The M Night Shyamalan movie that wouldn’t exist without Bob Dylan: “He was an inspiration when I was writing it”
After an incredibly promising start to his filmmaking career, it wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that the unlimited creative freedom M Night Shyamalan enjoyed at such an early age was directly responsible for the auteur coming dangerously close to disappearing up his own arse.
The Sixth Sense was released on the filmmaker’s 29th birthday and snowballed into a critical, commercial, and awards season sensation that earned Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Original Screenplay’, becoming the highest-grossing release of 1999 that wasn’t The Phantom Menace.
Grounded superhero story Unbreakable was an indicator that Shyamalan was far from a one-trick pony, while Signs showcased that he was as adept at sci-fi as he was the supernatural and superheroic. Sure, they all featured his signature twist, but up until that point, they’re all entirely different and engrossing films.
The Village was when the wheels started to wobble when the climactic rug-pull split opinion straight down the middle, and Lady in the Water was when at least one fell off. It was his first feature since The Sixth Sense to flop at the box office and the first time his self-indulgences got the better of him.
What does a fantasy about a character from a bedtime story arriving in the real world to upend one man’s entire worldview and belief system have to do with Bob Dylan? On paper, absolutely nothing. For Shyamalan, though, the movie wouldn’t have happened without the legendary musician’s influence.
“The sense of revolution that he obviously didn’t want to take on his own shoulders, that wasn’t his intention,” he told Nick Nunziata. “But for me, his music was a time of, ‘We can change things, it’s in our hands, the community, group coming together’. All those feelings of traditional, let’s do it the folk way.”
Calling him “an inspiration when I was writing it,” Shyamalan admitted he was “literally writing it listening to Dylan songs,” and he even included four cover versions of famous Dylan tracks on the soundtrack to further Lady in the Water‘s debt of gratitude to the trailblazing icon.
There can’t have been many people who watched Lady in the Water and instantly realised they were watching a fable that sought to channel Dylan’s spirit in every fibre of its being, which technically makes him guilty by association for the movie being so bland, banal, and unsuccessful.
If Shyamalan hadn’t been a fan and hadn’t been listening to Dylan constantly throughout the writing process, then Lady in the Water would never have happened. His next three films after that were The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth, so in a way, the singer and songwriter is technically responsible for the domino effect that led to the auteur’s wilderness years, but that’s a different conversation for another time.
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