CHADDS FORD, Pa., 7 August 2004 — In a field in rural Pennsylvania, director M. Night Shyamalan is surveying the remnants of his handiwork, a collection of worn wood and stone houses, forlorn outposts of humanity, reminders of an era when daily life was harder. The houses intentionally echo the lonely isolation of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, who lives but 20 minutes from here. In prepping for his new film, “The Village,” Shyamalan spent a long time flying around in a helicopter looking for the perfect field, surrounded by dense woods, that he’d seen in his head.
He’d imagined an expanse “more regimented, more rectangular” than the lolling hills at his feet. “There is no such thing in this area like that,” he says with a laugh. “You have to go to the other side of the country. I don’t mind letting go of those kind of details as long as it’s exchanged for other details.”
He points to the trees that stagger along the perimeter — they’re an essential character in “The Village,” the cold, stark lair of malevolent red creatures. “It’s nice when my crew, even actors, come in and mess up my very pristine, perfect impression of things. But even when you see the movie, it still comes through a lot — my very stringent aesthetics.”
“Pristine,” “perfect,” “precise,” “controlled,” these are all words that 33-year-old Shyamalan tends to use repeatedly, mostly in reference to his minimalist aesthetic, and mostly with a slightly self-mocking spin to take off the edge of self-importance. But it’s clear he’s serious.
Despite the muddy ground, the overcast sky, the director himself is rather pristine in a stark white shirt and jeans. Around his neck is sleek silver-and-black jewelry — much of it bearing Sanskrit blessings for health and happiness.
In his cameos in his films, the 6-foot-tall Shyamalan has an awkward, long-necked geekiness, none of which is apparent this day. What might have been presumed as arrogance several years ago has mellowed into the jaunty assurance of a young prince who’s assumed his birthright.
Shyamalan’s mantle includes “The Sixth Sense” ($673 million worldwide), “Signs” ($408 million worldwide), and the disappointing (for him) “Unbreakable” (“only” $249 million worldwide).
He’s Hollywood’s poet laureate of dread, the purveyor of his distinctive brand of melancholy-drenched paranoia. He’s tapped into the pervasive modern anxiety that something unfathomably bad is just around the corner. Yet his films also offer a respite from the helter-skelter speed of modern living. Shyamalan’s world moves slowly, decisively. There are few special effects, no swooping, spinning camera moves, just a series of fluidly turning master shots as he exquisitely controls the climate of fear, systematically raising it degree by degree. Shining through the shroud of foreboding are glimmers of faith — religion without the treacle — a sentiment that certainly has its following in a God-fearing America. The films also end with his signature surprise epiphany, less a plot twist than a revealing of the underlying premise of the film.
Much about Shyamalan is a contradiction. He’s firmly ensconced on the Hollywood A-list but acts like a newly minted suburban dad, preferring to live in the countryside outside of Philadelphia, close to his parents and where he grew up. He rigidly and meticulously orchestrates every frame that bears his name and yet believes almost mystically in intuition, which he describes as a kind of peace that settles over him when he knows he’s on the right path. He’s tremendously confident and yet fastidious about examining his weaknesses.
“He’s a gigantically hard worker, and he has an almost religious attitude toward the thing he’s trying to achieve,” says “The Village” producer Scott Rudin. “It’s of tremendous importance to him. He also understands that that’s not all there is in life. He’s very committed to his family.”
The sense of family imbues all his films, and “The Village,” plays on the distinct post-Sept. 11 theme of how far a parent would go to protect his family.
The film tells the tale, more suspenseful than pungently scary, of a utopian 19th-century community, founded by refugees fleeing the violence and evils of the city to live in pastoral isolation. Their serenity is threatened by the evil creatures (“those whose names we dare not speak”) who lurk in the surrounding woods.
As the film opens, a romantic triangle is burgeoning and the demon beasts have begun to encroach; it will fall to the town’s most vulnerable — the blind girl played by 23-year-old newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard — to sally forth into the forest. The characters in the film speak with an old-fashioned simplicity, a lack of irony, which Shyamalan knows might be jarring to modern ears.
“This is definitely the most personal of the four movies,” he says. “The idea of me desperately, desperately trying to hold on to my own innocence. I came at it from protecting my own innocence, the value of simplicity, the value of an ethic, a standard.”
By his own admission, Shyamalan is veritably obsessed with purity, although it doesn’t simply mean the simple life, the traditional values of love, honor and work. It also refers to the artist uncorrupted by ego concerns, by the lure of success, and adulation, all of which he admits is “internally intoxicating.” It’s also a metaphor for the original voice.
If Shyamalan is something of an idealist, he’s also a minister who wants a flock. He likes what he sees as his covenant with the audience and sees his originality as “the only weapon I have” in the marketplace. “That’s what they’re selling — originality. That will be our strength and our weakness.”
“The Village,” which cost $72 million (about one-third the cost of “Spider-Man 2”), boasts no certified box-office draws. Disney Studios, which has been suffering through a recent box-office drought, is selling the film primarily on the Shyamalan name. Its ABC wing has already replayed his greatest hits, with Shyamalan acting as emcee much as Walt Disney used to do. “Primetime Live” did a segment on him, and thousands of fans showed up at Regal movie theaters in towns across America for a satellite-feed town meeting with Shyamalan.
Shyamalan writes his scripts with actors in mind and spends a long time on the conception of the film, jotting down notes in beautiful leather-bound notebooks and then writing draft after draft of the screenplay. Unlike almost any other director working today, he also storyboards for six months, working with a storyboard artist who meticulously draws pictures of every scene in the movie. “It’s tedious, and everybody fights you on it from beginning to end,” he says. “It’s at once a very, very controlling thing to do and at once a complete act of faith.”
Shyamalan shoots no coverage, the customary practice of filming a scene from a multiplicity of angles and reassembling it in the editing room. There are consequently almost no cuts.
“It’s very risky,” Shyamalan allows, “but risk keeps everyone at the edge of their talent. That’s why I hired theater-trained actors, who could go two, three, four minutes and go with that energy flow.” He also required the actors to attend three weeks of rehearsal, including a week staying in tents for a kind of boot camp in 19th-century practices.
The director is a great believer in intuition, of just knowing things. The director counts casting Howard as the lead of his film as his latest example of instinct.
The director had been talking to Kirsten Dunst about playing the lead in the film, and wrangling over her schedule, and her inability to come early to prepare. Rudin had suggested Howard, the daughter of director Ron Howard, for a smaller part and the director, who doesn’t usually go to the theater, traveled to see her in a New York production of “As You Like It.”
He later called Rudin and told him, “Bryce, she’s the one. She should be in the movie,” Shyamalan says. “... It’s not out of anything other than I felt magic and magic is a very, very rare thing to feel.”