M Night Shyamalan, the film-maker with a sixth sense for selling tickets, got in over his swelled head with his latest would-be blockbuster. Donald Clarke hears about the development of Lady in the Water, which is already sleeping with the fishes in the US.
SOME months ago we began to hear murmurings of a book that was to blow the proverbial lid off Hollywood's (hitherto entirely unsuspected) propensity towards avarice and vulgarity. M Night Shyamalan, director of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village, had fallen out with Disney, till then his sponsors, and, through the agency of a Sports Illustrated reporter named Michael Bamberger, was preparing to array the Mouse House's sins before us. Early reports suggested that the tome would be a coruscating exposein the style of Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again or Stephen Bach's Final Cut.
Disney had, it seemed, been in some way unhelpful during the development of Shyamalan's forthcoming film. Annoyed at the studio, for whom he had, after all, made a great deal of money, the director gathered up his project, a spooky fairytale titled Lady in the Water, and carried it off to arch-rivals Warner Brothers. This promised to be juicy. What could Disney have done to so antagonise a once- favoured son? Well, not very much really.
"They were ready to make the movie," Shyamalan tells me. "But I told them I cannot make the movie there because I need the partnership, and if I can't see belief in their eyes then I can't believe in myself. If I don't have that belief in myself then I will falter. It was totally about the mechanism of creativity, and Disney totally understood that, by the way. Even to this day they understand that it is hard to create without people that believe in what you are saying."
Sure enough, Bamberger's book, The Man Who Heard Voices or How M Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, which was written with the director's approval, singularly fails to unearth any noteworthy acts of corporate barbarism by Disney's representatives. If Bamberger is accurately ventriloquising Shyamalan's objections, then the director seems to be adopting the posture of an unreasonably hurt teenage girlfriend: "It's not what you said. It's the way you said it." Shyamalan admits that Disney was prepared to make Lady in the Water. He just didn't like the company's tone.
Two incidents in particular serve to illustrate Shyamalan's prickliness. The first describes a visit by the director's assistant - the apparently saintly Paula - to the house of Nina Jacobson, one of Disney's most powerful executives. Bamberger takes on a veritable fit of the vapours as he describes how Jacobson, a longtime collaborator of Shyamalan's, dares to take her child to a birthday party rather than meet Paula in person. Puffs of steam emerge from his ears as he goes on to describe the inappropriately delicious class of soup she was served as a snack.
The second, more significant anecdote focuses on a dinner that Shyamalan had with Jacobson and Dick Cook, head of Walt Disney Studios, in the director's hometown of Philadelphia (note that Hollywood comes to Night).
To be fair to Shyamalan, Jacobson does appear to have been unforgiving in her demolition of his script for Lady in the Water. The film, which ended up starring Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard, sees a troubled janitor in a Philadelphia apartment complex happen upon a strange woman in the swimming pool. She is, it transpires, a mythical being named a narf, there to bestow inspiration on a prophetic writer played by Shyamalan himself. The film is coming down with oddly named creatures and confusing mythologies.
Jacobson reserved much of her derision for Night's decision to have a wild animal devour a pompous film critic in his script. This plot turn appeared to have been devised as an act of revenge for the mild drubbing meted out to his last film, The Village.
"You said it was funny; I didn't laugh," Bamberger quotes her as saying. "You're going to let a critic get attacked? They'll kill you for that . . . Your part's too big; you'll get killed again . . . What's with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working . . . Don't get it . . . Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working."
Harsh stuff, admittedly. But, for all the executives' objections, Cook, an individual well liked in the industry, made it clear that the company would proceed with the project. This was not enough for Shyamalan, who not only stomped off to Warners, but authorised Bamberger to disseminate his grievances.
Where do we stand now? Lady in the Water is beautifully made and features excellent performances by Howard and Giamatti but, with its tortuous mythological decorations, still ends up looking rather like a vanity project. As Jacobson predicted, the film has received truly appalling reviews from the American critics - the Village Voice went so far as to question the director's sanity - and has underperformed at the US box office.
"This is really painful shit," Shyamalan says. "To make a personal movie and for everyone to assume you're insane. It's just not true. Nobody I work with would say that."
Shyamalan, a prodigiously gifted storyteller who based the film on his own children's book, deserves to rise again. That said, the troubled history of Lady in the Water's development does, on first glance, have something of the quality of a morality tale about it. Nina Jacobson advises caution, is ignored and, when the predicted trouble arrives, ends up triumphant.
Sadly, away from its imagined worlds, Hollywood rarely accommodates such neat fables. Last month, Jacobson, the woman who saved Disney from Lady in the Water, was sacked during a massive corporate cull. Let's hope she writes a book about her experiences.
