The directors who inspire M Night Shyamalan: “They feel spot-on to me”
Sticking to his guns may have almost completely cratered the career of M Night Shyamalan, but he managed to rebuild himself and eventually find a niche that suited him much better anyway.
As far as breakthrough features go, they don’t come much better than The Sixth Sense, which hoovered up over $670million at the box office and landed six Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. The film released on his 29th birthday, and the pressure was immediately on.
Unbreakable and Signs strengthened his position as one of cinema’s fastest-rising directorial stars, but relying on his signature twist ending saw the wheels begin to wobble before they fell off completely when he decided he wanted to try his hand at effects-heavy blockbuster filmmaking.
Things reached such a nadir that even though he came up with the story and produced the movie, his name was suspiciously omitted from the marketing of 2010’s Devil, with his stock having fallen so drastically even associating itself with Shyamalan was risk the marketing team wasn’t willing to take.
Fortunately, salvation lay just around the corner, with Shyamalan now comfortably back on the horse after opting to forego studio politics and expensive undertakings in favour of modestly budgeted original stories he finds himself, sells off, and makes a lot of money from when the ticket sales mount up.
He’s become a brand unto himself, but Shyamalan hasn’t been going through his career with the blinders on. There are many other auteurs who’ve inspired and influenced him, several of which he rattled off to the BBC as being key touchstones he’s looked towards with admiration.
“So many,” he admitted. “Sofia Coppola, contemporaries like Quentin Tarantino, they totally inspire me. From people with a larger body of work, it would be Stanley Kubrick’s formalism. Specific movies like Rosemary’s Baby are also influential, even Being There; things that you wouldn’t think were spot-on, they feel spot-on to me. And Peter Weir, for the humanity that he brings to everything.”
Coppola, Tarantino, Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Hal Ashby, and Weir are an eclectic bunch of influences, but the latter three in particular have left pronounced fingerprints on Shyamalan’s work. Whether it’s through his regular adoption of psychological thrills, frequent detours into horror, spotlighting the humanity at the core of his characters, and those self-indulgent detours into mawkishness, he’s channelled that trio while putting his own spin on many of their favoured narrative and thematic motifs.
He’s never felt the need to depict violence on a Tarantino-esque level, however, but any director who followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction in the mid-to-late 1990s almost inevitably looked to the transformative filmmaker owed him at least some small debt of gratitude.
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