M. Night Shyamalan
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This article's lead section may not adequately summarize key points of its contents. (October 2013) |
| M. Night Shyamalan | |
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M. Night Shyamalan at a press conference for The Happening in 2008
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| Born | Manoj Shyamalan 6 August 1970 [1] Mahé, Pondicherry, India[2] |
| Residence | Willistown, Pennsylvania, US |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Waldron Mercy Academy Episcopal Academy |
| Alma mater | New York University |
| Occupation | Film director, film producer, screenwriter, actor |
| Years active | 1992–present |
| Notable work(s) | The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water |
| Home town | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US |
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Board member of
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Blinding Edge Pictures |
| Religion | Hinduism |
| Spouse(s) | Bhavna Vaswani (1993–present) |
| Website | |
| www.mnightshyamalan.com | |
Most of Shyamalan's commercially successful films were co-produced and released by the Walt Disney Studios' Touchstone and Hollywood film imprints.
In 2008, Shyamalan was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India.[3]
Contents
Early life
Shyamalan was born in a Hindu household in Mahé, Puducherry, India.[2][4] His father, Nelliate C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali and is a traditional physician (Vaidyar) from Mahé. His mother, Jayalakshmi, is a Tamil and is an obstetrician and gynecologist by profession.[5] In the 1960s, after medical school (at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research in Pondicherry) and the birth of their first child, Veena, his parents moved to the United States. His mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy at her parents’ home in Chennai.Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Puducherry, and then was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. Although Hindu, he attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, followed by the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988.[6] Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in Manhattan,[7] graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted Night as his second name.[8]
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 him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion.[9] By the time he was seventeen the Steven Spielberg fan had made forty-five home movies. On each DVD release of his films (beginning with The Sixth Sense and with the exception of Lady in the Water), he has included a scene from one of these childhood movies which he feels represents his first attempt at the same kind of film.
Career
Shyamalan wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a ten-year-old Catholic schoolboy (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 Julia Stiles and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child[11] and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance.[12] Only in limited release, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters, against a $6 million budget.[13]
That same year Shyamalan co-wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little with Greg Brooker. In 2013, he revealed he was the ghost writer for the 1999 film She's All That, a teen comedy starring Freddie Prinze Jr and Rachel Leigh Cook.[14] However this statement has come into question as the credited screenwriter for the film, R. Lee Fleming Jr., denied Shyamalan's involvement in a now deleted tweet.[15]
Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense, which was a commercial success and later nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
In July 2000, on The Howard Stern Show, Shyamalan said he had met with Steven 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.[16] After the film fell through, Shyamalan later said it was too "tricky" to arrange and "not the right thing" for him to do.[17]
Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense by writing and directing Unbreakable, released in 2000, which received positive reviews.
Shyamalan's name was linked with the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but it conflicted with the production of Unbreakable. In July 2006, while doing press tours for Lady in the Water, Shyamalan had said he was 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".[18]
His 2002 film Signs, where he also played Ray Reddy, gained both critical and financial success. His next movie The Village (2004) received mixed reviews from the critics, but turned out to be a financial success.
Released in 2006, Lady in the Water performed worse critically and financially. The film The Happening (2008) was a financial success but also received negative reviews. In 2010, he directed The Last Airbender, based on the Nickelodeon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. It received extremely negative reviews in the United States and won five Razzie Awards, but it made nearly $320 million internationally at the box office.
In July 2008, it was announced that Shyamalan had partnered with Media Rights Capital to form a production company called Night Chronicles. Shyamalan would produce, but not direct, one film a year for three years.[20] The first of the three films was Devil, a supernatural thriller directed by siblings John and Drew Dowdle. The script was written by Brian Nelson, based on an original idea from Shyamalan.[21] The movie was about a group of people stuck in an elevator with the devil, and starred Chris Messina.[22] The film was not previewed by critics before its release, eventually receiving mixed reviews. Devil was not a blockbuster hit, but has become a commercial success relative to its budget. The next film in the Night Chronicles series will be called Reincarnate. It will be scripted by Chris Sparling and directed by Daniel Stamm.
In 2013 Shyamalan directed the film After Earth, based on a script by Gary Whitta and starring Will Smith and Jaden Smith. It was received poorly by critics, with Rotten Tomatoes giving the film a score of 11% based on 180 reviews.
Shyamalan currently has three television projects in production and varied stages of development. The first, titled Proof, has been sold to the Sci-Fi channel, the second is being developed with NBC reportedly titled Lost Horizon and the third is an off-beat thriller titled Wayward Pines, adapted from the novel of the same name and will be made for FOX.
Shyamalan announced in January 2014 that he would be working again with Bruce Willis on a film titled Labor of Love.[23]
Sci-Fi Channel hoax
In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media hoax with Sci-Fi Channel, which was eventually uncovered by the press. Sci-Fi claimed in its "documentary" special—The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of The Village—that Shyamalan was 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.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 requiring 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[24] and Zap2It,[25] 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. This prompted Sci-Fi's parent company, NBC Universal, to state that the undertaking was "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."[26]
Personal life
In 1993, Shyamalan married psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he met at NYU[27] and with whom he has three daughters. His family resides in Willistown, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site, Philadelphia. His production company, Blinding Edge Pictures, is located in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.[28] Blinding Edge has produced The Happening, Lady in the Water, The Village, Signs, Unbreakable, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. It is run by Night and Jose L. Rodriguez.Filmography
| Year | Film | Director | Producer | Writer | Actor | Role | Notes | Rotten Tomatoes | Metacritic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | |||||||||
| 1992 | Praying with Anger | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Dev Raman | N/A | N/A | |
| 1998 | Wide Awake | Yes | No | Yes | No | 40%[29] | N/A | ||
| 1999 | The Sixth Sense | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Dr. Hill | 85%[30] | 64/100[31] | |
| Stuart Little | No | No | Yes | No | 66%[32] | 61/100[33] | |||
| 2000 | Unbreakable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Stadium drug dealer | 68%[34] | 62/100[35] | |
| 2002 | Signs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Ray Reddy | 74%[36] | 59/100[37] | |
| 2004 | The Village | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Jay (Guard at desk) | 43%[38] | 44/100[39] | |
| 2006 | Lady in the Water | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Vick Ran | 24%[40] | 36/100[41] | |
| 2008 | The Happening | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Joey | Voice only | 17%[42] | 34/100[43] |
| 2010 | The Last Airbender | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Firebender at Earth Prison Camp | 6%[44] | 20/100[45] | |
| Devil | No | Yes | Yes | No | Only credited for story concept; not screenplay | 52%[46] | 44/100[47] | ||
| 2013 | After Earth | Yes | No | Yes | No | Also executive producer | 11%[48] | 33/100[49] | |
| 2014 | Sundowning | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Filming | TBA | TBA | |
| 2015 | Labor of Love | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Filming | TBA | TBA | |
Criticism and controversy
Shyamalan twists
With the exception of The Sixth Sense, a common criticism of Shyamalan's works is that they feature better direction than screenwriting.[50][51] He has also been labeled a "one-trick pony" for his continuous use of the "twist" element in his screenplays.[50] After the release of The Village, Slate's Michael Agger noted that Shyamalan was following "an uncomfortable pattern" of "making fragile, sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic."[52]On a 31 May 2008, interview with the London Independent, Shyamalan offered this answer to the question about his "one-trick" movies: "[A common misperception of me is] that all my movies have twist endings, or that they're all scary. All my movies are spiritual and all have an emotional perspective."[53]
Plagiarism accusations
In 2004, Margaret Peterson Haddix noted that The Village has numerous similarities to her young adult's novel Running Out of Time, prompting discussions with publisher Simon & Schuster about filing a lawsuit.[54][55][56]In response to both allegations, Disney and Shyamalan's production company Blinding Edge issued statements calling the claims "meritless".[56]
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