For the past few weeks, Hollywood insiders have been passing each other dog-eared photocopies of a startling new book, The Man Who Heard Voices. Subtitled Or, How M Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, it is a revealing account of the making of Lady in the Water, the latest film from the writer/director of The Village and Signs. The book has just gone on sale in the United States and the film was released there this weekend. It stars Paul Giamatti (Sideways) as the caretaker of an apartment block, who rescues a sea creature from the swimming pool. What has stunned Hollywood is the book’s no-holds-barred description of Shyamalan’s acrimonious divorce from the Walt Disney Company because of disagreements over the script. He left Disney and made Lady in the Water for Warner Bros. Such Hollywood disputes are usually hushed up in press- release platitudes about “creative differences”.
Shyamalan’s first big project was to write Stuart Little, but he is best known for The Sixth Sense, his 1999 supernatural thriller starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. The film, which had a surprise ending and popularised the spooky phrase “I see dead people”, earned $700m at the box office and turned him into a movie-making franchise. The Sixth Sense, and then Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004), were made for Disney. All made money, not least for Shyamalan, who earned more than $20m per film, plus as much as 20% of the total box office: a rich deal.
The Man Who Heard Voices, written by the Sports Illustrated reporter Michael Bamberger, portrays the battle between the director and Disney as that of a brilliant and sensitive artist fighting to protect his creative vision from a bunch of empty “suits” interested only in the bottom line. Shyamalan is most venomous about Nina Jacobson, Disney’s production president, with whom he had worked closely on his previous films. After she tells him she has problems with his script for Lady in the Water, a scornful Shyamalan says he “witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his wide-open eyes. She didn’t want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made money”.
Shyamalan can say such things publicly only because he has achieved an unusual position of power in Hollywood. Like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron and Quentin Tarantino, he is one of a handful of directors whose name alone is enough to “open” a film and ensure a sizeable box office. In 2002, Newsweek put Shyamalan on its cover, with a headline touting him as “The Next Spielberg”.
His ascent has been an unlikely one. Born in Pondicherry, India, to Indian parents, both doctors, he moved to the USA when he was a few months old. He was brought up in Philadelphia, the only Hindu at a private Catholic school. He changed his name from Manoj to Night when he was about 17 and fascinated with Native American culture. Obsessed with film-making since he was a child — he made about 40 short films from the age of 10 — he studied film at New York University, making his first feature, Praying with Anger, in India for about $750,000. Although it was barely distributed, it enabled him to get a deal with Miramax for his next film, Wide Awake, but Shyamalan felt he was badly burnt by interference from the company’s fabled chief, Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, and vowed he would never again lose control of his work. He sold the script of The Sixth Sense to Disney for $3m, with the proviso that he could direct the film that he wanted. The enormous sum that The Sixth Sense made ensured he has had total creative control over subsequent projects.
For Disney, this deal was fine as long as his films kept making money. But The Village made only about a third as much as The Sixth Sense, while costing double. Some Disney executives appeared to agree with Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, who called The Village “a massive miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn”. Disney’s Jacobson felt audiences would have responded much better to The Village if Shyamalan had been prepared to listen to some of her suggestions for script changes. But Shyamalan, who lives and works hundreds of miles from Hollywood in rural Pennsylvania, preferred to listen to his own voices. It seemed he liked Disney’s executives when they agreed with him and distrusted them when they didn’t.
According to the book, the first indication of problems came when the director dispatched his assistant, Paula, to LA by plane with three copies of the script of Lady in the Water for Disney executives to read. Paula was under such strict instructions from the neurotically secretive Shyamalan not to let the scripts out of her sight, she didn’t even dare go to the loo during the flight. When she arrived at Jacobson’s house at the appointed hour, 1.45pm on a Sunday, she was disconcerted to find that Jacobson wasn’t there. “What could Nina be doing that’s more important than getting Night’s new script?” Paula wondered, thinking in “the way she knew her boss would want her to”. It turned out Jacobson was half an hour late because she was bringing her young son back from a birthday party. Paula became even more “perplexed and disturbed” when Jacobson said she would read the script “if I can get the kids down for a nap”. Paula knew these weren’t the priorities Shyamalan expected from the executives he worked with.
The real showdown, however, came a couple of days later when Jacobson, Dick Cook (chairman of Disney) and Oren Aviv (head of marketing) flew to Philadelphia to discuss the script with Shyamalan. Over a disastrous dinner, Jacobson told Shyamalan the problems she had with the script. She was worried that the mythic tale that was the backbone of the story was to be explained by a 6ft, overweight Korean party girl who dressed like Britney Spears. She had trouble with the invented language in the film, and words such as “scrunt, narf, tartuic, the Great Etalon”. She also thought it was a mistake for Shyamalan, who, like Hitchcock, always gives himself cameos in his films, to play the second-biggest male role. Most troublingly, she said: “I don’t get it.” “What are you saying, Nina?” Shyamalan asked. “You’re saying I’ve lost my mind... It’s a big idea, my biggest ever. What aren’t you getting?” Shyamalan “had known these people for years”, Bamberger writes. “He had always liked them; he had always thought they were smart.” But now they “had morphed into one, the embodiment of the company they worked for. And that company ... no longer valued individualism ... no longer valued fighters. Nina and Cook and Aviv wanted Night to be a cog”. Despite their reservations, the Disney executives still offered Shyamalan $60m to make the film, with guarantees of no interference. But Shyamalan felt they had lost faith in him. He burst into tears after the dinner and vowed to take the project elsewhere.
Although the book is being touted by its publishers as showing how far a creative genius needs to go to protect his unique vision, some Hollywood insiders feel it shows just the opposite. They find it hard to side with the “suits”, but think the Disney executives were simply protecting themselves from a director who had come to believe his own self-aggrandising, myth-making hype. They are amazed at Shyamalan’s reaction to what they thought were valid and well-intentioned criticisms from Jacobson, some of which, the director acknowledges, he incorporated into later drafts of the script.
“It’s like ordering scrambled eggs and getting poached,” says one bemused director. “And for that he walks?” In fact, the book is unintentionally hilarious as it quickly crosses the lines from biography into hagiography, then into outright sycophancy. Typical is Bamberger’s description of meeting Shyamalan for the first time at a party. “Night’s shirt was half-open — Tom Jones in his prime,” the breathless author writes. His wife, Bhavna, he adds, “had the stillness and quietness of a princess. She had a delicate beauty, like that of an idealised Miss India, with glossy lips and the figure of a swimsuit model”. Phew.
The book is shot through with instances that purport to show Shyamalan’s astonishing, instinctive genius — even his ESP. “What kind of power could he have over me?” the tremulous Bamberger asks at one point. He reveals how Shyamalan knew Giamatti was the right actor for his film when he saw his brown shoe coming down the restaurant stairs when they first met. Describing the director’s sense of purpose as he wrote the script for Lady in the Water, Bamberger says Shyamalan felt that: “If it came together, it would be like Dylan and Clapton and Springsteen and Eminem and Kanye West and Miles Davis and Bonnie Raitt and Joan Armatrading and Jerry Garcia and every musician you’ve ever loved joining George Harrison and belting out the opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night at the same time.” And, yes, Shyamalan did read The Man Who Heard Voices before it was published and, says his publicist, “totally supports the book”.
There has been a backlash in Hollywood at Shyamalan’s egocentricity. “Just the fact that Shyamalan, whose last four movies display a stultifying commercial sameness, refers to himself as an ‘iconoclast’,” says the producer Gavin Polone, “gives a glimpse of how stars can become overcoddled, the result being bad and expensive movies like The Village.” One screenwriter said it was “astonishing he felt that what were evidently intelligent and honest script notes were an affront to his delicate sensibility. What’s worse, though, is that his childish posturing shows a terrible disrespect to all the writers and directors who have had to fight to defend their vision against the studios. It would be funny if it weren’t grotesque”.
Jacobson has refused to comment on the book, other than to say: “To have a Hollywood relationship more closely approximate a real relationship, you have to have a genuine back and forth of the good and the bad.” But, like everyone else in Hollywood, she is surely waiting for the opening figures for Lady, which cost $70m to produce and another $70m to market. In the end, the audience will decide whether Shyamalan will be seen as the brilliant artist he knows he is, or the laughing stock unintentionally portrayed by Bamberger.
Lady in the Water opens in the UK on August 11
