After a revelatory ghost tale, a supernatural comic thriller, a crop-circling tale of invasion and a mystical, creature-infested village, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie – Lady In The Water – has been noted as something of a departure from the Director/writer’s more calculated “scary” storytelling efforts. Was this cartwheeling ‘family’ tale a deliberate attempt to confound the expectations of his audience? Speaking at a press conference in London today, the auteur discussed some of the ways he’s tried to avoid being “put in a box”.
“The Sixth Sense was the first one of my movies that everyone got to see and it was a scary film – that was part of the subject matter. So when Unbreakable came out, I felt like everyone thought it was a mistake, but it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be scary…I didn’t realise I had been set in that vein already. However, if I worried too much about that I wouldn’t be able to write. I’d love it if everyone could look at Lady In The Water as a lyrical parable, but there will be people that won’t get it because they are coming at it with a certain lexicon of what to expect already in place”.
“So, I seriously thought about taking my name off [the film]. When I was thinking about doing Life Of Pi, I was very worried about putting my name on the project. It's an amazing book that has a twist ending, but if I put my name on it, it would immediately lose the balance of the novel. So it’s something I struggle with. I said to my wife that 'Lady...' may have benefited from my name being removed. At least then it would have signaled to people to look at the movie with a new language in mind".