M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan
Manoj Shyamalan, known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-American film director, screenwriter, producer and occasional actor known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots. His major films include the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense, the superhero drama thriller Unbreakable, the science fiction thriller Signs, the psychological thriller The Village, the fantasy thriller Lady in the Water, the natural thriller The Happening, the fantasy adventure film The Last Airbender, the sci-fi action-adventure film After Earth, the found-footage horror film...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 August 1970
CityMahe, India
CountryUnited States of America
My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.
There's no staying where you were. If you're not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.
I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.
You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.
The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.
I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.
I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.
This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.
I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.
I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.
My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.
You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.