Vulture In Conversation: M. Night Shyamalan The director on his failures, his successes, and Glass. #SciFiSunday
Vulture recently interviewed M. Night Shyamalan (aka the director EVERYONE seems to have an opinion on) about some career highs and lows, and his new movie Glass that opens on January 18th.
Over the course of a 20-year filmmaking career, from the breakout The Sixth Sense through critical duds like The Happening and After Earth, M. Night Shyamalan has made, in his words, “a bunch of movies that were really successful and then a bunch of movies that people didn’t like.” Recently, he’s back to making movies people like: the low-budget horror comedy The Visit, which grossed $100 million, and the hit slasher-film-with-a-twist Split, about a killer with multiple personalities — the twist being that the film is revealed in its final moments to be a sequel to Shyamalan’s moody proto–superhero thriller Unbreakable. At an 8 a.m. breakfast in his hometown of Philadelphia, in an upscale eatery adjacent to the campus of Drexel University, Shyamalan is cheerful and engaging, talking about what some have called “the Shyamalanaissance” in advance of this month’s release of Glass, a sequel to Split and Unbreakable. He shared his hard-won philosophy about dealing with failure — and success. “Thinking about the philosophy of things is definitely what I spend my days doing,” he says. “My family is OD’d on it. We’re at the point where if they hear my voice in that certain timbre of excitement about something, [they] will shut down on me.”