M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan
Manoj Shyamalan, known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-American film director, screenwriter, producer and occasional actor known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots. His major films include the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense, the superhero drama thriller Unbreakable, the science fiction thriller Signs, the psychological thriller The Village, the fantasy thriller Lady in the Water, the natural thriller The Happening, the fantasy adventure film The Last Airbender, the sci-fi action-adventure film After Earth, the found-footage horror film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 August 1970
CityMahe, India
CountryUnited States of America
I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.
I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.
Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.
You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.
Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.
I consider myself an independent filmmaker.
The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.
I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.
My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.
Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.
I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.
My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.