M Night Shyamalan denies plagiarism during ‘Servant’ trial
M Night Shyamalan has testified in court that he and the team behind his AppleTV+ show Servant did not plagiarise the 2013 independent film The Truth About Emanuel.
Emanuel director Francesca Gregorini first brought an $81 million copyright infringement lawsuit against Shyamalan, who produced Servant, Tony Basgallop, who created the show, and Apple in 2020. A judge rejected the case, but it was revived in 2022 and finally brought before a jury last week in Riverside, California.
Gregorini testified that she was horrified when she saw the first Servant trailer, which revealed the core conceit that a bereaved mother hires a nanny to watch over her baby, who is actually a doll. This concept is similar to that of Gregorini’s film, which starred Jessica Biel and Kaya Scodelario.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Gregorini testified. “I could see basically they had taken my film and redone it.” She claimed that Servant stole “the beating heart and skeleton” of her film and even closely mirrored some of the same shots and sequences she had used. The director claimed that many people in her orbit, such as agents and industry colleagues, tried to prevent her from suing. Still, she knew she had to take a stand because plagiarism is prevalent in Hollywood.
“I realised that in doing the suit, I would be fighting for myself, for what happened to me, but also for the other people who perhaps, for whatever reasons, were not able to get their day in court,” Gregorini said. “You cannot take someone else’s work, repurpose it, call it your own, and not give credit or compensation to the person who made it.”
In response, Shyamalan testified that he believed the plagiarism accusation was “a misunderstanding.” He was adamant, “This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” and repeatedly answered, “Absolutely not,” when asked if he stole anything from Emanuel. In fact, he claimed he’d never even watched the film until recently, and when he did, he noticed that “everything in it has come from other movies.”
Shyamalan’s attorney walked the jury through shots from Emanuel that closely resemble shots from one of Shyamalan’s own movies – his 1999 classic The Sixth Sense. The filmmaker stressed that he wasn’t showing these scenes to accuse Gregorini of stealing from him but instead was trying to illustrate how all filmmakers share the same cinematic language. “I don’t own them,” Shyamalan explained. “Anyone can do these shots. We’re all in a long line of learning from each other, from Hitchcock and Kubrick before us. And they didn’t invent it. It goes before them, and it keeps on going after that.”
Overall, Shyamalan testified that he finds the plagiarism accusation “confusing” and explained that he didn’t make it a point to watch Emanuel until last month because he knew he didn’t copy from it. “I don’t need to see the jewels,” he said while making a jewellery heist analogy. “I didn’t steal them.”
Basgallop, who created the show and wrote the pilot script, also testified that he began working on the idea in 2005. He claimed he hadn’t heard of Emanuel until the lawsuit reared its head, but Gregorini’s lawyer countered that he didn’t incorporate the doll element into the script until 2016, three years after Emanuel’s release.
The trial is expected to move into the jury phase later this week.
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