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'Signs'director hopes for a hit
Knight Ridder Newspapers
CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa. — Back in 1987, M. Night Shyamalan, then a high school senior, told his cardiologist father and obstetrician mother that he was having second thoughts about going into the family business.
Shoving aside his application for the University of Pennsylvania's premed program, the home-movie hobbyist from the Philadelphia suburbs instead applied to the New York University film school.
"Sinns", director M. Knight Shyamalan and Mel Gibson, who stared in the movie, share a laugh between takes.
This prospect filled his parents, emigres from India, with dread. Where was the job security, the community service, in a movie career?
As it turned out, Shyamalan — who turned 32 just after the release of "Signs," his supernatural thriller — has become a forensic filmmaker who approaches his specialty much as his parents do theirs. Like his "The Sixth Sense" in 1999 and "Unbreakable" a year later, with "Signs" — starring Mel Gibson as a preacher who has already lost his wife and faith when aliens threaten to snatch his family — Shyamalan diagnoses what ails his audience and proposes a healing course of cinematic catharsis.
Contributed art
To the eternal relief of his parents and the relish of his fans, Shyamalan's career choice has afforded him an enviable degree of financial security (to write and direct "Signs", his paycheck exceeded $10 million) and an outlet for a kind of community service. For if the multiplex is the village green of the millennium, Shyamalan is the guy most likely to bring people together for a group hug.
Hist timing is auspicious. Principal photography for "Signs" — shot in the Buck's County, Pa., towns of Doylestown, Morrisville and Newtown — commenced on Sept. 13. Already reeling from the terrorist attacks two days earlier, the cast and crew were further shaken by the symbolic link between the events in New York and the script's primal storyline after a fractured family knitting
In movies such as "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Steven Spielberg proved himself the bard of the broken clan. With "The Sixth Sense" and "Signs," Shyamalan aspires to be the poet of the mended family.
together to fight invaders.
"I felt prescient," admitted Shyamalan last week at his offices in Conshohocken, minutes from downtown Philly and his home in Gladwyne, where he lives with his wife, Bhavna, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Bryn Mawr College, and their two daughters.
"I used to think that way about Michael Crichton, with 'Disclosure' in the bookstores just as Anita Hill appeared before the Senate to testify about sexual harassment. Maybe certain things are in the air."
In reality, 'Signs' theme is timeless. Its hero is a man who wonders whether it is faith or fate that dictates his destiny. If this had resonance when Shyumalan sold his script to Disney in March 2001, by Sept. 13 its vibrations could be measured by seismologists.
In "Signs," ground zero is the cornfield outside the farmhouse of Father Guham Hess, where some force has inscribed a cosmic crop circle in the amber waves of maize.
"Do you believe in miracles or do you just get lucky?" Graham (Gibson) asks his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), as they stand vigil to protect Graham's young children from the heart-but-not-seen menace outside. The thrust of the film is how Graham evolves from lapse-of-faith fatalism to lean-of-faith believer.
Ask the filmmaker, a practicing Hindu, what he believes in and, without blinking, he replies, "Miracles, definitely."
"The Sixth Sense" was a miracle. The quiet thriller about the boy who sees ghosts and the ghost who thinks he's curing him cost $40 million to make, earned $661 million worldwide and received six Oscar nominations.
After the film's phenomenal success, Shyamalan worried about being a one-hit wunderdick. Following "The Sixth Sense" was a frightening challenge for a junior auteur who lived 3,000 miles from Hollywood and whose prior studio effort, "Wide Awake" (1998), about a 10-year-old who literally and figuratively finds God after the death of his grandfather made $282,000.
Shyamalan's answer was "Unbreakable," about an extraordinary evil man (Samuel L. Jackson) who pushes a seemingly ordinary guy (Bruce Willis) into recognizing his superheroic powers. While it was commercially successful, grossing $249 million worldwide, "Unbreakable" had a lot of guts, but little heart.
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