Word: shyamalan
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...