A New Day Dawns For Night

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

From his office walls, M. Night Shyamalan's idols and inspirations look down on him. His production company, located in Conshohocken, Pa., just outside Philadelphia, has a cozy main room that is dominated by several framed movie posters. There's one from The Exorcist, which is one of Shyamalan's favorite horror films. There's also a poster from Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film directed by one of Shyamalan's heroes, Steven Spielberg. And finally, there's a large poster from Die Hard featuring a sooty portrait of Bruce Willis, who right now is Shyamalan's favorite leading man.

Despite the decor, Shyamalan, 30, is not simply some starry-eyed fan. When he looks at these posters, you can be sure he sees his own reflection on the glass encasing them. His breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense, which featured Willis in the lead, was about as big as Hollywood hits come: it garnered six Oscar nominations (including two for Shyamalan, for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay) and grossed more than $600 million at the box office worldwide, making it the ninth highest-grossing film ever. Shyamalan wants to build on that success, and he'll get his first shot to do so with the release this week of his new film, Unbreakable, co-starring Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.

"I feel a lot of pressure, from myself mostly," says the young director, in modest but confident tones. "I don't want 20 years from now for people to walk around and go, 'He's the guy who did The Sixth Sense.' It should be, 'He's the guy who did The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and so on.' It shouldn't even be that. It should be, just say my name, and it represents a body of work."

The name he was born with was Manoj Shyamalan. His parents, physicians living in the U.S., went to Pondicherry, India, to have him, then moved to the Philadelphia area when he was a few months old. Although the family is Hindu, young Manoj was sent to a Roman Catholic school "for the discipline." He says he felt like an outsider and remembers teachers saying that people who weren't baptized were going to hell. (Says Shyamalan: "I'd be, like, 'I'm not baptized, so I guess I'll see you guys later.'") He also recalls being called in front of his schoolmates after he got the highest grade in religion class and being used as an example of why other students should work harder. ("The teacher was upset that I got the best grade and I wasn't Catholic.")

Such experiences made him curious, particularly about spiritual beliefs. As a teenager, he gave himself the middle name Night because he associated the name with Native Americans after seeing it in a book about such cultures and finding himself drawn to their sense of spirituality. He had started making short films at 10 and eventually went on to study filmmaking at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In 1992, at 21, Shyamalan wrote, directed and starred in Praying with Anger, a low-budget film about an American of Indian descent who goes to India. Five years later he made his first studio film, the comedy Wide Awake. It was a commercial and critical disaster. Discouraged, Shyamalan found his writing got "darker and deeper." The result was The Sixth Sense. Now Shyamalan thinks Wide Awake's failure was a blessing: "Had that not happened and had I not failed so absolutely, I wouldn't have been able to grow as fast as I did."

The Sixth Sense, the story of a boy with the ability to see the souls of dead people, wasn't a conventional thriller. It was reserved and meticulous, making its surprise ending that much more electrifying. "Any story is more powerful if you can relate to it in your own life," says Shyamalan. "In The Sixth Sense my approach was, Don't light the hallways with blue scary lights. Nobody's hallway looks like that, so it's not going to affect people. Make it look like your hallway when the lights go down. Now put someone walking through it when they're not supposed to be there. Now it'll bother you when you go home."

Shyamalan wrote Unbreakable, the story of a man who survives a horrific train wreck and the stranger he encounters afterward, with two actors in mind: Willis (as the survivor) and Jackson (as the stranger). He was drawn to Willis for his Everyman quality and to Jackson for his incantatory elocution. Jackson returns the compliment. "[Shyamalan] knows how to use language," says the actor. "He gives characters an opportunity to express themselves. They tell you how they feel about certain things, how they feel about certain people, how they feel about themselves. But he also doesn't do it in such a way that when you get to page 10, you know what's going to be on page 110. He has some twist in there or some irony."

No matter how Unbreakable does at the box office, Shyamalan has become a Hollywood player. Spielberg and George Lucas have had discussions with him about writing the next installment of the Indiana Jones series. "Just to be a part of that team, to be a fourth wheel along with Harrison [Ford], would be a very cool thing," says Shyamalan.

As a director, Shyamalan feels his multicultural background gives him an advantage: "Decisions I make in my filmmaking are for a global audience. The domestic box office is an important thing, but it's just as important for me that the worldwide audience is enjoying the movie, as in The Sixth Sense. I picture my uncles and aunts and people abroad watching my movies."

Family matters are close to his heart. He and his wife Bhavna, who is studying to earn a Ph.D. in child psychology, have two children, ages 1 and 4. Shyamalan says he lives in the Philadelphia area because it puts distance between his work and Hollywood and keeps his perspective fresh. He also shoots his movies in the area so that he can be with his family. "I'm there to take the kids to school and put them to bed 330 days out of the year," he says. "This life can get so overwhelming. You have to protect your family as much as you can. Nobody else is going to do it for you." Clearly, the director of The Sixth Sense has plenty of common sense as well.