Lady In The Water

[MacGuffin]

Harry Knowles's interview with M. Night:

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=23478

H: Well I know a little bit about the film because I got to speak with Paul on the phone for a couple hours a few weeks ago and it certainly does seem like it's a different type of movie for you, from the ones you did over at Disney.

M: Yeah. You know there's a kind of very independent spirit about the movie. You know, we are in the mix right now and I'm watching it and I'm like, "God, this is like a Coen brothers movie or something."

[Pubrick]

I'm watching it and I'm like, "God, this is like a Coen brothers movie or something."

that doesn't mean what it used to. 

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.



"When was the last time we had a great fantasy film to watch? M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water is the best film of its kind since The Princess Bride, another fantasy movie that also begins with a bedtime story and deals with many of the same themes."-- Mike Sampson on JoBlo.com. In the Shyamalan annals, Sampson also claims it's "one of his best."

[Ultrahip]

At least he didn't give himself an actual cameo in that trailer. I was waiting for it, though.

[Gamblour.]

Saw the new trailer before Superman. I was very impressed, almost excited. I like the idea of bad creatures being linked with the mermaid, but we'll see how it works. It had the best parts of Shyamalan's mood and tone all over it.

[modage]

saw trailer before superman.  thought it was a ridiculous reversal of tone from the first trailer.  you can see the fingerprints all over it of nervous suits going 'uhh, nobody wants to see 'a bedtime story', lets MAKE SURE THEY KNOW who made it and promise it'll scare the shit out of em and shake the money out of their pockets!'  it seemed spoilerful.  atleast probably more than he would want you to see.  i will see it anyhow.  did not get the goddamn spiderman trailer i held out all day for!

[RegularKarate]

I think each trailer for this looks worse and worse.  The more they show of this, the more most people start to realize how bad and unimportant it will be.

[grand theft sparrow]

I think each trailer for this looks worse and worse.  The more they show of this, the more most people start to realize how bad and unimportant it will be.

So the less money it makes, the more likely it will wind up on a few of our top ten lists for the year.

[RegularKarate]

So the less money it makes, the more likely it will wind up on a few of our top ten lists for the year.

haha... true... I meant "people" like my parents though... regular movie goers who I've spoken to have expressed that they're tired of Shamalamadzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[modage]

M. Night-Vision
Source: ComingSoon.net

There isn't much that can be said about filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan that he hasn't said about himself, and as he begins a new era in filmmaking, releasing his first movie with Warner Bros. after a number of hits at Disney's Touchstone Pictures, he also takes his greatest risk with Lady in the Water. Mixing fantasy, fable and fairy tales, Shyamalan has created something decidedly unconventional, but still in the realm of what we've come to expect from his creative mind.

Unlike previous movies that explored aliens, ghosts and superheroics, Lady in the Water is a completely original real world fairy tale, starring Paul Giamatti as Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a mysterious young woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) living underneath the swimming pool. Where Shyamalan takes that simple premise is something that only he could possibly do.

ComingSoon.net recently spoke to Night about a number of subjects, but mostly about his most daring and challenging film yet.

ComingSoon.net: This was originally a fairy tale you told your kids, but then it evolved into something a little darker and scarier. How did this evolution take place in terms of how dark or scary you wanted to make it?
M. NightShyamalan: Well, when it was back at Disney... (laughter) They were so stringent about what had the Disney label on it, so at that point, I didn't know, to the point that it hurt the piece, because I wasn't allowing it to be visceral, because I was so worried about those kinds of things. When that didn't happen over there, it really freed me up to do it. Now, when I was shooting the movie, I was starting to lose some kids. It was getting scarier and scarier and scarier, so for me it stops at around 8 years old, and for 7 year olds, it probably will be too much for.

CS: Where in your subconscious did this movie spring from? Was it your knowledge of movies, your South-Asian background, reading Joseph Campbell?
Shyamalan: All of the above. There's always some hook that gets me, like the idea of what if someone was living under your pool. Why would they be there? Then why would they be there spawns a whole story that comes from that.

CS: Can you talk about casting Bryce Dallas Howard--your second time using her--and Paul Giamatti?
Shyamalan: [Bryce] has a regalness, an unusual otherworldly quality about her. She doesn't have normal 24-year-old actress affects. She doesn't think that way, it's odd. Whether it's how unusual her parents brought her up, she has strong dogma. Her belief system is really like a monk. She believes in things like that, to the point where you're like, "Come on, just be a human being! Just chill out!" But she's like that and that would be perfect for Story, that she doesn't have to pretend to be otherworldly. There's a really kinda ethereal quality inherently about her, that's great. And Paul's kind of everyman brilliance is just great against the two of them. They both give off such different vibes, even as human beings, they do.

CS: How was it working with Jeffrey Wright? Was he at all as difficult as some people believe him to be?
Shyamalan: Oh, man. I've heard those stories, too, but he was a joy, an absolute joy for me. I've had a lot of actors in my movies who have supposedly been difficult, and when they know that someone's driving the bus, when they truly believe that, they don't even think about taking the wheel. They want to ride the bus and go in that direction, you know what I mean? They'll check and see "Are you driving?" and they 100% believe that. At the read-through for "Lady" which was really magical, because my movies are a lot like plays, a lot of dialogue in rooms. I hire only theatrical actors, especially on this one, and they did it like a play, and they were amazing. The table was in awe, because we had two Jedis at the table. We had Paul and Geoffrey, like you were just, "Wow" watching the two. When we did scenes like the bathroom scene where they're reading the crossword puzzle, the group was just in awe of these two guys who could basically do anything. Jeffrey just twitches a muscle and you're like, "Whoah!" They're limitless talents, those two.

CS: You also brought on cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle for this one. What did he bring to the table?
Shyamalan: Yeah, Chris Doyle is the greatest. He's insane. You know, again it's that feeling of being very raw and doing things very viscerally that you weren't entirely in control of what was going to happen, but you felt that something good was going to come out of it.

CS: From the number of Bob Dylan songs used in the movie, it would seem that you have a fascination with the singer.
Shyamalan: This sense of revolution that he obviously didn't want to take on his own shoulders, that wasn't his intention. But for me, his music was a time of "We can change things, it's in our hands, community, group becoming together" all those feelings of traditional, let's do it the folk way. Also, the storytelling in his songs, this sense that he was a storyteller, that he told these stories that are very moving and metaphorical, so in every way, he was an inspiration when I was writing it. I was literally writing it listening to Dylan songs. Kind of what if you had a fictional group of people at a time of trouble in the world, and there was a lot of fighting going on around the world, and this community realized that they could make a difference, that they were part of a beginning of a change?

CS: You also play a larger part in the movie, a character who is going to change the world. Does that imply that you think writing or making a film can change the world?
Shyamalan: Let me answer the first part of the question. This is my seventh film. In the first movie "Praying With Anger", I was the lead in that, and that was a very tiny movie in India, then "Wide Awake" I wasn't in that at all. Then "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" I had very small parts, because I was learning to make movies in the big studio system, and then "Signs" I had a big part. There was only like five characters in it, and I was the fifth character. For me, it was an important part emotionally, and this was more like that for me. Those two movies had characters that I wrote that I was like, "I really need to say that emotionally, that means something to me."

Now with regards to the character in "Lady," the idea of Harriet Beecher Stowe was the idea that really caught me. This idea that you write a book and somebody like Lincoln reads the book and other people in that time period read that book and you're creating change. Then someone who can make a difference decides to do something about it. Harriet Beecher Stowe didn't know she was doing all that, she was just writing a book, but it actually opened minds and created point of views. The power of the writer is the wish that an angel would come in and say, "You think that that sucks right now? You should do it because down the line, the 80th person that's going to read it is going to cause this [to happen] and you'll be part of a chain that you can't possibly know. It's very important that you keep acting, that you be proactive. That you believe you have a purpose." The link in the chain, that if any one of us doesn't do our little link in the chain, the eventuality doesn't happen. If we're all just a group of people who don't believe in ourselves, don't believe in our purpose, we can't build off each other. How do we know what part we're going to play in the chain? Just positive energy, empowering positive energy moving forward will create an incredible network of things. How many people don't believe in that, that they're part of that inevitable change of things. My babysitter once just left a book by mistake that she was reading about how people are having a hard time making ends meet, because their cost of living is so high and they're not saving anything, so they're always renting. It's called "Nickel and Dime" this book, so I went and I bought a bunch of low income houses and built them up and gave them to families in Philadelphia, because my babysitter was reading it, because her teacher had assigned it to her, because the teacher was moved by this lady. Look at that chain of events. All part of it, all from writers, but all a chain of events. It's a beautiful thing and an empowering thing to be able to hear, if you could, the beauty of the spiral of things that happen. If God could tell you when you die, "This is what you did," it would be so cool

CS: Does any of that come from your South-Asian influences, like the principles of karma?
Shyamalan: Yeah, I'm definitely big in the Buddhist thing, I'm all over that, and hearing about the story being told, when I was hearing it in my head, I was like, "Wow, it's more like an Asian philosophy." I don't know why I felt that. They believe in the storytelling, whether it's the Hindu philosophy or whether it has a million stories, and we know they're all metaphorical, but you believe them, not as literally that each of those Gods--Vishnu and all those--actually exist, but still, the reverence for them is extraordinary.

CS: One of the funniest characters in the movie is a rather smarmy know-it-all movie critic played by Bob Balaban. Were you trying to say something to your critics through him?
Shyamalan: I was in a very raw mood when I wrote the movie, so it came out very heightened and parody-like. The movie had an eccentricity about it, like "Princess Bride" I loved that movie. Those characters commenting on the story, as the story's going on, that you're commenting on a structure of stories, how stories are told, are they important, do you believe in them? All the elements are talking about storytellers, storytelling, and he's a part of a world where everyone is realizing their potential of what they're about, but he's stopped learning. My favorite thing about "Lady" is that it changes and blossoms into a different thing in showing what it is. And obviously Farber is one of those moments where it kind of just starts going on right on the edge of mania, and then starts unfolding in a way, where you're not sure what's going to happen. That's a really cool moment.

CS: Did Bob Balaban enjoy the idea of playing a movie critic?
Shyamalan: He loved it! We met and I said, "I'm going to say to you what I never said to another actor... I want you to start three-dimensional and become two-dimensional, so it becomes more of a parody" and he was like, "I'm totally into that." I wish I kept his answering machine message, because I gave him the script, and I didn't tell him what the part was. I just said "You're the part of Farber" and he called and left me this message, it was so funny, I wish I kept it.

CS: Were you thinking of any particular critics when you wrote that part?
Shyamalan: I was thinking of putting a list. "Inspired by..." (laughter) No, it's just goofing around.

CS: Do you ever read what critics say about your movies?
Shyamalan: You know, I get a general vibe. If you get caught up in too much in this, you lose your mind, because it's all a momentary perception thing that happens, and it's so clouded by the other movies or the expectations, that it can be damaging to you as an artist when you're just crippled like that, so I get a general sense. What you think may be the critical response to my movies is very different than the reality. Like say, for example, what is my best-reviewed movie? (Someone guesses "Sixth Sense") Wrong. "Signs" is my best-reviewed movie, next is "Unbreakable," and then next is "Sixth Sense" and then next is "The Village" and that's the order of the reviews. Also, "Signs" is my most popcorn movie so the least aspiring to a higher thing. It's that aspiring to something higher that always gets everyone going "Oh, yeah, motherf**ker?" That gets everybody all riled up. So it's interesting, but also the perceived realities are very different as you move on. If everything was re-reviewed now, it probably would be a different group of reviews that would come out.

CS: Do you get involved in the marketing of your movies these days?
Shyamalan: Yeah, I definitely do. There's a certain integrity to them [trailers, commercials] that I wouldn't want them to cross, so I'm involved with that, and I give them ideas that "you can try this angle or that angle and this is where I was coming from" but this time I just gave them my thoughts and took off to France.

CS: Since you basically do everything, do you have time to write or come up with ideas for your next movie while finishing up the one you're working on or do you wait until after it's done?
Shyamalan: I wrote this one simultaneous with "The Village," most of it was. I have a full notebook of ideas, you know, about everyone realizing their parts and there's this weird story and they all might be characters in it, and one character that doesn't believe he's a character in it. I was like either this guy has to be a lawyer or a critic. He's one of those. (laughs)

CS: But do you actually have time to do any writing while you're making movies?
Shyamalan: I have notebooks of ideas. It's dangerous, because you may burn a great idea if you do it too early. Like all during "Lady," I had this great notebook of ideas about this movie that I was certain was going to be my next movie. As soon as I finished "Lady" I was like, "Dammit!" I dated that one... too long. I didn't commit, and now I feel like I've been there already. I got another idea that has so much power, and it's new and it's fresh. It's very dangerous to explore, it's a dance between holding off the next idea as much as you can, you know?

CS: Is there anything you can tell us about your next project?
Shyamalan: Well, the one I think I'm going to do is going to have a big star in it. (laughter)

CS: Are you going to star in it as well?
Shyamalan: You never know, you never know, it wouldn't be any bigger part than this. In fact, I feel a little bit more comfortable if it was like 15-20% less, so that the balance is just right for the directing, cause it's difficult to do both because you want to just walk on the set and totally be that guy. We'll see what happens but if they're going "Are these curtains good?" you're like, "Hold on a sec. No, they're terrible!" That's a tricky balance, but we spend a lot of time rehearsing, I think it was like two weeks, so that made it like a troupe of actors, which was really great for us.

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water opens on Friday, July 21. Check back on Monday for an exclusive interview with its star Paul Giamatti and another one later in the week with Bryce Dallas Howard.

[MacGuffin]

Shyamalan takes leap of faith for latest movie

M. Night Shyamalan left Disney when the studio refused to make his new movie "Lady in the Water," based on his own fairytale. Now the director of "The Sixth Sense" is risking his reputation on the movie, and some critics are scratching their heads and wondering why.

"Lady in the Water," to be released on Friday by Warner Bros., is based on a bedtime story Shyamalan made up for his two young daughters. But his fairy tale, also published as a children's book, has already cost him dearly.

When the 35-year-old director presented his vision to Disney, which produced his four previous films, the studio said the story was too confusing.

Disney executives also questioned Shyamalan's decision to act in a pivotal supporting role rather than take his usual Hitchcockian cameo. But Shyamalan refused to compromise his vision, instead parting with a studio which grossed more than $1.5 billion on his last four films.

Disney has downplayed the split, saying in a statement: "We have a terrific relationship with Night, and although we didn't agree creatively on this particular project, we look forward to working with him in the future."

The breakup is recounted in a new book called "The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale." Shyamalan invited Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger to chronicle the making of the film and tell his side of the story.

But The New York Times panned the book, calling it an "unintentionally riotous puff book," adding that while the director is not really to blame for the outcome, "his only serious misstep was allowing it to happen."

Britain's Guardian newspaper wrote the "off-screen drama" is getting nearly as much attention as the film itself.

MISSING MAGIC?

And adding to the film's problems are negative early reviews. Hollywood Reporter called the film "waterlogged."

"The magic that would transport you from reality into fantasy is missing. The particulars of the fairy tale are simply too sketchy and convoluted to inspire confidence in its mythology," the industry newspaper wrote.

Time magazine said bluntly: "Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the (evil creatures), the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant."

Despite all that, the India-born Shyamalan who was raised in a Philadelphia suburb, stressed in a recent interview how important this project was to him, both professionally and personally.

"Whatever happens, I've never gotten more joy out of a story," he told Reuters. "I don't know why."

But all the criticism appears to fuel Shyamalan's desire for "Lady in the Water" to succeed.

The director said he feels so strongly about his latest work, that he would trade all his earlier success for this film to succeed.

"This film represents more about things that are life and death to me ... more of a manifesto of my beliefs," he said.

"One day there will be that one (movie) that doesn't connect," Shyamalan said, adding that if he ever makes a movie, "that doesn't mean anything to the audience, I will have to go back and reflect on that."

The movie stars Paul Giamatti as a stuttering, lonely, building superintendent who becomes concerned someone is using the building's swimming pool after hours.

But even Giamatti -- who has shifted from supporting roles to leading roles in recent years thanks to the success of "American Splendor" and "Sideways" -- had some problems.

"There were times where I did not want to stutter and he really wanted me to because I thought 'People need to hear this really clearly,"' Giamatti said while promoting the film

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive Profile: DIRECTOR M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN GETS IN DEEP WITH LADY IN THE WATER - PART 1
The creator of THE SIXTH SENSE and SIGNS creates and emotional fairy tale for his new movie 
Source: iF Magazine

Director M. Night Shyamalan has thrilled audiences with his pictures since the debut of THE SIXTH SENSE and has become a sort of modern Hitchcock with his unique "twist" endings. However, his latest movie LADY IN THE WATER does not fit neatly into that category. 

LADY was inspired by a story that the director has told his daughters time and again to put to them bed and it's resulted in a sort of a fairy tale more than anything, and Shyamalan risked everything with this picture after his recent divorce from his parent company of Walt Disney Studios in order to get it made.

"It's always like if you made $300 million they're like, 'You could've made $600 million,'" admits Shyamalan who admits no matter what a film makes at the boxoffice, it can be perceived as a failture if the right spin is put on it which is one of the reasons he split from Disney and set up shop at Warner Bros. with LADY IN THE WATER. "There is always that parental thing, and really it was coming from a little bit of a parental place. I appreciate that from them and we did kind of have like a parent child relationship in a great way, but sometimes you just want to go, 'I have to go to college and I have to do my thing. I'll be back. Don't worry. It's all going to be good.' And that's kind of where we went and there was also a person that I was going to make this movie for and that was Alan Horn and he was someone that's always been right there connected to my movies and so affected by my movies."

Each movie for Shyamalan is a personal journey that is torturous for him to undertake.  There are stresses put on every aspect of his life, and he claims that his wife can more than attest to this fact.  At the end of the day, the filmmaker just wants people to realize that making his movies is difficult because he is still trying to maintain a certain level of the quality of independent movies in a blockbuster movie framework.

"On every single movie there is a struggle," he admits. "It isn't so like, 'Oh, he does it. I see the name on the billboard and it makes a lot of money. F**k him.' It's so torturous. I mean, my wife is probably the one that knows it the most, but it is a torturous process to make personal movies with this weird thing that I'm doing.  I'm making independent, personal movies released in a blockbuster capacity. That balancing act is a torturous balance and it's not one that I contrived. It is naturally the sum of the elements of how I think. So the supernatural elements and the personal elements, if they said to me, 'Go do whatever you want.' this is what I do. It's like that, that balance. So it is a struggle and that part of it is really nice that people can see that it's really f**king hard."

But what about his new "tell-all" book that is being released in response to his quitting Disney?  Shyamalan claims that the book was started well before the Disney divorce, and originially was intended to be a "making of" LADY IN THE WATER.

"This was supposed to be a book about the fifth movie I did at Disney," says the director. "So this was months before any of that. He was actually more interested in how, I guess -- I don't know, you'd have to ask him -- the auteur and how they think and how they specifically orient things rather than being more general. It was that kind of thing. And then I remember calling him and going, 'You're not going to believe this.' I was really worried, but the movie, the book, all of that time period was really a huge giant act of faith for me. It was going, 'It's all going to be okay. Put yourself at great, great risk.' That's why I shook hands with him."

Not everyone was thrilled with the somewhat insane idea behind writing a scandalous book about corporate Disney, in fact it seemed that Shayamlan was turning rabid and biting the hand that had fed him over the last few years. Plus the idea of leaving Disney to find someone else to make LADY IN THE WATER seemed an equally impossible crazy notion.

"My lawyer called me up and screamed bloody f**king murder at me about this," recalls Shyamalan. "He said, 'No one does this. You're insane.' The reason was that he wrote me a very moving letter as a human being and sometimes you just really take those kinds of leaps of faith, and I'll get burnt many, many, many times on it, but this guy was true to the soul of the person that wrote that letter. So, LADY was that same way with a leap of faith where I went, 'You know what, I have to get up from the table and I'm going to go find someone. I think that someone is going to love this movie. I think that someone is going to believe in it in a way.'"

LADY IN THE WATER also features Shyamalan in his largest role that he has given himself yet, as a young tortured writer who has little or no faith in himself and needs a bit of magic to see the scope of what his works can achieve.  He credits the character's source of inspiration to be the author of the famous UNCLE TOM'S CABIN novel by Harriett Beecher Stowe.   

"It's this idea of Harriett Beecher Stowe - I'm spiraling off from this thing a bit - but Harriett Beecher Stowe was a big thing," says Shyamalan. "I love that whole thing that she wrote UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and then Lincoln read that and then started this movement, and she was just writing a story."

And Shyamalan doesn't kid himself about the journey ahead.

"Everyone has a part," he admits. "Everyone has a part in the play, which is fantastic, that link in the chain. But yet for me it's much more raw on a lot of levels and I love that. There is a lot of pain ahead of me, a lot of risk ahead and someone else asked what makes me tick, and I said it was danger. It's absolute, perilous danger, just putting yourself out there and hopefully over the course of time you will get very truthful things from me in that way."

How much of him is in the script and not just the movie?  Well, according to Shyamalan the script and story are a kind of emotional catharsis for his to write.

"There's this kind of speech that she makes in the mail room and then the speech he makes, 'Your face, they remind me of God,'" he says. "I mean, it's all these things that you can't write in a summer blockbuster. 'Your faces remind me of God.' Those kinds of things you can't write unless it was coming from a genuinely raw, just a genuine place."

[MacGuffin]

Much riding on Shyamalan's 'Lady' luck 
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY



CHESTER COUNTY, Pa. — M. Night Shyamalan settles into a chair in his dining room, examining the movie posters from a career defined by hits —The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village— and wonders whether he has lost his touch.

"Maybe I've had a disconnect with people," he says. "Maybe the wine and food I like isn't the wine and food everyone else likes now."

It's a remarkable admission for a man whose four big-studio pictures have taken in more than $2 billion in theaters and home video sales.

But it has been a remarkable 18 months for Shyamalan, 35. In just a year and a half, he has parted ways with Disney, the studio that distributed all of his big movies. He has cooperated with a new tell-all book, The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, that details the split and vilifies Disney executives.

But most disconcerting is a question that has been nagging at him for months: Has he made a movie no one wants to see?

Lady in the Water opens Friday with a lot of reputations at stake. Disney executives will be watching the film's performance to validate their decision to end the relationship with Shyamalan. Warner Bros. will be watching the same numbers to justify their decision to snap up the director and give him $70 million to make this film and, they hope, more under the Warner Bros. banner.

No one's credibility, though, is more on the line than Shyamalan's. Already some media outlets are blasting the director, whom they say has fallen prey to hubris. The New York Times called Voices "a full-length, unintentionally riotous puff book." Newsweek, which once put Shyamalan on its cover under the title "The Next Spielberg," is now calling for a "career intervention" to address his arrogance.

Lately, Shyamalan concedes, he has caught himself agreeing with the criticisms.

"In your darker moments, you worry that your tastes have rarefied," he says. "It's very possible that's what's happening. And in the event that Lady doesn't find its audience, that's going to be looming over me."

Yet for all the questions and self-doubt, Shyamalan says he has found an inner peace he rarely has known as a director.

"I've never gotten to this place this close to the opening where I felt as little anxiety as I feel right now," he says. "Even if it's a financial disaster, I know it's going to work out, because I got to make the movie I was dreaming to make."

Divorced from Disney

It was a movie he planned to make with Disney, which shepherded his last four films to a box office haul of $1.6 billion domestically and worldwide.

But tensions began to mount after 2004's The Village, about a blind girl who must enter woods she believes are haunted to save her fiancé. Although it took in $114 million domestically and $142 million overseas, the movie underperformed for a Shyamalan picture and was raked by critics.

The director knew Lady would be a hard sell. Born of a bedtime story he told his daughters, his newest film is a fantasy that stars Paul Giamatti as an apartment building superintendent who rescues a sea nymph, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, whom he finds in his swimming pool.

The movie proved the toughest since Sixth Sense to write. Shyamalan reworked the script six times.

"It's a modern-day fantasy," Shyamalan says from his office on a 40-acre horse farm that doubles as a family getaway.

Lady "has a female lead with no superstars in it," he says. "It isn't a traditional scary movie for me to sell. It doesn't have a twist ending. I expected it would send a lot of mixed signals to people who perceive me as a certain type of director."

What he didn't expect was the reaction he got from Disney executives.

When Shyamalan finishes an early cut of a movie, he screens it for two dozen of his closest friends. All must fill out a report card about what works and what doesn't.

Though he won't say what Lady scored, he says, "It did well. Better than I thought it would."

At a dinner at a Philadelphia hotel in February last year, however, it became clear that the movie had not scored well with Disney. Shyamalan met with Disney chairman Dick Cook, marketing chief Oren Aviv and Disney president Nina Jacobson.

Shyamalan says that when Jacobson rattled off a list of concerns she had about the movie, including his decision to give himself a meaty role and a scene in which a movie critic is mauled, he lost his composure. He left the restaurant vowing that he was through with Disney, even though Cook offered to produce the film with a $60 million budget and the freedom to make Lady any way he wanted.

Though Disney executives confirmed details of the dinner and offer, officials declined to elaborate on the split.

"We enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Night Shyamalan that lasted six years and yielded four wonderful movies," a press release from Disney says. "We wish him the best of luck with Lady in the Water and on all of his future endeavors."

Such divorces are rare in Hollywood because the marriages are even rarer. Most directors shop their scripts to the studio that bids highest.

Shyamalan says money had nothing to do with the split. Instead, he says, he felt Disney had lost faith in him.

"They didn't like the movie. They weren't saying 'Let's work it out.' They weren't saying 'Tell me how you're going to fix it.' It wasn't like that," he says.

"Warner Bros. loves the movie. That's important to me. Until they loved it, I wasn't happy."

Shyamalan has spent much of his life seeking approval. When he was admitted to New York University's film school, his father, he says, told him "It's not Princeton." When Newsweek put him on its cover, he says his father reminded him the magazine had a smaller circulation than Time.

Disney, Shyamalan says, "was very much a parent to me, one that I wanted to please. I thought I would make movies for Disney until I was an old man. But at some point, the child has to decide to go on his own."

Faith in his movies

Will audiences follow?

Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com says that Lady could be a hard sell "because it seems to fall somewhere in between a fairy tale and a horror movie. It's not well defined, at least in the ads."

He's quick to add, though, that "Shyamalan is still a director who attracts an audience by his name alone. There aren't many of those around."

There also aren't many filmmakers "who evoke such strong feelings, on both sides of the fence," says Howard, who also starred in The Village.

"His movies polarize people because they're so emotional," she says. "And he's uncompromising about the story he wants to tell. I think the feelings run the gamut from obsession to hatred for him.

"But whatever you're feeling, it's un-ignorable."

There was no ignoring his bolt from Disney, says Michael Bamberger, author of Voices.

"You can say that he's a crybaby for walking away from Disney's offer," says Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. "And he does have an ego. He is obsessive. But he's not cynical. He believes in the movies. And he really was hurt that they didn't believe in a movie that's about faith."

Now Shyamalan must face whether moviegoers still believe in him. He admits that the question has been pressing of late.

"I don't know that I could be an independent filmmaker," he says. "I think there's something universal in the stories I try to tell. But trying to do that, you can torture yourself. The 'I (stink)' is a pretty powerful tool when I'm doing a movie."

In fact, Shyamalan has enjoyed making only one, Signs, a movie he says was made "for the Denny's crowd. I think that was fun because it was a popcorn movie. I was going for the masses."

His personal favorite, however, is Unbreakable, a movie he made his way, with the clout he earned from Sixth Sense's $672 million worldwide box office haul. Unbreakable did $95 million at the U.S. box office despite shots from critics that it was too dense and dark.

If Shyamalan prefers underdog movies, Lady may soon become his favorite. He concedes that the battle with Disney to make the film might have overshadowed his reason for making it.

"If this doesn't do well, maybe I'll realize that I was so worried about getting it made that I didn't realize I had something that doesn't reach audiences," he says.

There may even be something cathartic about the movie failing, he says. "Maybe what would really help is a complete disaster. Something that would clean the slate. People could trash me to oblivion, say I'm done. Then there are no great expectations. There's nowhere to go but up."

But this is one film for which he'll try to tune out the skeptics, the studio execs, the box office analysts.

"People may turn this into my disaster," he says. "But it won't be for me. This is the movie my kids wanted to see get made. It's the movie I wanted to make. No matter what happens, I love this movie."

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive Profile: M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN DELIVERS EMOTIONS FOR ALL IN LADY IN THE WATER - PART 2
Director sings the praises of Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard for his latest film 

Director M. Night Shyamalan is good at delivering scares and his unique "twist" endings. However, even though his latest film LADY IN THE WATER has its fair share of twists and shocks, it does not fit neatly into that category. 

LADY was inspired by a story that the director has told his daughters time and again to put to them bed and it's resulted in a sort of a fairy tale more than anything, and Shyamalan risked everything with this picture after his recent divorce from his parent company of Walt Disney Studios in order to get it made.

"I just think that he [Paul Giamatti] is the greatest," says Shyamalan. "This dude is phenomenal. As a director I can't believe that every movie doesn't have him for their first choice. He can convey every emotion. He can do physical comedy. He can do drama. He can do everything. He can scare the s**t out of you if he wanted to. He can do anything."

For Shyamalan, Giamatti was his first choice for the lead role of Cleveland Heep. The reason for this certainty in casting is attributed to the actor's genuine and honest delivery. 

"He is so pure," says the director. "His eyes are so pure. There are actors that you can watch that have great craft and you watch them and you go, 'Wow, they're really good actors.' And you're not feeling a thing because they're doing it all inside and they chose all these internal things and they do it and they get to a wonderful place, but you're watching them."

Shyamalan was just as certain about using Bryce Dallas Howard for the role of Story, the Lady in the Water.  Howard was introduced to audiences in Shyamalan's film THE VILLAGE, and is the daughter of Director Ron Howard.

"Bryce is not normal and so she is a perfect choice to play not a normal person," says Shyamalan. "I don't know if you've met her yet, but she probably won't even let you in and so don't even worry about it. There is nothing in her makeup that's like a normal twenty four year old girl. There's not. She's just from another planet."

According to Shyamalan, the actress has grown leaps and bounds since THE VILLAGE and delivered a performance rivaling that of what Shyamalan expected. 

"There was definitely a kid on THE VILLAGE and now there is a woman," says Shyamalan. "Definitely there is a change. There is an elegance, which I knew. There was a princess to be kind of quality about her and I mean that in a good way - a royalty about her. Now she's kind of attained that."

Shyamalan emphasizes that he created this film for a slightly different audience than some of his previous films.

"I would say anyone over eight," he adds. "That would be my thing. It's interesting. We had two screenings of the movie at the end when we were done with it and it was interesting to see the kid's reactions because they had never seen their dad's cry. So that was a really powerful thing that I kept hearing over and over. 'My dad was crying.' The whole family had their own powerful reaction to it. It was really cool, really cool."

Again in this picture Shyamalan returns to the screen as an actor in his own movie.  This is the largest role that he has given himself to date, and feels that it was the ensemble cast that enabled him to reach the heights of his own acting abilities. 

"This is as big a role as I'll ever play because there is a physical limit to it because I can't direct," says Shyamalan. "It's not because of this group of actors. They were just so giving, but I could see that if I was with another group of actors that needed more I would've had to pull back a bit more. In the end I think that I was like in twenty scenes out of a hundred and something. So that's the limit that it could be. It's more comfortable in the maybe fifteen-scene range."

Shyamalan admits that he is overly sensitive about his films and has issues with his perception of reality.  His film UNBREAKABLE is popular amongst his fans, and people are constantly asking him if he will direct a sequel to the superhero movie, but he wasn't satisfied enough with the initial reception of the film to do a number two. 

"I'm a little bit of an emotional guy and I was a little bit upset that people didn't immediately take to it," he says. "Like the way that they're reacting now is what I thought was going to happen, but again, that was my first understanding of the shadow and things and expectations and how the perceived reality works, what we're talking about, versus the reality."

And how does Shyamalan view the critic's response to films?  He has friends that are critics, and welcomes banter with them even though in LADY IN THE WATER he has a film critic who ends up dead meat before it's over.

"I actually do have a lot of friends who are critics," says Shyamalan. "I had a big argument once at dinner table where I was like, 'If we're promoting art, there is almost like -' what happened to DA VINCI wasn't so nice for all of us. That's not helping any of us in the entertainment industry."

The director views critical opinion as gleeful destruction rather than constructive criticism, and expects more from the arts in the future.

"The way that was handled -- such glee, such joy to tear it down," he admits. "That's not kind in a way and it questions whether we're all thinking in the right way. Hey, I understand it because when I see something that I wanted to be great and it wasn't great I get really upset and all of that. But the promotion of art has kind of become this small little thing and I would love it to kind of expand more and be more of a celebration of the arts. I know that's a naive thing."

[Pubrick]

since i killed the letterman thread i'll mention it here.

bryce was lovely on the show the other nite. the whole time i kept thinking of manderlay and i wondered if letterman even knows about that movie. he thinks she's such a sweetheart, like a mini-julia roberts. anyway she's much more than that, also she's the only reason i'll be watching this and if the village is anything to go by, the only reason i'll end up defending it. oh but she's really pale in it..