquatic performer known as "The Dii'ingVenus,"starred in a raft ofsilent shorts, playing the "Siren ofthe Sea" (l9ll), "Neptune's Daughter" (1914) andAnitia, "A Daughter of the Gods" (1916), which con-tains what many call the movies' first nude scene by amajor star. Esther Williams (see below) played her inthe 1952 biopic "Million Dollar Mermaid."Hedy Lamarr in "Ecstasy"Still known by her given name, Hedwig Kiesler,future MGM star Lamarr wasn't supernatural in theCzech film "Extase" (1933), but she was super crunaturel. Her nude woodland swim and nymph-likerun through the underbrush made this the mostscandalous film of its time.Esther Williams"America's Mermaid" and International Swim-ming Hall of Famer Williams measured a babeli-ciotts38-27-34 when filming "Million Dollar Mer-maid." No wonder she popularized the t'aqua musi-cal," an MGM specialty that included her "BathingBeauty" (f9,K) and "Neptune's Daughter" (L949)."Mr. Peabody and the ilermaid"MGM starlet Ann Blyth played Lenore the Mermaidin this lighthearted 1948 fantasy classic starring thegreat William Powell as a man who returns fromvacation with a lishy tale for his therapist."Splash"A mermaid named Madison comes to New York,meets Tom Hanks and goes shopping at Bloomie's inone ofthe first Touchstone pictures - the PG-ratedbrand that helped keep the Disney studio relevant astimes changed. Directed by Ron Howard - BryceDallas Howard's dad - the 1984 filmwas nominatedfor a best original screenplay Oscar."The little Mermaid"The 1989 animated feature that saved Disney's ani-mated features. It was also a blockbuster that launchedan underwater kingdom for the Magic Kingdom."Aquamarinet'Girls just wanna have fins in this 2006 20th CenturyFox adaptation of the Alice Hoffman novel about twol2-year-olds and awatery waif with attitude.FRANK TOVECE

m. night shyamalan interview (with sidebar on movie mermaids)

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