I started making occasional visits to the farm, for lunch and a talk in the farmhouse. Everything was well-ordered: the hand towels, the water bottles in the refrigerator, the posters of Night’s movies. There were six of them, now that The Village was out. There was a special shelf for books Night hadn’t read. The floors and the walls and the furniture were pretty much all brown or beige. Near Night’s office there was a secret room, with no doorknob on the door. You had to press on the right part of the wall to get in it. It was off-limits.
You might have said the whole setting was severe, but the sofas were plush and comfortable. You sank into them, but there was no chance of falling asleep. Night’s voice—electric and squeaky, posing questions, pontificating about something—was always in the air. He was writing a new script and he’d break for lunch at noon—or thereabouts. He wasn’t a total slave to ritual.
He had his own chef, and Night’s assistant, Paula, and the man who ran his production company, Jose, ate lunch with him daily. If Paula talked about her upcoming honeymoon, Night might offer a theory about honeymoons as a predictor of married life. If Jose brought up Shaquille O’Neal’s struggles as a free-throw shooter, Night might offer an analysis of the giant basketball player’s arc problems. With Night, you didn’t just sit there. There was no discussion of the weather.
He said his new script had been nothing but a struggle. He hadn’t wrestled so much with a screenplay since writing The Sixth Sense.
For the longest time, on that one, all he had was an idea. Night had gone to a funeral. A boy there was talking to himself. Night wondered what the boy was thinking. He went home and wrote down four words: I see dead people.
It was a start, but that’s all it was. He began writing from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. As a kicker, he had the boy say, “I see dead people.” He reread the line. It didn’t work. I see dead people, it sounded too young for a smart ten-year-old. It sounded like something a six-year-old might say. He drew a line through it.
“And then the voices came,” Night told me.
“The voices?”
“The voices told me to put it back.”
“What did they say?”
“‘Put it back.’”
It was interesting, but I really didn’t know what he was talking about. I mean, we’ve all taken multiple-choice tests where you fill in one circle, erase it, fill in another circle, erase it, and go back to what you had the first time, right? What was different here?
“I had faith in the voices. I was just then learning the power of listening to the voices.”
I asked, “Do you think everybody has these voices?”
Over $1 billion dollars, that’s what The Sixth Sense did in worldwide ticket sales and DVD sales and in the sale of broadcast rights. It was an entertaining movie and a phenomenon. The movie came out and before you knew it “I see dead people” was on T-shirts, in commercials, in Saturday Night Live skits, in reference books. People would come up to Night in restaurants and whisper, “I see dead people, too.”
There’s a joke in movie marketing: when that greetings-from-God voiceover comes on during the trailer, deepened by a lifetime of smoking, and says, “This Christmas, the heartwarming story for anybody who’s ever been in love—or wanted to fall in love.” In other words, a movie for the population of the world, or that segment who can afford a $10 ticket. That’s what The Sixth Sense was: This summer, the spooky story for anybody who ever wanted to know what the hereafter is like—or for anybody who thought they did.
Night wrote it, directed it, produced it. He appeared in it. After one good movie, people were calling Night the next Hitchcock, with the cameos and the smart creepiness, and he wasn’t even thirty. He was praised as a director who loved actors—witness the understated performance he drew from the action hero Bruce Willis. It was 1999, and Night was like a rock star.
Night’s three following movies all made lots of money. There were people who loved them, and of course people who didn’t, but they were successful movies by nearly any definition. They weren’t, though, phenomena. Night had the idea that the new one could be.
He had started writing it in the spring of 2004, when he was putting the finishing touches on The Village. He stayed with it through the summer and the fall. It was resistant to paper, way off-kilter, but he kept writing. That’s what the voices were telling him to do, embrace a strange, beautiful, audacious idea. Late at night, he’d sit in the basement of his home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, his wife and two young daughters in their beds fast asleep, and stare into his red notebook, his skin tingling with anxiety.
He’d get down a good half page here, and a couple of worthless pages after it. There were scenes that sounded good when he talked to himself—which he often did, his lips actually moving—but not when his characters did the talking. There were family vacations where he went through the motions of cheerful beach lounger, distracted all the time. The occasional party, where everyone thought he was in charge. Good acting. Always, somewhere in his mind, was his next movie.
There was an architect in his kitchen then, looking to move a wall to accommodate a larger kitchen. He was ready to spend more of Night’s money.
“How’s the new screenplay coming?” he asked. It was a little joke, as if the project’s budget was tied to Night’s next paycheck.
“Awful,” Night said.
He paused. In a screenplay he’d call it a beat.
“But it’s gonna be great.”
For inspiration, he’d think of Michael Jordan. Night was awed by how much Jordan believed in himself, and how, right through his final game, everybody knew it. You could see it in the sweat on his shaved head, in his wagging tongue, in his backward canter after holing another long jump shot. Night could have made calls and arranged to meet him, but he didn’t. What he knew from a distance was all he needed.
“He’s playing his last game in Philadelphia,” Night told his agent. “That’s got to mean something. That’s got to be some kind of sign, right?”
“Only to you and the other twenty thousand people,” said the agent, Jeremy Zimmer.
“Bullshit.”
Night went to the game and snapped pictures. Twenty thousand other people did, too.
Night knew there was something telepathic going on between him and Michael Jordan, him and Bob Dylan, him and Walt Disney.
While writing his new script, he read the David Halberstam book about Jordan. He studied it. The hours “Michael” (as Night referred to him) logged in the weight room and at the free-throw line, long after everybody else had left. That image helped keep Night at it. Bhavna had once shown Night a book, a study of prodigies. The most common trait among prodigies was the sheer number of hours they devoted to their talent. Night took notice.
Night knew that Jordan not only made more game-winning shots than any other player, he missed more potential game winners than anybody else, too. Night liked that. He was ready to fail, to fall on his face, as long as it was spectacular. (For all he knew, he was doing so right then, with his new script.) Jordan came up at odd times of the day, unconnected to anything. “With the game on the line, he wanted the ball,” Night said to me one day. It was early in the morning and he was already preaching. “He always believed he’d make the next one.”
When he was starting out, before The Sixth Sense, Night was meeting with some businesspeople from Apple, the computer company, at Jeremy Zimmer’s office in Los Angeles. The conversation turned to basketball.
“I believe if I had unlimited time to practice, after two years, I’d be able to shoot with any NBA player,” Night said. The room went quiet.
Who is this guy? Who thinks that way? Who says these things to strangers?
The meeting ended, the room cleared, and Jeremy Zimmer said, “You can’t say stuff like that.” He knew how it sounded: grandiose, unrealistic, egotistical.
Night was unfazed. What he had said was true. That is, he believed it.
As a kid, Night once gathered his cousins around a table and cleared everything off it except a cup.
“Okay, if everybody stares at the cup, stares at it hard and really believes that we can make the cup move, it’ll move.”
A half-minute passed.
“It’s not moving.”
“C’mon, man, concentrate, concentrate. Think, We can move the cup!”
Another half-minute.
“Hey, I think I saw it move!”
“You see? See? That’s what I’m talking about!”
The goddamn script! It was giving him panic attacks. There were sleepless nights, cold sweats, bouts of uncontrollable crying, odd dreams. In the movies, the image of the writer up in the middle of the night, tapping away while the rest of the world sleeps, is romanticized. For Night it was hell. One day, as he was describing his struggling self, I said, “But your life’s good, isn’t it? You’re healthy, you’re rich, your wife’s getting her doctorate, your children…” His girls were a delight—little pixies.
“These movies I make?” he said. “They’re who I am.”
Every school day was the same. Get up with Bhavna and the girls, put on jeans and a T-shirt and work boots, drop his daughters off at school, and drive to his office at the farm, where a blinking cursor would greet him and mock him for the next nine hours. He didn’t go out for lunch. He didn’t schmooze with friends on the phone. He’d sit at the keyboard and write a line. Look at it. Hit the backspace button. Write a line. Look at it. Hit the backspace button. Write a line. Look at it. Not hit the backspace button. Another chip.
He had a title: Lady in the Water. He had the names of the two main characters, a woman named Story and a man named Cleveland. He knew who would play Story: Bryce Dallas Howard, his lead actress in The Village, in which she played a blind woman. He knew the story he wanted to tell. The themes were so broad, he had no idea how he’d fit them on a movie poster. It was about a secretive building superintendent who falls in love with a sort of angel—a “sea nymph,” Night was calling her—who lives under the super’s pool. It was about strangers coming together. It was a recipe for the repair of the world. It was a comedy. It was a horror movie. It was a bedtime story, one he had invented for his daughters, one he had told them night after night. He wondered why he was struggling so to get it to work in the form of a screenplay, the writing form that defined his life. And then he figured it out. This movie was more personal to him than anything he had ever written. It carried all his prayers. It was a self-portrait.
When he finally got a first draft done, he read it with no pleasure at all. His notes in the margins were slaps to himself.
Bad writing.
Makes no sense.
Common!
That last one stung particularly. His parents had escaped the Indian caste system, which bound them to the worn-shoe life of the working class; they had become, despite the pull of their family histories, medical doctors living in America. They had a backyard swimming pool. They were leading the good life. In the Shyamalan family, common was a loaded word. To be ordinary, how perfectly awful. His parents were loving, spiritual, engaged people—and strivers of the highest order. A certain kind of traditional American immigrant. They valued education intensely and sent their daughter and son to the best private schools. Night was the only Hindu at his all-boys coat-and-tie Catholic grammar school, Waldron Academy, and everybody there knew him by his given name, Manoj. The parents chose the school for its discipline. The students there were required to work.
For high school, his parents sent him to Episcopal Academy, a private school loaded with high achievers, athletic, social, and academic. Night was scrawny and dark, and only academically was he a notable. He was a good HORSE player on the playground basketball court but had no chance of making a varsity team that included a future NBA player. His lone social triumph came late in his senior year. A pretty girl needed to retrieve something from a baseball player’s car. The ballplayer tossed her the keys.
“I’ll come with you,” Night said, suddenly bold.
“Okay,” the girl said, cooing.
The athlete glared at Night and said, “Whoa—I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I can trust you two.”
The girl tittered. Night found the moment intoxicating.
He applied to New York University, to its Tisch School of the Arts, Martin Scorsese’s alma mater. Night applied early decision. If he was accepted, he’d have to commit right away. The letter came back thick.
“Dad, I got in to NYU,” Night said that evening. “That’s where I’m going to go.”
His father, an internist with a specialty in cardiology, had hoped movies would be a passing interest for Manoj, and that at some point he’d follow his parents into medicine or the law—some real profession. With Night’s verbal scores and his extreme fluency, it was easy to imagine him becoming a high-profile trial lawyer, an F. Lee Bailey, somebody like that.
Dr. Shyamalan was watching a hockey game, and he was silent for a long moment. They were close, but the father could be tough with his son, comically so at times. When Night was young, his stomach was often upset. “Eat more toast, you’ll feel better,” his father said. Toast was his panacea for everything.
Dad, I think I broke my knee.
Eat more toast!
Dr. Shyamalan knew why kids enrolled in the film program at NYU, the dreams they took there. He knew what the news meant for his son’s future. He kept staring at the hockey game.
“It’s not Princeton,” he finally said.
Over the summer before he left for NYU, Manoj started thinking about a middle name for himself.
“Why don’t I have a middle name?” he asked his parents.
“Manoj Shyamalan is a fine name,” his mother said.
“I have no middle!” the son said. Not just a middle name but a middle, period.
His parents didn’t know what he was talking about. That was often the case.
“Why don’t you call yourself Jaya?” said his mother.
“Jaya? That’s your name,” Manoj said. “I’m gonna call myself by my mother’s name?”
A lot of Indian immigrants in America, males especially, were using American names. Manoj knew there were many Indian Bobs and Mikes and Sams driving cabs and going to grad school and working at Wal-Mart. He wanted something distinctive. For a while, he used his father’s first name, Nelliate, but it didn’t fit. At the time, Manoj was developing what turned into a sustained interest in American Indians. The idea of finding God in the outdoors, worshiping nature, sounded better to him than anything else he was hearing. He admired the English versions of Indian names. (The author of Blue Highways was William Least Heat-Moon, to cite one prominent example.) Reading about the Lakota Indians, Manoj came across the name Night and liked it immediately. Adopting it took years. “Manoj had to go through the rituals of death,” Night told me. “I had to earn the name Night.”
In time, he did. In time, he came to own it. He took possession of one of the most common, essential basic words in the English language, one of the first words infants learn. There’s mama, milk, baby, day, and night. You might say night, what, thirty or forty times per day? It’s everywhere. Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 5: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Depending on when you Google it, night turns up around three million references. The first one I saw was the Elie Wiesel book. The second was an astronomy site named for the van Gogh painting. The third was Saturday Night Live. The fourth was M. Night Shyamalan.
He could have sold his screenplay for Lady in the Water without writing a single word. He was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the business and any studio would have been happy to pay him upfront, like a ballplayer getting paid on the expectation of future home runs. But Night didn’t want that sense of security. He worried that it would make him lazy and satisfied. He wanted to write his screenplays, then sell them. He called the draft he’d send off his sale script.
It was a mind game for Night. He knew he was writing Lady in the Water for the Walt Disney Studios, the company founded by one of his heroes. Disney was Night’s artistic home. He had made The Sixth Sense there and his three following movies. There was never idle speculation in The Hollywood Reporter about what studio would pay the bills for Night’s next movie. Technically, The Sixth Sense was released by Hollywood Pictures, and the three next movies were made by Touchstone Pictures, both divisions of Disney. Those four movies were too edgy—too scary—to go out under the Disney name. Still, Disney was his studio. Not since Mr. Walt Disney himself had any one director been so associated with Disney.
Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman, came to the screenings and openings of Night’s movies. He had stood with Night in the parking lot of a suburban multiplex after a test screening of Unbreakable and, without the benefit of a single test score, said, “The best Disney movie in twenty-five years.” Eisner’s praise meant the world to Night. He liked the idea of pleasing the boss.
Night wanted to make Lady under the Disney name, see it stamped in the opening credits by the tidy cursive Disney signature, with the flittering Tinker Bell dotting the i. His daughters loved the magic of Disney. He could imagine their faces when they finally got to see it, the story that began in their beds.
Night made two movies before his Disney years. The first, Praying with Anger, was shot in India and paid for with money that Night, still a student at NYU, had borrowed from family and friends. It played on one screen for one week in 1992 and was never shown again.
His second movie, Wide Awake, was about a little boy trying to solve a big riddle: Where do we go when we die? (It’s a preamble to The Sixth Sense.) Wide Awake was shot at Night’s Catholic grammar school in 1995—Rosie O’Donnell played a nun—and released in ’98 by Miramax Films, then a small, frugal independent production company founded and run by the brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein and owned by Disney.
On Wide Awake’s first day of filming, Night stopped action, and the cast and crew watched Bhavna as she performed a ritual Hindu service in a colorful ceremonial skirt. It was a prayer for the camera. Her husband was making a union movie, his first, with name actors and a crew of seen-it-all movie pros, and they all just stopped and watched, perplexed and delighted. The idea that they were doing something odd never occurred to Night.
After Night shot the movie, Harvey took over. He was famously tyrannical, an enormous man who had a reputation for squashing careers. He didn’t like the footage Night had shot and didn’t trust him to turn it into a profitable movie in the editing room. He pushed Night aside.
Night asked one of Harvey’s lieutenants, “Why is he doing this?”
“Because you’re not an A-list director.”
“But could I be?”
Night heard Harvey screaming in the silence: You’re not, and you never will be.
The movie bombed, as it had to. It had been made in bad faith.
Night swore that no matter how desperate he ever became, he would never make another movie for Harvey. To anybody else, that sounded absurdly bold. After Wide Awake, nobody was beating down a path to Night. The truth was, Harvey owned Night. He had a contract with Night for two more movies. But in his mind, Night was firing Harvey. The conventional thing, the political thing, was for Night to try to smooth things over with Harvey, so he could get more work. But Night had another idea.
He’d write something spectacular, so spectacular that competing studios would outbid one another for the right to own it, at a price Harvey would not dream of spending. So spectacular that the winning studio would agree to Night’s demand to direct his own script. So spectacular that the winning studio, the one that would buy Night’s script and permit him to direct it, would work out the contractual problems with Harvey, spend big money on lawyers, if need be.
Night wrote The Sixth Sense out of ambition and desperation—to get out of Harvey Weinstein’s suffocating grasp. He labored over it obsessively, day and night, rewriting scenes again and again, permitting no one to see the script until he had every detail worked out. He believed he could write his way out of his hole. All he had to do was put in the time, concentrate the right way, believe in the voices. He wrote the line “I see dead people.” He took it out. He put it back in. The voices had spoken: Sometimes what doesn’t make sense works.
Night asked Jeremy Zimmer to impose these conditions on the sale: He wanted a minimum bid of $1 million; the guarantee that he would direct the movie; and for the auction to begin and end on the same day. All the scripts were sent by messenger and delivered at the same time, except for one: Harvey’s, which went out by U.S. mail. Night could do that because the Weinsteins owned him as a director but not as a writer. The conditions would have been preposterous, except that Jeremy believed in the script as much as Night did, and he hadn’t even read it. He could hear Night’s belief in the script in his voice, so Zimmer ran with it. He called up one executive after another and said, “I’m going to send you a script, and I think you’re going to want to clear everything and read it right away. It’s that good.” Night wasn’t an unknown. His script for Stuart Little had been widely praised, as was an unproduced script called Labor of Love. But Zimmer was talking like he was about to send them Psycho. What Night had engineered was a study in chutzpah but also self-protection. He wasn’t going to let Harvey Weinstein subvert his career and his life.
Four studios passed on the script within hours of receiving it. Nina Jacobson at DreamWorks read it and loved it. So did Michael Lynne at New Line; he put in an extraordinary bid, $2 million. Zimmer convinced David Vogel, the president of Disney Pictures, to cancel his lunch plans, read the script, and get in. Vogel did so. He thought it was the kind of over-the-transom script that a movie executive might read once in a career. Zimmer encouraged Vogel to better the New Line offer. Vogel wanted to end the auction immediately. He offered an astonishing amount for the script, $3 million, and added another $500,000 for Night to direct. A done deal.
Harvey was fine with it, as Night suspected he would be all along. Harvey was a bargain shopper who didn’t spend one tenth that on a script, especially if a mediocrity (Night’s take on Harvey’s take) like M. Night Shyamalan was demanding to shoot it. Harvey insisted on a piece of the profits, on the off chance that the project would make any money. In the end, for Harvey, it was money for nothing.
Night’s moves were spectacular. With no business experience, with no training, he had engineered a complex and lucrative deal. In 1998 he was a young outsider, twenty-eight years old and from suburban Philadelphia, and he had found a way to get a trio of powerful and experienced Hollywood men—David Vogel and Harvey Weinstein and Jeremy Zimmer—to do exactly what he wanted them to do. The experience was empowering.
Less than a year later, during the first test screening of The Sixth Sense, something was wrong with the projector. The reels were wobbling and so was the picture on the screen.
“You better stop the screening,” Night’s editor, sitting next to him, said. He knew a wobbly picture would not endear the movie to the audience.
But Night was at peace. All he said was, “It’s okay—let it go.” He could feel how the audience was responding to his movie, he could feel it in his tingly fingers, moist eyes, dry throat, and pounding heart.
When the movie was over, there were gasps. There was wild applause. In the lobby, Night was mobbed by people who hadn’t known his name three hours earlier.
Hey, there’s the guy who wrote it.
He didn’t write it, he directed it.
I heard he did both!
With one movie, Night’s status had changed. For the foreseeable future, or for as long as his movies made piles of money, he’d have the right to final cut, the last word in how his movies would look upon release. From then on, Night would also have a significant say in when a movie would be released in the United States and overseas, which actors would be hired, what the poster and the trailer would look like, and where he’d shoot. The list of big-budget directors who have that kind of say is short. There’s George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, Ron Howard, maybe ten others. The Sixth Sense got Night on that list not because he had directed it but because he had written it and directed it. He had come up with an original idea and brought a whole world to life. He got people to think about his movie long after they left the theater.
After The Sixth Sense, Night no longer had to move the chess pieces himself. Others would do that for him. All he had to do was write and direct movies people wanted to see. Such power and freedom can corrupt, of course. But Night was lucky. He didn’t want a harem, a mansion in Bel-Air, his picture in Us Weekly. All he wanted to do was keep making movies.
By the standard of his Disney debut, Night’s next three movies were lesser events. But viewed collectively, Disney, from the accountants right up to Michael Eisner, had no reason to be anything but happy. Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis as the unscratched lone survivor of a train wreck, earned $249 million in worldwide ticket sales. Signs, with Mel Gibson as a lost minister/farmer trying to figure out the mystery of the crop circles appearing in his fields, grossed $405 million in ticket sales. The Village, the weird and dark one, marketed as a movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, grossed $256 million. Then there was the sale of DVDs and broadcast rights generating tens of millions more. The movies made enormous amounts of money, for Disney shareholders and for Night.
There was murmuring. There always is when somebody’s getting rich fast. There were people saying Night had peaked early with The Sixth Sense. There were people—Disney executives, moviegoers, reviewers—who had him in a box: the writer-director who makes dark, creepy movies with surprise endings. Each time out, there were big pens who were kind to him, but even more taking free swings.
Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times on Unbreakable: “Copycat films are a fact of life in Hollywood, and once writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense grossed more than $600 million worldwide and earned six Oscar nominations, it was inevitable that someone would use all the same elements to produce an inferior version. Unbreakable is the knockoff we’ve been expecting, but what’s surprising is that it’s Shyamalan himself who’s at the helm.”
A. O. Scott of The New York Times on Signs: “Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular—and as empty—as those bare patches out in the cornfield.”
Then there was Roger Ebert, with his famous thumb pointing movies toward oblivion or fame. His contempt for The Village was outsized. In the Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote: “A colossal 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.”
You read that stuff about yourself, it takes a toll. It seeps in. The movie Night was writing then, was it a colossal miscalculation? Lady in the Water wasn’t like anything playing in his neighborhood multiplex. It had no conventional three-act structure, no turning point, no dramatic love scene or fight. It was a story in which the characters don’t know if what they’re doing or saying is real. There were times when Night felt he was making an artistic breakthrough, as Steven Spielberg did with E.T. (an alien with a heart), as Quentin Tarantino did with Pulp Fiction (killers double as wry social commentators), as William Friedkin did with The Exorcist (coexistence of good and evil in one young girl). And there were times when the script made no sense even to him.
Night was walking a plank. The Village had been a departure for him. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Signs were about faith. The Village asked you to question authority. (To me, it was his most interesting picture.) The Village was a movie for heretics, and the fact that it exists at all is a testament to Night’s powers of persuasion. Disney would have been delighted to see Night forever make reruns of The Sixth Sense, or even Signs. (The headline for the review of Signs in the New York Post was telling and funny: I SEE GREEN PEOPLE.) By any normal measure of a movie’s success, The Village did extremely well. For a movie from an original script—not from a TV show or a game or a best-selling book or another movie—without any sex or guns or car chases, its success was stunning. But because of The Sixth Sense and Signs, Disney had spectacular financial expectations for Night’s movies. The profits of The Village showed him going in the wrong direction. The movie did not represent onward and upward.
And now Night was writing something weirder still, an original fable. If he could make it work, worlds would open, for him, for other writers and directors, for people who saw the movie, for anybody who just wanted once in his life to say to the boss, Haven’t I earned your trust? Let me try to do my own thing here, okay? For anybody dealing with his own Harvey Weinstein.
If Lady failed, Night knew what it would mean: The Disney bosses would push him back in his box. And there was no air left in that box. Night felt the Disney executives had never embraced The Village, never gotten its darkness or why it had no movie stars, though they had let Night make it. And it was not, to them, a home run. It was not another Signs. Night understood that whatever he did after The Village could not be in a minor key. On his good days, he knew that the script he was writing would be nothing like minor, if he could get it to work. If, if, if. 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. But how often in your life—your life, my life, Night’s life, anybody’s life—do you hear that chord?
Night was trying to write this ambitious, crazy, inspired, inspiring screenplay, and a lot of the time he had no idea what he was doing. Which meant that, at age thirty-four, with his Oscar nominations and his money and his farm and his beautiful wife and his adorable girls and his party invitations for which he controlled the guest list, Night was feeling more desperate than he ever had. More desperate, even, than when he was starting out.
He knew that if he wrote the wrong words, if he screwed the thing up, he could be viewed as a kook or worse. The forces of the industry would require him to become an assembly-line director, or to retreat to the art houses, and once you’ve had a taste of feeding the masses, you don’t want to do that. It was the most powerful kind of drug, and he was addicted to it. With Woody Allen, you get the idea that if he’s playing big in Duluth, he thinks he’s doing something wrong. Night was just the opposite. He had to reach Duluth. He had to connect, to win you over. The world population was growing all the time, so there were always more people to reach. He wanted to get in your head. Making money was great as long as he was being true to the story he wanted to tell. His feeling was that if he wasn’t constantly trying something new, moving ahead—then a piece of him, the liveliest piece, would die. He would no longer be the person his wife had married.
He felt like he was writing through a fever. This time he wasn’t writing out of ambition. He was writing out of inspiration. He was writing for his daughters, and he was writing for himself. He’d create an artificial deadline for a new draft and pull an all-nighter to meet it. Every day he was a wreck, delirious and moody, but no one who saw him would have known. His secretary, his office manager, his cook, his driver, his daughters’ nanny, the housekeeper, the farm’s caretaker, the guys he played basketball with on Tuesday nights, his architect, his daughters, the guests at the Burch dinner, we all saw someone ready to laugh at anything. He could turn any little nothing—the pretentiousness of the phrase take a meeting—into a comic bit that would last for days. Only Bhavna saw her husband’s desperation, his underlying sadness, his resolve.
Lady in the Water started to work. He put in the hours, day after day, night after night, carting around the script, physically and mentally, wherever he went. He got through a first draft, a second, third, fourth, all of them for his eyes only. The fifth he liked. He gave it to twenty-three carefully selected readers, including Bhavna, their nanny, the editor of Signs, and one of his basketball buddies. Each reader was given a numbered script, a strict due-back date, and a pointed questionnaire that he had used for his other scripts as well.
Night turned their responses into numeric scores on a ten-point scale, then compared them to the scores his other scripts had received. He chose readers who would give him what he wanted. Some would give him candor. Others would hold his hand. He’d use all of it.
The nanny, a bright young woman who had taught at his kids’ school until Night and Bhavna hired her away, told Night she thought the script was strange, illogical, sacrilegious for Christians. The power of Night’s myth overwhelmed her own religious values. “I love it!” Night told her. He didn’t view her as a critic but as a sparring partner, somebody who could help make him better.
One reader thought it was too scary for children. Another said the script did not make her cry. Jeremy Zimmer thought the dialogue of one key character, Lin Lao Choi, was “stilted,” but his feedback was positive in most every other regard. Night gave his agent’s response a hand-holding 8.75. The composer who scored Night’s movies, James Newton Howard, said it was “amazing, very cool, masterful, laugh-out-loud funny.” Night graded his response a 9.5, and it made him feel better.
Night picked up on an odd pattern: Men liked it more than women. Usually, women liked his scripts and his movies more than men. Night theorized that women are more comfortable with believing in the supernatural, and they brought men to Night’s movies. But for Lady in the Water, many of the first female readers found the humor too coarse and said it distracted from the underlying message. He knew what he had to work on. One more draft and he’d send it to Disney. Draft 6 would be his sale script.
He began work on Draft 6 on February 1, 2005. He wanted the movie to come out in the early summer of 2006, maybe even by Memorial Day, so that it could be sold as a summer “event” movie. For that to happen, he had to start shooting by August 2005. Which meant Disney had to have the sale script in February.
Night, who thrived on tension, chose a date: The three key Disney executives would get the script on Sunday, February 13. Paula, Night’s assistant, would fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles that morning with copies of the script and hand-deliver them to the homes of Dick Cook, the chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group; Oren Aviv, the head of marketing (Disney did not make movies that it didn’t know how to sell); and, most significantly, Nina Jacobson, the Disney president, who had moved from DreamWorks to Disney specifically to work on The Sixth Sense. Nina’s tastes largely dictated what kinds of movies Disney made. Later that evening, on an itinerary established weeks earlier, Paula would collect Cook’s script, then Aviv’s the next morning. Night wanted to know where his scripts were at all times. Nobody kept them for very long.
Except for Nina. She could keep them. She had worked intimately with Night on all four of his movies for Disney. She was described to me as a quirky, opinionated woman, skinny with worry, which she expressed in a fast-talking squeaky voice. Her personal habits were amusing: biting her knuckles or applying lip balm while making an important point, which she did with a great torrent of words, like water from an open hydrant. She was like Night that way; they were both talkers. She used fuck so often it became gratuitous, little more than an affectation. At other times her language was out of the corporate manual; she spoke of certain movies being “Disney-branded.” But she was not an empty suit. She was smart. You could tell her punk sensibilities were being thwarted by her job. When she wore Prada, it came off as sarcastic. Because she had worked with Night from what Disney saw as the start—The Sixth Sense—Night granted her one special dispensation. She could keep the script. Night trusted her.
Six o’clock, Saturday night, February 12. The date and time was embedded in his head. That was when Night would give Paula a disk with the sale script on it. He and Bhavna would go out for the night while Paula went to the basement copier at the farmhouse and made copies. Draft 6 needed every minute he could give it, and he had already given away so many minutes. His schedule was a mess. Why had he agreed to talk to a group of film students at NYU? That would cost him most of a day. Why had he agreed to fly with his father to Jacksonville, Florida, to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play in the Super Bowl? He doesn’t like to fly (turbulence makes his stomach queasy, and toast does not help); he’s afraid of large unruly crowds; he didn’t think the Eagles would win (they didn’t); and it would cost him a day and a half. Why had he agreed to go to the twentieth reunion of his graduating class from Waldron Academy, being held on the Saturday night before Paula would fly to Los Angeles? He could have been working that Saturday night. And then there was his other life, the one at home. He had always been involved in the lives of his girls—the new script had started in their bedrooms, after all—but now he was needed more. Bhavna was writing her doctoral thesis, about cultural differences in emotional responses, and two afternoons a week, Night was needed at home when the girls returned from school.
The self-made Saturday-night deadline and the insistence on the secretive distribution of the sale script were adding to Night’s burden. Because of the twist ending to The Sixth Sense, and the surprises in his other three movies, Night had to keep his scripts under tight control. The script for Unbreakable had been leaked on the Internet months before the movie came out. Night was determined that would not happen again, and it didn’t. Secretiveness had become part of how he marketed himself. There were no public records of where he lived or worked. He gave few interviews. When Paula used the farmhouse copier that could handle only twenty pages at a time, each page was stamped with a name or a serial number superimposed in large light gray type over the text. If this established Night as untrusting, which it did, it also established him as mysterious and neurotic, and he was okay with that, because it was true and because it served him well.
There was another advantage to having Paula hand-deliver the new script on a Sunday. That turned its arrival into an event, just as Night had done when selling The Sixth Sense. It promised his script immediate and undivided attention on a day of the week when phones rang less, when time slowed down, when people were closer to their emotions. He was comfortable getting in the middle of people’s weekends. He felt that the reading of his script should not be considered work. It should add to the weekend’s pleasure.
It was a feverish twelve days. The changes from Draft 5 to Draft 6 were major and minor, but more than anything, they were shifts in tone. By Draft 6, the apartment building had become a character. For comic relief, he had an apartment of young smokers, five guys in their mid-twenties still tethered to their dorm-room bongs, trying to solve the riddles of the world. The film-critic tenant was deliciously pompous, too full of himself to realize the smokers were mocking him. When Night had read the role of Vick, the writer—a part he had reserved for himself—he felt weak and exposed, exactly how he wanted to feel. Lin Lao Choi, party girl/university student, was sounding more real. (And what a visual: Night had her at six feet, with rolls of fat and a Britney Spears wardrobe.) And then there was the enigmatic love between Story and Cleveland, the super who was in almost every scene of the movie. Some days they seemed like a potential couple, on others like father and daughter. Night didn’t know, and it did not bother him.
It wasn’t The Village. This one, Night said, had no cynicism. The more he worked on the script, the more the characters came together, as the story wanted them to. By Draft 6, they were a world. By Draft 6, there were no more notes like Common!
In a moment of euphoria, he called Jeremy Zimmer and said, “I want to put up half the budget.”
Night and his agent had talked about this before, but only in theory. Night wanted to personally finance half the movie and therefore be in for half of the movie’s profits. Night had been thinking about making such an investment for years, long before Mel Gibson had financed The Passion of the Christ himself. Lady in the Water would have at least a $60 million budget. Night figured he could put up $30 million without going to a bank, though it represented most of his liquid wealth. But if the movie grossed $300 million, Night would double his money, even after all the muddled Hollywood accounting. And if the movie turned into a phenomenon, as Night thought it could, his haul might be $100 million or more. He liked the idea of investing in something he could control.
And then the voices came just as he was about to hand the disk to Paula. In the past, the handing off of the floppy disk had always been momentous for him. He’d kiss the disk, give it to Paula, pop open a bottle of champagne, and make a toast: “To the sale script!” Not this time. As Night was handing the disk to Paula, the voices suddenly barged in, unannounced and unwelcome.
You don’t have it.
Yeah, I do. I always have it when I send off the sale script.
Not this time you don’t.
Maybe it’ll need another pass. But Nina will see that it’s all there.
No, she won’t. There’s a fundamental problem in the script that nobody will see until it plays in front of an audience.
Well, at least I don’t have to write anymore. Not for now.
The last sound he heard before leaving the farmhouse for the night was Paula closing the door on her way to the copying room, converted from an old bathroom.
Night and Bhavna headed out to the reunion at Waldron. Everybody there still called him Manoj. His mood was manic and intense. Memories came flooding back. He was twelve, at a school social, the only dark-skinned person there. He asked a girl a half foot taller to dance. They did, clumsily, and then she ran off to her girlfriends. In their giggles he could hear everything they were saying and thinking, and he went home that night and prayed that he could turn off the voices, but that never happened.
At the reunion he was doing strange things. He apologized to a teammate from a long-ago kickball game, when Night had celebrated his teammate’s game-winning kick with an excessive hug. (Feeling things too deeply once again!) He heard stories about himself that seemed to be about somebody else, the dark-skinned Hindu boy who was pushed into the smelly confessional by the fat nun and ha, ha, ha; ha, ha, ha! Night was giggling crazily at the stories, laughing so inordinately it made others envious and nervous. What his old classmates didn’t realize was that he was on the verge of hysteria, on the verge of doing the one thing he did not do, losing all control. Writing Lady in the Water had taken something out of him.
He was asleep the next morning when Paula boarded an early flight from Philadelphia to LAX. She did not drink a thing the flight attendants were offering; she would not be using the plane lavatory. She would not leave the scripts unattended for even a moment, and she would not call attention to herself by hauling them into the cramped WC of an Airbus 321. She had a window seat because it was more secure, more private, more removed. The scripts stayed in their snug little case, zipped and locked. She didn’t nap, she didn’t read. For five hours, she kept her eyes on her feet and the scripts underneath them, her knees shaking up and down, up and down, up and down.