Manoj Nelliattu Shyamalan (born August 6, 1970), known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Academy Award-nominated American film writer and director.
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, Puducherry, India, and is of South Indian heritage: His father, Nelliattu C. Shyamalan, a physician, is a Malayalee, and his mother, Jayalakshmi (called Jaya), an obstetrician and gynecologist, is a Tamilian. In the 1960s, after medical school(in JIPMER Pondicherry) and the birth of their first child, Veena, Shyamalan's parents moved to the United States. Shyamalan's mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy with him at her parents' home in Chennai (Madras), Candina.
Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Puducherry, and then was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, an affluent Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. He attended the private Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, which his parents chose for its academic discipline, followed by The Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopalian high school in nearby Lower Merion. Shyamalan went on to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was here that he made up his middle name
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super-8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted Shyamalan to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged Shyamalan to follow his passion. By the time he was 17, Shyamalan, who had been a fan of Steven Spielberg, had made 45 home movies. Beginning with The Sixth Sense, he has included a scene from one of these childhood films on each DVD release of his films, which he feels represents his first attempt at the same kind of film..
Shyamalan made his first film, the semiautobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still an NYU student, using money borrowed from family and friends. It was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 12, 1992,, and played commercially at one theater for one week. When the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, Shyamalan was introduced by David Overbey who predicted that the world would see more of Shyamalan in the years to come. Praying with Anger has also been shown on Canadian television. Filmed in Chennai (Madras), it is his only film to be shot outside of Pennsylvania.
Shyamalan wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake in 1995, though it was not released until 1998. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a 10-year-old Catholic schoolboy (played by Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Rosie O'Donnell, Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child, and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. A commercial failure, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters.[10]
That same year Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little.
In 1993, Shyamalan married Indian psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he'd met at NYU[11] and with whom he has had two daughters. As of mid-2006, the family resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site of Philadelphia.
Main article: Praying With Anger
Praying With Anger was Night's first work as a young director, and was released in 1992. The movie deals with the story of a young man returning to India to explore his heritage. The young man's name is Dev Raman and is played by Night himself. During the course of the movie, Dev learns that his cold and distant father, now deceased, actually cared for him a great deal before his passing. The title of the movie comes from a moment in the film when the protagonist learns that he is able to pray to Hindu deities with almost any emotion except indifference. Upon realizing this, Raman finds he is only able to pray with anger.[12][13]
Main article: The Sixth Sense
Shyamalan achieved commercial success in 1999 when he wrote, directed, and produced The Sixth Sense, a supernatural drama about a psychologist (Bruce Willis) who blames himself for a patient's suicide and his own broken marriage. Upon meeting a disturbed child (Haley Joel Osment) who claims to see people who have died, the psychologist feels he has a chance to redeem himself. According to the book DisneyWar, David Vogel of The Walt Disney Company read Shyamalan's script and, without obtaining approval from his superiors, bought the rights to it for a high $2 million dollars and allowed Shyamalan to direct.[14] Vogel's bosses, disagreeing with his decision, sold the profits to Spyglass Entertainment, and kept only a 12.5 percent distribution fee for itself.[14]
The film had a $40 million budget, and grossed over $600 million box office worldwide. It is one of the 25 most commercially successful films through mid-2006,[15] .
The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Osment, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. It won the Nebula Award for Best Script, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Main article: Unbreakable
Unbreakable is a drama about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the sole survivor of a train crash, and his encounters with comic-book collector Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who is convinced that Dunn has latent superpowers. The movie opened to mixed reviews with many comparing it to "The Sixth Sense" and noting its slow pace and somber atmosphere. With a budget of $75 million, the movie failed to make a net profit domestically with a total box office gross of $95 million. It went on to collect another $154 million worldwide.
Main article: Signs (film)
Opening in August 2002, Signs is a science fiction drama of a rural Pennsylvania pastor (Mel Gibson) who has lost his faith after his wife's death, and regains it with his family as they witness the worldwide events of an alien invasion. Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin also star. Budgeted at $72 million, Signs grossed $227 million domestically and $408 million worldwide.[16] It was the highest-grossing film as well as the highest opening-weekend gross ($60 million) of Gibson's career as an actor.
The film received a generally positive reception. Most notably of which was Roger Ebert's four-star review, stating "M. Night Shyamalan's Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced."
Shyamalan said in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly that his choice of Gibson was based in part by the actor's emotional role in the film Lethal Weapon: "I was on my parents' sofa watching the video of Lethal Weapon, and then this guy did stuff emotionally that had no business being in an action movie. ... I completely believed the humanity of a man who was so torn by the loss of his wife that he wasn't afraid of dying, which made him a lethal weapon. ... [W]hen I wrote the movie about a guy who loses faith because his wife has passed away, I felt like that was the guy. And I also like taking an action guy and not letting him be The Guy".
Shyamalan also said that originally, there was going to be very little music in the film, but that composer James Newton Howard's intense and emotional compositions reminded him of a Bernard Herrmann (Alfred Hitchcock's frequent composer) score, and prompted him to change his mind.[17]
Main article: The Village (film)
Drawing on Wuthering Heights after being offered to pen a screen adaptation, Shyamalan went to work on what was originally titled The Woods,[18] The Village was released in July 2004. A drama starring Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Adrien Brody, it tells of a small, 19th-century community (we see the tombstone of a boy is being laid to rest in the opening of the film that reads 1890–1897) run by a group of "Elders" who seem to be content in their isolation from the outside world. The village is encircled by a forest said to be filled with mysterious and threatening creatures. Even as an uneasy truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to be falling apart, one villager (Phoenix) starts to question their forced isolation.
With total production costs of $71.6 million,[19] the film grossed $114.2 million domestically ($50 million in its opening weekend) and a further $142 million in non-USA receipts. Its successful opening weekend in America was followed by a severe dropoff of 67%, and the film is generally considered to be a commercial disappointment. Critical response was mostly negative:[20] Desson Thomson of The Washington Post called it "a bewildering disappointment";[20] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said, "It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous".[20] Roger Ebert, who had previously praised Shyamalan, called the film "a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. . . . He is a director of considerable skill who evokes stories out of moods, but this time, alas, he took the day off."
Shyamalan expressed a great deal of regret in the way the film was marketed, telling producing-partner Sam Mercer, while overseeing the editing of the teaser trailer for Lady in the Water, that he had wished for the The Village to have been sold as a period romance with a scare only at the end of the trailer. Shyamalan is also said to have thought that the shift in the main theme of faith from his previous films to that of deception, resulted in the mixed-negative response. Citing that his other movies set out to make an audience believe in the supernatural, The Village set out to do the opposite.[21]
The Village earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.
Main article: Lady in the Water
Lady in the Water, released on July 21, 2006, is a fantasy about a Philadelphia apartment-complex maintenance man, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who discovers a young woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool. Gradually, he and others in the complex learn that she is a water nymph who has come to "the world of man" to bring inspiration to someone in the complex. Her life is in danger from a vicious, wolf-like, mystical creature that tries to keep her from returning to her watery "blue world."
The proposal for this film highlighted a severe rift between Shyamalan and Disney, the studio for which he had done his biggest previous films. In the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, Shyamalan said that he felt Disney "no longer valued individualism ... no longer valued fighters."[22] Shyamalan left the studio after production president Nina Jacobson and others became highly critical of his script, which Warner Bros. eventually produced.[23] Critical response was again negative — Frank Lovece of Film Journal International saying simply, "this Lady is the Showgirls of fantasy film"[24] — disparaging both the inclusion of a film-critic character (one element of Shyamalan's screenplay that Disney found troublesome) and Shyamalan's decision to take such a large and personal role in the film as a writer whose work would change the world. The New York Post wrote that the film was "dead in the water", criticizing Shyamalan as a "crackpot with messianic delusions".
Lady in the Water went on to receive four Golden Raspberry Award nominations, three of which were for Shyamalan himself (Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay), as well as Worst Picture. Shyamalan later "won" two of the awards, Worst Supporting Actor and Worst Director.
As of September 14, 2006, the film made $42.285 million domestically and $30.5 million in the foreign box office, totaling $72.785 million. Combined production and marketing costs amounted to approximately twice this figure.
On January 8th, 2007, it was announced that Shyamalan would write, direct and produce the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a popular animated series on the Nickelodeon kids cable channel, a series influenced by Asian art, mythology and fighting styles. The movie will be produced for Paramount Pictures' MTV Films and Nick Movies. They hope it will turn into a three-picture series with Shyamalan's continuing involvement. He will now film Avatar after he finishes work on The Happening.[25]
Main article: The Happening (2008 film)
On January 28, 2007 Variety reported that Shyamalan showed a new script titled "The Green Effect" to movie studios executives while visiting Hollywood but no major studios were interested enough in green lighting the film[26]. A little over a month later the same magazine reported that M. Night's spec script (now titled The Happening) had been sold to 20th Century Fox after having gone through a comprehensive rewrite. The film is scheduled to be released in June 2008 and will be produced by Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, and Berry Mendel. It is reported The Happening will be Night's first R-rated effort[citation needed].
The plot of the film involves Earth's vegetation unleashing an invisible neurotoxin causing all those who breathe it to brutally kill themselves. The protagonist, a science teacher named Elliot Moore, goes on the run with his wife and friends as hysteria grips the planet.[27]
In July 2000, on The Howard Stern Show, Shyamalan said he'd met with Spielberg and was in early talks to write the script for the fourth Indiana Jones film. This would have given Shyamalan a chance to work with his longtime idol, Steven Spielberg[28]. After the project fell through Shyamalan later said it was too "tricky" to get everyone on the same page and that it just "was not the right thing" for him to do.[29]
Shyamalan's name was linked with the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone but the project seemed to conflict with the production of Unbreakable. In July of 2006, while doing press tours for Lady in the Water, Shyamalan said he is still interested in directing one of the last two Harry Potter films . "The themes that run through it...the empowering of children, a positive outlook...you name it, it falls in line with my beliefs," Shyamalan said. "I enjoy the humor in it. When I read the first Harry Potter and was thinking about making it, I had a whole different vibe in my head of it".[30][31]
After the release of The Village in 2004, Shyamalan had been planning a film adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi with 20th Century Fox, but later backed out so that he could make "Lady in the Water". "I love that book. I mean, it's basically [the story of] a kid born in the same city as me [Puducherry, India] — it almost felt predestined" Shyamalan said, "But I was hesitant because the book has kind of a twist ending. And I was concerned that as soon as you put my name on it, everybody would have a different experience. Whereas if someone else did it, it would be much more satisfying, I think. Expectations, you've got to be aware of them. I'm wishing them all great luck. I hope they make a beautiful movie."[32]
In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media hoax with the Sci Fi Channel, which when eventually uncovered by the press prompted Sci Fi's parent company, NBC-Universal, to denounce the undertaking as "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and we value our relationship with both".[33]
Sci Fi claimed in its "documentary" special — The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of The Village — that Shyamalan was legally dead for nearly a half-hour while drowned in a frozen pond in a childhood accident, and that upon being rescued he had experiences of communicating with spirits, fueling an obsession with the supernatural. The Sci Fi Channel also claimed that Shyamalan had grown "sour" when the "documentary" filmmakers' questions got too personal, and had therefore withdrawn from participating and threatened to sue the filmmakers.
In truth, Shyamalan developed the hoax with Sci Fi, going so far as having Sci Fi staffers sign non-disclosure agreements with a $5 million fine attached, and required Shyamalan's office to formally approve each step. Neither the childhood accident nor the supposed rift with the filmmakers ever occurred. The hoax included a non-existent Sci Fi publicist, "David Westover", whose name appeared on press releases regarding the special. Sci Fi also fed false news stories to the Associated Press[34] and Zap2It.com,[35] among others. A New York Post news item, based on a Sci Fi press release, referred to Shyamalan's attorneys threatening to sue the filmmakers; the attorneys named were non-existent.
After an AP reporter confronted Sci Fi Channel president Bonnie Hammer at a press conference, Hammer admitted the hoax, saying it was part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to generate pre-release publicity for The Village. Despite his office's disclosure-agreement requirement and approvals of each marketing step, Shyamalan told the AP, "I was, of course, involved in the production of the special but had nothing to do with the marketing of it. If the Sci Fi Channel erred in their marketing strategy, it was totally out of enthusiasm."[33]
An American Express commercial directed by as well as starring M. Night Shyamalan debuted during the 2006 Oscars. The spot takes place in a restaurant with several eerie events happening in quick succession. After these events unfold, a waitress approaches Shyamalan, jolting him out of what seems to have been a daydream, and tells him how much she loves his films. Shyamalan, in a voice-over, says, "My life is about finding time to dream, that's why my card is American Express," as he goes to a different restaurant to find other things to dream about.[36]
