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Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is controversial but no fool. He knows his work plumbs primal stuff and that he inspires extreme reactions, good and bad.
"You know," Shyamalan says when asked about enflaming passions, "I think that may be a strong statement that you made there." Shyamalan is on the phone from his home in Willistown, Pennsylvania. It is near Philadelphia, where most of his films are made. He is talking because his latest strange opus, The Happening, comes to DVD tomorrow.
On the DVD, Shyamalan tries to explain himself, his work, and how his philosophies are infused into a horror movie in which nature's plants -- bushes, trees, grasses --fight back against humanity by emiting chemicals that cause mass suicides. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel play a troubled couple fleeing "the happening" in Philadelphia.
On the phone, Shyamalan says he likes to explain himself to avoid misunderstandings about his "original and unusual movies." Ever since The Sixth Sense became a cultural phenomenon, as well as a megahit, its creator has had to deal with heightened and often misguided expectations about what comes next. Including with The Happening.
"Maybe you wanted a popcorn ride and instead you get this other thing," Shyamalan says of wrong expectations, which he would like to correct. "Then, to hear what the intention was can make you enjoy the course that I did go on. I think that is the bane of maybe being an original filmmaker: 'I thought I was getting' ... And then you get judged by that. So clarifying the agenda could maybe make you let go of a preconception and make you go: 'Wow, I see ...' "
But the judgments on his films have become tougher, more virulent and more extreme since Shyamalan's run of success with The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002). His films The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening (2008) generated as much anger as respect. But Shyamalan, known for closing ranks with his inner circle, is surprisingly open and candid today.
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He says he is trying to create "different colours" with his films, and thus broaden the scope of his career. "But (it is important) not to shy away from the conflict that may arise where you are trying different colours. And not to get angry from that feeling (of expectations) in the audience, because it is a natural one."
For example, as a result of The Sixth Sense and his other earlier films, audiences now often expect Shyamalan to make horror-tinged thrillers with a supernatural plot twist. The Happening has no such twist and ends with an anti-climax that has spiritual (but not religious) overtones. Some people are pissed off.
"You have to make sure you are not getting into a chess game with the audience," the 38-year-old Indo-American says. "The one thing we know we don't want is a watered-down version of the original thing that you love. No one wants that on either end.
"For me, I want to do something ground-breaking and different. So I never really thought of 'the twist' as something (that would become his signature). So I never felt bad letting it go and making a movie without one."
Shyamalan's next film is a live action version of Nickelodeon's anime series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The film version, due in 2010, will drop Avatar from the title and rely heavily on special effects.
"I feel that the long term goal here is to not have easy dates," Shyamalan says of people who go to his movies. Instead, he wants them to have "an accumulation" of experiences that would inspire trust in a Shyamalan film.
"That's the only way I can proceed. I think it's much more complicated than one expectation from one movie (such as The Sixth Sense). The more complicated movies, like Unbreakable and The Village and Lady in the Water, I totally get why they are not easy to swallow. But that was the fun of it. That was the point of them."