The films of acclaimed director M Night Shyamalan are famous for their last-minute plot twists. From The Sixth Sense to Signs and The Village, his work has relied on sudden changes to make the viewer question what has gone before. Now he is at the centre of a real-life twist. A book published next month sees the director launch a brutal and direct attack on the Disney studio that produced all his mainstream films.
The all-out critique of Disney has astonished industry insiders in Hollywood, where arguments between directors and studios are commonplace but rarely aired in public. Not so for Shyamalan’s industrial-sized fallout with Disney. Early drafts of the book circulating in Hollywood are leaving many stunned at how strongly the director has turned on his old studio.
The book attacks colleagues and mentors at the company where he forged his hugely successful career. At its core is Shyamalan’s feeling that Disney was not giving him enough artistic backing on his latest project, a supernatural thriller called Lady in the Water. Though Disney was keen to fund the film, Shyamalan felt it did not trust him enough as a director.
The book’s culmination is a dinner dubbed the Valentine’s Day Massacre. At the event, held last February at a posh restaurant outside Philadelphia, one Disney executive, Nina Jacobson, lays into Lady in the Water. She slams the script, the plot and Shyamalan’s decision to give himself a cameo role, as he does in all his films. ”Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working,” the book quotes her as saying.
Jacobson’s comments were the final straw for Shyamalan — not least because he had worked closely with her on his previous huge hits for Disney, including Signs, an alien-invasion thriller with Mel Gibson, and The Sixth Sense, the ghost story starring Bruce Willis.
After the meal, Disney executives assured the director they still wanted to make the film. But, once they were gone, Shyamalan broke down in tears and vowed to take his career elsewhere. ”He was crying because he liked them as people and he knew he would not see them again, not as his partners,” the book says.
Elsewhere the book pulls no punches in assailing Jacobson, with whom Shyamalan worked so closely for many years as his career soared. The book says Shyamalan ”witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his own wide-open eyes. She didn’t want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made money.” It even says that Shyamalan felt mentally haunted by Jacobson and other Disney executives and could not shake the images of their faces from inside his head.
The book is called The Man Who Heard Voices, after Shyamalan’s supernatural themes, and was written by sportswriter Michael Bamberger. But Shyamalan has cooperated closely and given his firm stamp of approval to all its content and tone. It is likely to join such flaming Hollywood tell-alls and exposés as Hollywood Animal, by the top scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas, and You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by producer Julia Phillips. Those books also broke the Hollywood code of silence to reveal the bitching and backbiting that goes on behind almost every major project.
Certainly Shyamalan’s split with Hollywood has been the most public spat between a director and a studio in recent times. It was also one of the most damaging setbacks for Disney. Despite some of his recent films being critically panned, they have all made huge sums of money at the box office. Because his spooky, unearthly style is so well-known, Shyamalan is one of the few directors who can virtually guarantee that a project will make a healthy profit.
And in the end it is that bottom line, not the artistic content, that a studio is looking for. The Sixth Sense has made more than $600-million worldwide, Signs has raked in $408-million globally, and his most recent film, The Village, took $256-million.
That track record means his new studio, Warner Brothers, expects a surefire hit with Lady in the Water. It is certainly giving it its full backing with a $70-million advertising campaign. The film stars Paul Giamatti, who was in the Oscar-winning Sideways, and Bryce Dallas Howard, who featured in The Village. The story revolves around Giamatti’s discovery of a magical woman in his swimming pool. — Guardian Unlimited Â