In response, Shyamalan stripped away the supernatural from “The Village.” In an interview from Michael Bamberger’s book “The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,” the filmmaker said that he’d told the DreamWorks executive Nina Jacobson, “Now people don’t know what they’re going to get when they come see my movies.”
“I’m saying, ‘You can’t trust me at all — you don’t know where I’m going.’”
His films were still successful at the box office, and by and large would continue to be, but his relationship with audiences got worse. Shyamalan grasped at goofier reveals (“Maybe people are setting off the plants?” Mark Wahlberg’s character guesses halfway through “The Happening”) and produced a hoax documentary that claimed he’d once died for 30 minutes. Around this time, he stepped away from directing an adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel “Life of Pi,” because he felt too protective of a story about a boy from his own birthplace of Pondicherry, India, to subject the tale to the scrutiny of being an M. Night Shyamalan picture. (The film would go on the win its director, Ang Lee, an Academy Award in 2013.)
If Shyamalan was writing his own story, he’d note two ironies. The first is that Shyamalan himself tends to be too earnest. Rather than give pat answers to the press — the cast was great, the studio was great, everything is great — he reveals his inner mechanics like a reality show contestant who comfortably brags that they aren’t here to make friends.
The second is that he’d made “The Sixth Sense” to break into Hollywood as a daring, original filmmaker — yet he’d been hemmed in by the pressure of a Newsweek cover that anointed him “The Next Spielberg,” as though he was still that child back home aping his idol. Shyamalan wanted to be the first Shyamalan. He rejected an offer to pen the script for a fourth Indiana Jones film, but somehow believed that “Lady in the Water” (2006), an overcomplicated and savagely panned bit of indulgence, would be his “E.T.” Worse, he approved Bamberger’s previously mentioned book in which the author likened him to Bob Dylan, Michael Jordan and Moses, with an extra dash of sex appeal. (“Night’s shirt was half open — Tom Jones in his prime.”)
The disaster that was “Lady in the Water” kicked off a four-film slump in which Shyamalan’s budgets were pricier than ever, peaking at $150 million for “The Last Airbender” (2010), yet even added together, their total Rotten Tomatoes score is still rotten.
Shyamalan had hoped that splashy blockbusters would prove he deserved creative freedom. He’d put his faith in a false narrative of Spielbergian success. And he’d failed.
