Chances are you still haven't heard of M. Night Shyamalan. But then, a little over a year ago, hardly anybody had. Now, though, Disney is basing its whole marketing campaign for its supernatural chiller, Unbreakable, around the 30-year-old, Philadelphia-born film-maker. Sure, Unbreakable has the names of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson above the title, but the key promotional tagline for the movie runs: "From the maker of The Sixth Sense". That's what happens when your relatively small film surprises everyone by taking more than $600 million at the international box office, and scooping a hatful of Oscar nominations besides. Oh, and by the way, he also had a writing credit on last year's highly enjoyable Stuart Little.
Shyamalan (pronounced Sha-ma-lan), the son of Indian parents, doctors who emigrated from the subcontinent to the US in the 1960s, is unsurprisingly full of confidence when we meet to discuss Unbreakable. It's another murky tale of the supernatural set in his hometown, with Willis again taking the starring role, as a depressed security guard who comes to the realisation that he may be invulnerable to pain and injury. After all, the young director is, to use a shop-worn phrase, on top of the world. His writing and directing fees on the new movie amounted to $10 million. He has the air of someone who knows what he wants and knows how he's going to get it.
"My inspiration comes from Spielberg," he says when asked about his strikingly visual style of film-making. "But the actual style is based more on suspense directors. Hitchcock definitely, but also Polanski's Repulsion. I wanted to create that kind of eerie suspense, which nobody else seems to be doing right now. Nowadays, suspense is more like Blair Witch 2, which isn't really that interesting. I didn't want to be safe with this one. I could see the way it could have gone after Sixth Sense, that I could have done a movie that was right on the target for another big blockbuster, which everyone wants. And then you get respect and you become a kind of softer kind of guy that makes these movies. I want to make movies for a mass audience but I don't want them to feel they know me."
Having made a well-received micro-budget, independent debut, then followed it up with Wide Awake, a critical and commercial flop, which clearly still rankles a little, Shyamalan's leap to blockbuster hit-maker clearly took studio executives by surprise, which he believes has allowed him to avoid excessive interference. "What happened was that with The Sixth Sense, we flew below the radar they didn't care about us. They were doing their expensive, big-name movies - Beloved, The Insider - and then they had this little script that this Indian kid from Philly was making, and Bruce Willis was in it, so it got a little bit of attention, but really they weren't paying much notice. Unbreakable, because of The Sixth Sense's success, flew above the radar, so I've never had to worry about that."
He is adamant that, despite the lucrative rewards available, he will continue doing things his way, no matter what. "There has to be some higher meaning to the movie I do. I can't make 102 Dalmatians. The thought of getting up every morning for two years and doing something that's just about the gag or about making money is not enough. Because in the end of the day, if that's taken away, and they don't laugh and there's no money, did you just waste two years of your life on this Earth? That's crazy.
"Wide Awake was a critical and commercial failure. It was a terrible time. But what I have from it is that when I sit down and watch it, I know I tried to do good things, and a lot of people who saw it were touched by it, so for a handful of people at least it had meaning. The movies I do are entertainment experiences, but at the core of them there's something serious. In this one, it's about, are you doing what you're supposed to be doing with your life? If someone came to you and said: you're extraordinary and you're destined to do something great. Do you buy that? Have you felt something like that before in your life and turned away from it?"
Does that sense of manifest destiny chime with his own personal experience over the last year? "Yeah, definitely," he replies. "Because after The Sixth Sense, you had people saying about me that I was a fluke or I was amazing or I was going to be the next this or that. So this movie was about me trying to prove I could do it again. It had to be resonant and original. It can't be derivative. And I think that's the big achievement of these two movies. It's not the box office success. It's that the world now knows what my name is moviewise. And that's a big deal.
"It's like, you can now say a movie is a guy trapped in an elevator, directed by M. Night Shyamalan and you'll know what that means. Whereas if you were to say to a guy trapped in an elevator, `directed by Jonathan Demme', I don't get any feeling right away. There are some directors who are journeymen, like Jonathan Demme, but that's not what I do. No sense of false modesty there, then. By now, it's pretty clear what that directed by M. Night Shyamalan tag actually means. Doomy music. Extended takes. Disturbed children. The shadow of death. Is that we can expect from his next film? He starts giggling. "I'm just listening to what you're saying, and thinking he's writing my next film. I don't know, because I guess I haven't resolved whatever it is I'm trying to resolve with these kinds of films. I mean, I've also written a film about a talking mouse! But, for whatever reason, these kinds of stories and characters seem to have a particular resonance for me."
Another recurring motif is his home town of Philadelphia. "All my movies are set there, which helps to keep these fantastical stories rooted in reality. These are real people facing real problems in a real place, and they happen to encounter something fictional. That excites me, taking nine elements, all of them real, and then bringing in a tenth, fictional element. "It's representing the classic nature of fear. The kind of things you see in a regular horror movie, like a pool of blood seeping out from under a bed, just don't scare me. I'm never in my life going to see that. But if you walk into a kitchen and all the cupboard doors are open, that can be scary."
He agrees that he's fascinated by genres which people don't take seriously, hence the central role of comic books in the plot of Unbreakable. "I don't think horror has been done with proper respect, and it's the same with comic books. It's like if you're on a date that's not going well, and you just keep talking too much, filling the space with meaningless babble, whereas if it's going well, you don't need to do that. I like the idea of my movies as an elegant conversation with the audience. If you come out of Unbreakable thinking that ending was so dark, then you'll be thinking about it in three months time, when you've forgotten about Charlie's Angels or whatever."
There are two things, he says, that filmmakers must achieve with audiences. "You have to try to know them, and then make your decision on what you're going to do with them. Most people are stuck on that first part, and they don't respect them enough to know them. You need to super-respect them. They're a highly intelligent, savvy bunch of people who know film language inside and out."
OF course, the biggest selling-point of The Sixth Sense was its infamous twist (and if you haven't seen that film yet, you might want to look away for the next couple of paragraphs). Unbreakable also has a surprise twist in its last few moments, which I'm bound on pain of immediate death not to reveal. "We used to have a rule that you could talk about my last twist but not about my next one," Shyamalan laughs.
But twists are risky, aren't they? You always risk being second-guessed by the audience, or leaving them feeling cheated. "They're fraught with potential success or failure," he agrees. "It's high-energy risk-taking, but I didn't set out to do it. In both cases, it came out of a natural process of deepening the story and the characters. On The Sixth Sense, it was that the character is a little cardboard, a little too passive. So what is his need, what does he want from this kid? Well, this kid only helps people who are dead, so that's the way it happened. It would have been terrible if I'd just come up with it as a trick ending. Now that I've done it twice, I don't know what I'm going to do in the future. It could be a trap. But, whether you hate it or love it, I'm probably going to do it."
Unbreakable is on general release