FROM THE ARCHIVES: A Friday the 13th Flop Foretold — M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening
Advance word on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens today, has been epically bad. This will come as no surprise to readers of senior writer Richard Rys’s July 2006 piece “Night Vision,” which traced the arc of Shyamalan’s career right up to the release of his last highly anticipated bomb, Lady in the Water. In one incisive section, Rys highlighted the lengths to which Shyamalan goes to maintain personal control over his projects — to, it seems, their ever-increasing detriment:
In a way, the private performance is a metaphor for how Night sees himself artistically — as a storyteller who wants to tell his tales to an audience with as little outside interference as possible. For instance, after Night had spent nearly a year writing and revising his Lady script, his assistant flew to Los Angeles to hand-deliver copies to the studio, then collected them the next day. Even when shooting begins, only a handful of people are given complete scripts, and the plot remains a closely guarded secret. “On a Night movie,” says one crew member who’s worked on most of his films, “if you know the punch line, you know the movie.”
His filmmaking technique is just as carefully controlled. Night rarely uses footage from a second camera, known as “coverage,” instead relying solely on one lens to provide a lingering shot that lasts for minutes. It’s become his visual signature, and it makes it tougher for a pushy producer to ask for another version of a scene.
Even marketing his movies is, for Night, a critical step in the creative process. He’s said that when he thinks about a film, he asks himself how the studio will sell it; only when he can envision that does he sit down to write. Perhaps the best proof lies in the success of Signs, which was buoyed by a pitch-perfect campaign evoking all the suspense of The Sixth Sense and earned $228 million. “He’s really hands-on in the marketing,” says Brick Mason, Night’s longtime storyboard artist. “I think the studios know he’s the best person to market his own films.”
Read the full “Night Vision” in our archives.
Illustration by Eddie Guy, from the July 2006 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
