Shyamalan was born with the name Manoj in Pondicherry, India, 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. The director remembers being small for his age, an enormously sensitive kid scared of — well, what have you got? Everything. His family was inseparable — even today, they greet each other with a flurry of hugs and kisses, though they live only five minutes apart on the Main Line — and his mother says that whenever young Manoj had to be alone she’d call him every 30 minutes. Shyamalan was raised Hindu but sent to a Roman Catholic grade school for the discipline. Yes, he was aware of being different and other, but his memories of growing up have more to do with basketball and ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ He began making his movies at 10 or so. He used an 8mm camera. He’d have to plug it into a VCR and lug the whole mess around with an extension cord.
Though Shyamalan tends to be quite frank in interviews, he hesitates when he’s asked something that might affect his loved ones, might encroach on their ‘shared history.’ When I ask him 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!” Shyamalan is laughing now. He is tall and broad-shouldered, but he has a laugh that is so childlike it is almost a giggle. While Shyamalan was at New York University studying film, he fell hard for a fellow student named Bhavna, who’s now getting a Ph.D. in child psychology. He proposed to her not long afterward with a note in a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. “She was like, ‘This is so weird. This says … ‘ ” He was already on his knees.
Shyamalan’s first feature was an independent movie called “Praying With Anger,” which grossed $7,000 and change at the box office in 1992. He shot the movie in India to save money, and actually starred, turning in an endearingly creaky performance as an American finding his roots. (These days, Shyamalan limits himself to cameos.) Because ‘Praying With Anger’ contains not one but two star-crossed romances, I ask Shyamalan if Bhavna’s parents objected to their marriage. He does not giggle. “I don’t know how I can talk about that without bringing in her business and her family’s business,” he says. “That’s a shared history.” He elaborates a bit, saying that Bhavna’s family was from the north of India and that his was from the south, and he was slightly younger. Those things are deal-breakers in India, of course. “But everything’s cool now,” he says. I ask him if he’d ever thought about giving up. “No, I’m not that kind of guy.” Did she? “Probably.” How did he persuade her not to? “I’m kinda hard to get off your back when I want something.”
In 1994, Shyamalan wrote a script called “Labor of Love.” Fox, he says, offered him hundreds of thousands of dollars, assuring him he could also direct. Once he had sold it to them, it became clear that they’d just been yesing him to get the screenplay. “I cried. It killed me. It was a story about what I felt about first being married. It was pure. I said, ‘You can’t do this.’ So they flew me out and I met with all the bigwigs in a room. I was wearing a pin-striped suit. My mom got me that suit so I wore it. Apparently, you don’t wear suits in Hollywood. So I walked in looking like some high-school kid trying to get a job. Immediately, there were all these jokes about my suit. They’re like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna give you a $25 million movie.'” The film was never made. “I cursed it.”
When Shyamalan did get a second feature off the ground, in 1996, things actually went far, far worse. “Wide Awake” is about a Catholic schoolboy whose grandfather’s death sets him on a search for God. After Shyamalan edited the film, Miramax’s famed co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein, insisted that it be recut. Rosie O’Donnell, who plays a nun in the movie, intervened on Shyamalan’s behalf. A meeting was set so that everybody could clarify his position. O’Donnell got the flu, and had to call in on the speakerphone. Weinstein was already put out with her because she’d just fired a friend of his from her TV show. “I said, ‘Listen, Harvey, I don’t want you to release it unless it’s Night’s version’,” O’Donnell remembers. “‘He’s the artist. You’re just the guy who frames it and sells it.’ Well, you know what? That didn’t go over big. He started saying, ‘Who do you think you are? You’re just a f—ing talk-show host!’ He went off. I was stunned. I thought he knew that he acquired the films and that the other people were the artists. I didn’t think this was news to him. He said, ‘Like you would f—ing know. You b—-! You c—!'”
O’Donnell cried, and told Weinstein to shove it somewhere very specific. “Night called me afterwards, like, ‘Oh my God, are you all right?'” she says. “Thank God Harvey didn’t crush him, because it takes a lot to stand up to that. I gotta tell you, it takes a lot to make me cry and he totally made me cry.” O’Donnell says that to Weinstein’s credit he later apologized, sending her jewelry and flowers. Asked to respond to all of the above, Weinstein sent Newsweek a gentlemanly statement: “Night is an incredibly talented filmmaker, and it’s unfortunate for us that we were unable to find a successful way to market ‘Wide Awake.’ It’s one of my great disappointments, since I loved the film. Thank God for DVD.”
Shyamalan himself regards the ‘Wide Awake’ fracas as a pivotal moment in his career. “Harvey’s just the way the world is,” he says. “If the movie was great and was going to make a lot of money, it would have gone very smoothly.” The episode taught him that making uncommercial movies makes you vulnerable and that, as he puts it, “I never want to be weakened and victimized again.” (At one point while Shyamalan was in the mixing room finishing ‘Signs,’ he joked to his film editor, “Harvey called. He wants you to recut this.” Somebody else piped up, “He’s heading right over.” Chuckling ensued.)
After ‘Wide Awake’ grossed all of $300,000, Shyamalan reminded himself that it was blockbusters like ‘Raiders’ that inspired him in the first place. “I think Night recognized that he has a very sensitive, sentimental streak in him,” says Barry Mendel, who produced “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable,” “and that he needs to juxtapose that with something darker, edgier and more commercial.” Shyamalan began writing a supernatural thriller about a serial killer and a boy who sees dead people. It was lousy at first. A ‘Silence of the Lambs’ rip-off. Then he started thinking about the kid. What if he was a really sensitive kid, a kid so empathetic that he even felt bad for ghosts? Shyamalan wrote some dialogue for a birthday party — a turning point, though it never made it to the screen — where the sensitive kid and a chubby kid are just sitting there, friendless and ostracized. The sensitive kid tells the chubby kid, “My mom said God made some of us different, knowing that it’d be hard. But he picked the people who would be different really carefully.” Then the sensitive kid leans forward to the chubby kid: “God thinks we’re strong.”
When Shyamalan finished writing 1999’s “The Sixth Sense,” he told his agents at the United Talent Agency that he had a screenplay for them to sell and that he was going to direct it. No matter what. And that the minimum bid was $1 million. No matter what. Says Mendel, “Night came out to L.A. and he bought himself a new pair of shoes, and he and Bhavna checked into the Four Seasons determined to have something great happen.” Disney gave him $3 million. “I was only 10,” says Haley Joel Osment, “but I could tell it was amazing writing.”
On the day that Shyamalan’s driver, Franny, drives us out to the Episcopal Academy, the director and I have our spat about whether he’s cocky or not, and then we walk around campus in a funk trying to find somewhere cool to talk. We wind up in the chapel, which is empty and quiet except for a whispering air conditioner. I ask Shyamalan about 2000’s “Unbreakable,” about the making of a superhero. The movie was his second with Bruce Willis, and it was so grave and slow that it seemed to suggest he’d become overconfident about his ability to hold an audience. Shyamalan is fiercely proud of “Unbreakable” and of its status as a cult favorite. Still, when he talks about it, it’s clear that if he was arrogant before it opened — “Sixth Sense” had made the all-time box-office Top Ten, and he was quoted as saying it’d be cool if “Unbreakable” made it, too — his theories about movies and audiences took a beating when “The Grinch” clobbered him at the box office.
“When ‘The Grinch’ took us, it really shocked me,” he says. “It was such a great lesson for me. ‘Signs’ could go out there and completely tank, I’m telling you. I couldn’t believe what was happening. ‘The Grinch’ became the phenomenon! They stole Thanksgiving!” By the time we leave his old school, Shyamalan seems chipper. His driver heads the wrong way down a one-way street and, from the back seat, the director says, “Franny! I’m gonna get expelled.”
The thing that broke “Unbreakable,” of course, was the ghost of “Sixth Sense.” “I think Night suffered from second-film syndrome,” says Willis. “People wanted to say, ‘This guy isn’t the genius that everyone said he is.’ I don’t use that word casually, but I believe he has elements of genius in him — as a writer, as a storyteller and as a film director.” When I ask Shyamalan about his expectations for ‘Signs,’ he sounds grounded. Sort of. “I don’t care about the box office,” he says. “I care about the connection. I want it to be a phenomenon — a cultural phenomenon, where the audience feels some connection to this place, these people and what was being said here. That’s ‘Jaws,’ ‘E.T.,’ ‘The Exorcist.’ All those movies. They just connected.” I tell someone that Shyamalan has worked with that the director is hoping for a cultural phenomenon, and he laughs fondly: “In my opinion, just even saying that is stupid. As a tactic, you know? Keep that to yourself! That’s a fine goal but by saying it you’re sticking your chin out and saying, ‘Punch me.’ I think that Night — and this is an endearing quality — is not that savvy about how to promote himself. He definitely wears what he’s thinking and feeling on his sleeve.”
The morning I leave Philadelphia, Shyamalan’s parents offer to drive me to the train. As the green, leafy Main Line darts past the windows — beautiful lawn after beautiful lawn after beautiful lawn == I ask why Manoj ever stopped calling himself Manoj. “You are pronouncing it so well,” his mother says, sweetly. (It’s Ma-noge.) She says that Shyamalan’s teachers used to mangle it, so when he was a teenager he came up with Night. His father tells me that his son always felt a kinship with the Native Americans, and that the word resonated for them because the elders told their children stories around the fire in the evening and because you can see the universe only at night. Also, his father adds, “It was a good entertainment name.” And there are the twin strands of Shyamalan’s DNA, it seems to me — the very things that will keep him on minds and movie screens for years. A profound sincerity. And a profound ambition. We would never have known the one without the other.
