Movies: Night Vision

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 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.”

Evidence that Night has grown more keenly aware that his name alone fills seats lies not in his endings, but in his beginnings. In 2000’s Unbreakable, the opening credits roll as the camera pans across Bruce Willis staring out the window of a moving train. There’s a steady cadence to the appearance of each name, with Night’s arriving last, to little fanfare. Four years later, The Village begins with a series of foreboding forest images backed by a somber score that swells. As the crescendo breaks, there’s silence. The trees fade to black. Then it appears, like a cue to clutch your popcorn, or your date, a little tighter:

NIGHT HAS NEVER LACKED confidence in his own artistic vision, predicting in his Episcopal Academy yearbook — correctly — that he’d be accepted to NYU’s film school. (He also depicted himself on the cover of Time taking Hollywood by storm; he’d eventually settle for Newsweek.) There, he stood out for his genuine love of the craft and a feel for ideas that would connect with mass audiences, particularly one screenplay titled The Black Sheep. It told the story of an arrogant kid who arrives at a new school and angers the teachers because he’s smarter than they are. “It was very commercial,” says film editor Frank Reynolds, Night’s NYU classmate. “It was way beyond anything else that was done in that class.”

But with his first studio film, Wide Awake, Night got a crash course in Hollywood at its worst. Miramax head Harvey Weinstein forced Night, then in his mid-20s, to fire his director of photography, then continued to push the affable but cocky kid around, eventually stripping him of the final cut of his own film — the ultimate emasculation of a director. The last straw came when Night was called to Weinstein’s office in New York for some face-to-face humiliation with a group of Miramax bigwigs. He was on time, as usual. They made him wait. Three hours passed before Night finally decided he’d had enough. When one of the execs tried to stop him from leaving, the last words Night heard as he walked out the door were, “Who the hell do you think you are?” He didn’t bother to answer. In that moment, he decided he would never make another movie unless he was in charge.