The one thing actors are forbidden from doing on an M Night Shyamalan movie
M Night Shyamalan has a formula that has worked time and again, if twist endings can qualify as a formula. Cursed with starting his career on an unrepeatable high, he has nevertheless found a way to stay true to his creative sensibilities and maintain a passionate fanbase.
Shyamalan wasn’t yet 30 when The Sixth Sense became the second highest-grossing film of 1999. Starring Bruce Willis as a child psychologist dealing with an extremely creepy client, it blew audiences’ minds when it came out and made him the toast of Hollywood. Despite the obvious pressures this placed on him, the director managed to follow it up with another surprisingly executed box office success—the alternative superhero thriller Unbreakable.
Things spiralled from there as the director’s signature twists started to feel obligatory, forced, and, more often than not, laughably nonsensical. The Village, The Happening, and Lady in the Water all spelt a steady downward trajectory for the once wildly promising young director, and The Last Airbender could have been the last nail in the coffin if anyone was still clinging to expectations anymore.
However, Shyamalan has recently returned to form with twisty, popcorn-friendly psychological thrillers that bring fans to the cinema even if they don’t stir any critical hearts. For the past 25 years, he’s been steadfastly sticking to his unique vision, and even if the results aren’t uniformly successful, it’s hard not to respect his tenacity and the fact that he’s one of the few filmmakers making mid-budget movies that strike gold at the box office.
Despite the psychological twists and horrifying turns of his films, Shyamalan is known for being pretty laid-back and approachable. Compared to the psychological abuse that some actors endure from their directors, he’s all warmth. Speaking with Variety in 2023, the filmmaker revealed he doesn’t pull stunts on his actors to get genuine reactions of fear on camera; he lets them find the performance themselves. There is, however, one area where he won’t let them go.
“The only thing I don’t allow actors to do in the movies is feel sorry for themselves,” he said. “I think audiences can find that indulgent in a way that’s offensive. But as soon as characters feel sorry for themselves, audiences are like: ‘I’m out.’”
Anger, fighting, and humour are all fair game, he continued, but self-pity is strictly off-limits. “If you feel sorry for yourself,” he reasoned, “That’s a form of giving up, and that’s not a circumstance I want to put them in.”
Although Shyamalan isn’t on par with directors like Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher in eking out every last ounce of acting from his performers, he also isn’t on the fast-paced, monosyllabic page as Clint Eastwood, whose notoriously taciturn style of directing has turned some actors against him.
Instead, Shyamalan opts for a more conversational approach. When he needs his actors to react to a supernatural phenomenon that will be added in post-production, he said that he narrates the scene to help them live into it. “I’d say something like, ‘You have this feeling there’s something in the room and you don’t want to turn around because you don’t want confirmation,’” he said, “‘You’re trying to tell yourself you’re being silly and talk yourself out of the feelings you’re having. And then you turn around and can’t internalise what you’re seeing.’”
This is clearly a more compassionate approach to directing than what Kubrick or William Friedkin ever did, though the results vary significantly.
