M Night Shyamalan has been cleared of copyright charges in ‘Servant’ trial
A federal judge ruled in favour of M Night Shyamalan and Apple in a copyright trial on Friday, with the defendants accused of stealing aspects of an independent feature film in creating the series Servant.
The trial lasted for seven days and began on January 14th, with Italian director Francesca Gregorini seeking up to $81million in damages, claiming that Shyamalan and his collaborators had taken elements from the narrative of her 2013 film The Truth About Emmanuel, without crediting her.
Gregorini’s film follows a delusional mother who treats a baby doll as if it were real and a nanny who affirms this delusional reality. The director filed the lawsuit after noticing significant plot similarities between her film and Servant.
Shyamalan testified on Wednesday that he and the other creators of the show had not seen or heard of The Truth about Emmanuel before the trial, describing the situation as “clearly, 100%, a misunderstanding”.
Shyamalan expanded on this, saying, “This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” he told the court. “I would have never allowed it. None of the people that I work with would ever do anything like that.”
Gregorini testified that she was “shocked” when she first saw the trailer for Servant, believing that the series idea had been stolen from her film. As well as alleging that narrative details had been taken, she also claimed that a number of shots and scenes had been directly lifted, including a scene when the nanny treats the doll as real when she’s alone and another scene when she faints.
Gregorini was advised not to sue and told that she might experience a negative impact on her career, but she said she wanted to take a stand against the creative theft that she described as being very prominent in the industry.
“I wanted to hold the defendants accountable for what they did and to do my part so that this doesn’t happen to anyone else in my industry ever again”. The defence lawyers came to the conclusion that there were many differences between both projects, namely Servant a supernatural thriller and The Truth About Emmanuel a coming-of-age drama.
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