M. Night Shyamalan

Early life

Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan was born on August 6, 1970, in Mahé, India, a town in the Union Territory of Puducherry. His father, Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Mahé and a JIPMER graduate; his mother, Jayalakshmi Shyamalan, a Tamil from Chennai, is an OB-GYN.

Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old. Shyamalan was raised Hindu in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to Hell. When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade in religion class and [he] wasn't Catholic". He later attended the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.

Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar. Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. When reading about the Lakota, he discovered a person whose name was translated as 'Night' in English. He used Night thereafter instead of his original middle name, Nelliyattu. The name change was also in his view to draw audiences to his films with just his name, as with Hitchcock and Spielberg.

Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies.

Career

Film

Shyamalan made his first film, the semi-autobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still a student at NYU, using money borrowed from family and friends. He wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake. His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a ten-year-old Catholic schoolboy (Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Rosie O'Donnell, Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance. Only in limited release, the film grossed $305,704 in theaters, against a $6 million budget.

That same year Shyamalan co-wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little with Greg Brooker. He was the ghostwriter for the 1999 film She's All That, a teen comedy starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook, but did not reveal his role until 2013. On June 17, 2013, Jack Lechner (who served as Miramax's head of development in the late 1990s) confirmed that both Shyamalan and R. Lee Fleming Jr. contributed to the script: Fleming wrote the initial script that Miramax bought while Shyamalan did an uncredited rewrite (doing more than "a polish") that got the film green-lit. Lechner reiterated that content from both writers was included in the final cut of the film.

Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis, which became the second-highest grossing horror movie of all time. He became a director whose name could, like Spielberg, market a film. The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

In July 2000, on The Howard Stern Show, Shyamalan said he had met with Spielberg and was in early talks to write the script for the fourth Indiana Jones film. This would have given Shyamalan a chance to work with his longtime idol. After the film fell through, Shyamalan later said it was too "tricky" to arrange and "not the right thing" for him to do.

Shyamalan followed The Sixth Sense by writing and directing Unbreakable (2000), again starring Willis, a stealth superhero film within a thriller, which was both critically and financially successful.

Television

Shyamalan is the executive producer on the Apple TV series Servant. He directed several episodes, including the pilot. Servant was renewed for a second series in advance of the season one premiere. The second season of Servant completed filming in fall 2020 under COVID protocols.

Shyamalan was also instrumental in the creation of the Fox science fiction series Wayward Pines (2015–2016), for which he executive produced and directed the pilot episode. The series became the most-watched show of that summer.

In 2016, TNT first announced that Shyamalan would be responsible for a reboot series for Tales from the Crypt. As of June 2017 the series had been cancelled due to a number of legal reasons.

He also appeared in an episode of the series Entourage.

Production company

Shyamalan's production company, Blinding Edge Pictures, is located in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Blinding Edge has produced Servant, Wayward Pines, Devil, The Happening, Lady in the Water, The Village, Signs, Unbreakable, The Last Airbender, After Earth, The Visit, Split, Glass and Old. It is run by Shyamalan and Ashwin Rajan. In February 2023, the company signed a multi-year first-look deal with Warner Bros., among them the Shyamalan-directed Trap, which released theatrically on August 2, 2024.

Books

While working on his film The Happening, Shyamalan developed an interest in improving the delivery of education in American schools. He hired doctoral student James Richardson to do most of the background research and as a result published I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America's Education Gap through Simon and Schuster in 2013. John Willol of NPR reviewed the book by stating "I Got Schooled is a breezily written, research driven call to change America's approach to education. Shyamalan is smart and sincere, and his innovative ideas are unbound by the educational establishment."

Personal life

Shyamalan married Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he met at New York University. The couple has three daughters, including director Ishana and musician Saleka. His cousin is actor Ritesh Rajan.

Shyamalan and his family live near Philadelphia at Ravenwood, a 125-acre (51 ha) estate, built around a 27,000-square-foot (2,500 m2) 1937 Georgian Revival house.

Shyamalan is a season ticket holder of the Philadelphia 76ers.

In 2023, Shyamalan bought a 218-acre (88 ha) estate from the Rockefeller family in Willistown Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, which has five historic houses and two barns for $24 million.

Shyamalan was born and raised in a Hindu family, educated at a Catholic school, and most of his movies contain Christian symbolism. Shyamalan considers himself "pretty spiritual," but not religious. "I do have a lot of thoughts about things in that realm beyond what we can touch and feel, but I'm not a huge fan of organized religion," said Shyamalan, "although I'm very fascinated by it, so it comes into my movies a lot."

Critical analysis and box-office performance

Rolling Stone wrote that The Sixth Sense gave Shyamalan the reputation of "the guy who makes the scary movies with a twist". In 2008, Shyamalan said it was a common misperception that his films "have twist endings, or that they're all scary", explaining that they "are spiritual and all have an emotional perspective". He avoided plot twists for years, until again using them starting with The Visit in 2015. Rolling Stone wrote in 2018,

In his twenties, [Shyamalan] says, "I don't think you could have told me that making thrillers for your whole life wasn't a bad thing. At first it was a sense of, 'Hey, I can make anything.' But that's hypocritical, because when I pick up an Agatha Christie novel in my library, I have a strong expectation. So, I get it ... When I became happy with the idea of making thrillers for the rest of my life, everything went right."

After the release of The Village, Slate's Michael Agger noted that Shyamalan was following "an uncomfortable pattern" of "making fragile, sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic".

Shyamalan has also been nominated for, and in some cases won, numerous Golden Raspberry Awards for Lady in the Water in 2006, The Happening in 2008, The Last Airbender in 2010, and After Earth in 2013. In 2016 he was also nominated for the Razzie Redeemer Award.

The Village, Lady in the Water, Split and Trap have been included in Cahiers du Cinéma annual top ten lists.

Shyamalan is also known for setting and shooting his films in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, along with nearby Reading, Pennsylvania. Most of his early commercially successful films were co-produced and released by Walt Disney Studios' Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures imprints. Films of his resurgence, however, were usually released by Universal Pictures.

Awards and nominations

In 2008, Shyamalan was honored with the Padma Shri award by the Government of India. Shyamalan was the Jury President of the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival competition section.

Controversy

SyFy Channel hoax

In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media hoax with SyFy Channel, which was eventually uncovered by the press. SyFy claimed in its "documentary" special The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of The Village, that as a child, Shyamalan had been dead for nearly half an hour while drowned in a frozen pond in an accident, and that upon being rescued he had experiences of communicating with spirits, fueling an obsession with the supernatural.

In truth, Shyamalan developed the hoax with SyFy, going so far as having SyFy staffers sign non-disclosure agreements with a $5 million fine attached and requiring Shyamalan's office to formally approve each step. Neither the childhood accident nor a supposed rift with the filmmakers ever occurred. The hoax included a nonexistent SyFy publicist, "David Westover", whose name appeared on press releases regarding the special. SyFy also fed false news stories to the Associated Press, Zap2It, and the New York Post, among others.

After an AP reporter confronted SyFy Channel president Bonnie Hammer at a press conference, Hammer admitted the hoax, saying it was part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to generate pre-release publicity for The Village. This prompted SyFy's parent company, NBC Universal, to state that the undertaking was "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and we value our relationship with both."

Plagiarism accusations

Robert McIlhinney, a Pennsylvanian screenwriter, sued Shyamalan in 2003, alleging similarities between Signs and his unpublished script Lord of the Barrens: The Jersey Devil.

In 2004, Margaret Peterson Haddix claimed that The Village has numerous similarities to her young adult novel Running Out of Time, prompting discussions with publisher Simon & Schuster about filing a lawsuit.

In response to both allegations, Disney and Shyamalan's production company Blinding Edge issued statements calling the claims "meritless".

Orson Scott Card has claimed that many elements of The Sixth Sense were plagiarized from his novel Lost Boys, although he has said that enough had been changed that there was no point in suing.

Pop culture

After the release of The Happening, The Guardian's Kim Newman questioned, "Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?" The British Film Institute (BFI) also discussed the impact of racism on Shyamalan's career, pointing to frequent mispronunciations of his last name. By 2017, Vice said that "Shamalamadingdong" had become the "agreed-upon mockery of his name".

BFI asked if critical attacks are the result of egotistical statements on Shyamalan's part. They question whether his strong statements of self-assurance coupled with the remarkable success of The Sixth Sense set up a fall from grace which was soon realized when a run of very successful films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village) seemingly collapsed with a string of critical failures (Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth). In 2019, Tim Greiving of The Washington Post said that "his confidence was interpreted as arrogance by some, especially after he cast himself in Lady in the Water as a brilliant writer whose book is prophesied as a world-saver." Greiving continued, "Howard, who expressed pride in him for forging ahead despite his turn among critics, noted how rare it was for such a young filmmaker to write, direct and produce original material. He wondered whether that placed a bigger target on his back, as his reputation for doggedness was perpetuated within the industry and reinforced by critics."

In 2026, a Malayalam movie called Mollywood Times featured its main character as an ardent fan of Shyamalan, and shows how Shyamalan's life (whose origin is tied to Kerala) influenced his film-making career.