Movies: Night Vision

Want to know the twist behind M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Lady In the Water? It’s not on the screen, but behind the scenes, where the director stands at a career crossroads

Philadelphia, too, has a stake in Lady, the filming of which is detailed in a book by Michael Bamberger due out this month, called The Man Who Heard Voices, Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale. Ever since The Sixth Sense, Night has had the power to dictate where he makes his films. Want more moments like “I see dead people?” he asked Hollywood. Let me work in my hometown and make movies my way. In doing so, he has become to this city what Woody Allen is to New York. Though he often goes unrecognized while rooting for the Sixers or relaxing at the Continental, he still lives in Gladwyne with his wife Bhavna and their two daughters, and the dreamer has delivered, according to film office czarina Sharon Pinkenson, a $250 million windfall to his hometown.

If Lady gets lucky, its success will guarantee that Night can continue to make movies on his terms, preserving his marriage of commercial success with the soul of an indie filmmaker. But another letdown could upset that delicate balance. A “failure” for Night would be the pinnacle of most directors’ careers, but he’s on another plane. If this movie falls short, he may face compromising his vision, or leaving Hollywood behind completely — and thus beginning a darker chapter in his career than anything he’s imagined for the big screen.

IT’S STILL BREAKFAST TIME on a Saturday morning in April, and Night is bunkered inside a small meeting room at New York’s Tribeca Grand Hotel, revealing the secrets of Lady In the Water to an exclusive audience. On his lap, he holds unbound pages of a children’s book he wrote. It’s based on the film, which itself is based on a bedtime story he dreamed up for his daughters, Saleka, now nine, and Ishana, six. This is an AmEx promotional event for the Tribeca Film Festival, and while Night has agreed to give 40 neighborhood school kids a sneak peek at his fairy tale, press coverage is tightly controlled. He’s let his hair grow out into a sort of mod-meets-Bollywood look that’s almost heartthrob-ish, and there’s a vaguely elfin quality to him. It’s endearing, the nervous way he flips each page, reading slowly, carefully, to keep the children seated on a fluffy shag carpet at his feet in entranced.

“There is someone living under your pool,” he says gently. “She’s called a narf. She’s a very rare type of sea nymph. And she made a room under your pool after the pool was made.”

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.”