An Evening with M. Night Wasted

By Joshua Tyler: 2004-07-21 00:00:00

When I passed up a screening of Catwoman to attend In the Director’s Chair with M. Night Shyamalan I thought I was playing it smart. After all, it’s Catwoman, a movie almost certainly destined to be one of the worst of Halle’s or anyone’s career. A unique theater event with one of Hollywood’s biggest name directors is the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to miss… isn’t it? Actually it is, unless someone throws it on DVD. Then it might be worth a look. But driving an hour to get to a mostly empty theater to watch Night answer softball questions from hundreds of miles away in a cushy studio, well that’s just not good time management.

On the surface, the concept is a good one. Forty Regal Cinemas around the world link together to carry a live interview with M. Night. Fans in each theater get to ask M. Night questions and he talks back to them face to face. Sounds great right? It could have been, but wasn’t. Regal Cinemas botched it and audiences caught on. Simply put, at least here in Dallas, no one showed up. Who can blame them? Regal wanted ten bucks for a ticket and provided nothing other than a chair for Night’s fans to sit in. Event? It’s more of a cattle call. The theater I showed up to in North Dallas would have seated hundreds, but this time seated only thirty bored passersby, at least ten of whom were lower level press. And by lower level I mean bottom feeders. Behind me were two women of questionable credentials from a questionable website called “Sista Girl Movies” or something similar. They’re fortunate I didn’t hear their actual site address, retribution is owed for their hooting, hollering, and incessant mocking. It’s little wonder online journalists get such a bad name.

My ranting bitterness aside, the evening itself was one of highs and lows, filled with long clips from M. Night’s movies and very few real questions from his fans. Even those questions were all softballs, carefully selected and pre-written ahead of time to take it easy on old M. Night. Joel Siegel was on screen too (as a host I suppose) is he really still a film critic? Never has Joel seemed so old. Technical difficulties abounded, and the sound cut out so often that many of the few people who did show up left long before the end. Regal Cinema’s Production was lackluster, questions were asked via telephone. How about getting a camera on the people asking questions? Make something out of this big linked theater system Regal is pushing. Heck, show us some audience reaction from the people right there in the studio with Night why don’t you. Give us something to raise this above a standard sit down, great on DVD but pretty weak when you’re paying huge ticket prices to see what was little more than a promotion for M. Night’s next movie.

Yes, the event wasn’t exactly a success and hopefully Regal has learned their lesson well enough not to attempt another in the same manner. But as it turns out, it was M. Night himself who was its only saving grace. In this format, he seems an instantly charming fellow, nerdy and well… normal. When the sound was working he was a delight to listen to. His enthusiasm for what he does and honesty about his own failings was refreshing, even when Joel Siegel was trying to convince us that he burped gold.

Granted, much of what he said wasn’t anything new; fans of Night have heard his stories before. But there were a few interesting reveals, like his admission that he is easily affected by criticism and how that influenced his filmmaking post-Unbreakable, which received mixed reaction. Explaining that he said, “a lot of time I skip that broad stroke, like in Unbreakable and I go right to the other levels, and I go 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And I go, oop, I missed level 1. I skipped level 1, well screw them, we did level 12, you know, but that’s not, that’s not responsible filmmaking, at least not for me if I’m gonna open on 4,000 screens, that’s not respo-, that’s not-, I made-, I, it was error, I gotta go, comic book movie, expectation. Did I hit this, this and this? “

His point to me seems to be that when people see a movie about comic books, they want superpowers and big special effects. It seems his conclusion is that to have mass appeal it isn’t enough to create a movie that hits all the little things, all the deeper details, you’ve got to throw something broad in there too. By comparison he alluded to Spider-Man 2 in which according to Shyamalan, “the details in it are good and OK, here and there. You know, the filmmaking’s good. Ok, but the broad strokes are brilliant you know.” Going further he observes, “So, the, the top layer of it was brilliantly done and, and they did level 1, level 2 like that, and that’s, that’s another lesson and you can’t-, the, the level-, reality levels 3,4 ,5, 6, 7, that’s my own deal. They’re not paying me to do that and people aren’t that’s not what they’re originally paying for. I-, I need to do that so I can wake up in the morning, but that’s not my job.”

Personally, I say forget all that and keep going deep, but his experience with Unbreakable led him to do something more broad with Signs and subsequently The Village. You have to wonder, if Unbreakable (though for many Night’s best film) had received a more universally warm reception, would Night have still thrown in that scene at the end of Signs with the close-ups of the alien? After all, when people see an alien invasion movie, they want to see someone fight an alien! Or would he have gone the less broad and more interesting route and never shown us the alien, kept them in the shadows, half glimpses off camera. Wouldn’t he be a more interesting filmmaker? Night seems to admit that he’s now chosen instead to be a more acceptable filmmaker, and as a huge fan of Unbreakable, I think that’s a shame.

Other interesting tidbits included the idea that Wuthering Heights of all things was part of his inspiration for The Village, or that he nearly shelved The Sixth Sense just because he heard they were making Casper. “If I saw a movie that I, that actually was in the genre of something that I liked, led probably get discouraged and not write it,” he admitted. “I remember-, swear to god, I remember I had this Sixth Sense idea years before and I put it away ‘cause I heard they were making Casper. Swear to god, I was like, well there goes that. So I put it, I’m like this, you know, they’re already making a ghost movie.” Luckily for us, he eventually came to his senses.

Perhaps most notable was Night’s genuine humility. After all, how many other people do you know that would be horrified to be compared to Hitchcock? Or Spielberg? But when Newsweek ran a cover proclaiming him so, Night was shocked. “First thing was that they had actually had ‘the next Hitchcock’ on there and then the writer said, ‘are you gonna, are you trying to kill him? Don’t, don’t do that. Don't do that.’… So they, they took it off and then they put Spielberg and then they faxed it to my house and I was, ‘Oh no.’ And then I called him and I said, ‘Dude I didn’t do this, I swear I didn’t say anything like. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t insinuate it.’ He’s like, ‘It’s Ok, it’s Ok.’”

Moments like those made In the Director’s Chair with M. Night worth watching, I just don’t understand why they had to drag us to an empty movie theater to do it. Look, if you want to give fans something like this, here’s how you make it WORK. First, make it free. Give out free tickets to Night’s fans, maybe through his website or some sort of other promotion. After all, let’s be honest, this was all really just one big ad for The Village, why should fans have to pay for you to advertise your movie to them? Second, make it a REAL EVENT. Make it special. Hand out promotional materials, give away freebies, get it catered, have someone in the theater hosting it! Make the most out of it! Lastly, play up the national connection. Get cameras in each of the forty theaters. Show audience shots throughout the broadcast, maybe let M. Night see who he’s talking to when answering questions. Do something MEMORABLE! Don’t just stick Shyamalan up on a screen, take ten dollars from people, then snicker when the sound goes out. If you can’t make it special, if you can’t make it GREAT then don’t do it at all. Instead, get twenty or thirty people with Night in a studio, have them ask him questions, film it, then stick it on The Village DVD. That’s the best way to reach Night’s faithful.

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