The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  There are, of course, Saturday evenings when we don’t go to the movies, and the third Saturday of April 2004 was such a night. It was a balmy night, humid and breezy, odd for Philadelphia at that time of year. I remember the night well because of the dinner party we attended. Christine, if I may say this about my wife, improves any party, and because I’m a sportswriter, some hostesses confuse me with the witty scribes they remember from old TV shows, Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple, maybe. Anyway, we’re invited to some nice gigs. I am not a party person, but sometimes you can’t help yourself.

  We were the guests of a sparkly couple, Bob and Susan Burch, we knew through friends. They live in one of the grand mansions still standing on the Main Line, the string of affluent Philadelphia suburbs. We had not been to their house before. The walled driveway went on forever, and above the entrance road, in an apple orchard, one of the Burch children was riding a pony, no saddle, with war paint on his face and a quiver of arrows across his shirtless back. What we thought was the house was actually the guesthouse, so we kept going. Jim Courier, the tennis player, was with us. He saw the boy on his pony and the Philadelphia skyline ten miles beyond and interrupted himself in midsentence to say, “Where the hell are we?”

  Bob Burch—a book reader, God bless him—got rich selling sweaters, and if he ever had a boss in his life, you cannot tell. When Susan recounted a cross-country family trip in a Winnebago, Mother Susan at the wheel and a goggled Bob almost keeping up on his latest bike, it sounded like a scene from an Albert Brooks movie. Her guest list comprised an unlikely hodgepodge of people. Brian Roberts, who runs a giant cable company, was there with his wife, Aileen, a Philadelphia do-gooder, visiting the Burches for the first time. Courier was there with a date, a former model and pianist, and there were five or six other people, including an investor/weekend poet and a futurist. Christine and I were the only poor people, relatively speaking, on hand that night—we have a nice collection of yard-sale art—but this was a crowd no longer worried about money. (Surely a lie, but it is the privilege of the city-dwelling working typist to romanticize such people.)

  The guests of honor, a phrase I use casually here, were M. Night Shyamalan, the screenwriter and director, and his wife, Bhavna, then a doctoral candidate in psychology at Bryn Mawr College. The Burches and Shyamalans lived near each other and were involved in some of the same charities, and Susan had wanted to get Night and Bhavna over for some time. It was not easy, because the Shyamalans guarded their free time carefully, and Night was famous for being secretive and private. Susan knew they avoided parties in general, especially if the conversation was likely to run to old golf courses or new hedge funds. Susan’s social IQ is at the genius level, and she laid out the guest list for Bhavna ahead of time; on that basis, she got the Shyamalans, as the salesmen say, “to yes.” The Shyamalans didn’t know the other guests, but in a manner of speaking, they had picked them.

  I had read M. Night Shyamalan’s surname a hundred times in The Philadelphia Inquirer—he had grown up in suburban Philadelphia and made his movies in and around the city—but I didn’t know how to pronounce it (as it is spelled, except the y just sits there doing nothing: SHA-ma-lon). He was a Philadelphia celebrity in a low-key way, though Philadelphians are not much for hero worship. In the days of the Founding Fathers, the city claimed Benjamin Franklin; in the nineteenth century, the city’s great industrialists were its stars, your Lippincotts (books), your Baldwins (locomotives), your Stetsons (hats), plus the Barrymores (actors). For most of the twentieth century, the Main Line bluebloods were still prominent, with their estates and their horses, plus Grace Kelly and Rocky Balboa, although you could argue that he was a movie character. In the new millennium, there was Allen Iverson, the elfin NBA basketball player; Donovan McNabb, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback; and M. Night. Nobody I knew really talked about him. You just went to see his movies. I had seen his three big ones: The Sixth Sense (disturbing, in a good way); Unbreakable (didn’t like it while watching it, but it stayed with me); and Signs (entertaining but didn’t linger).

  Christine and I had seen The Sixth Sense on a Saturday night, every seat taken, people murmuring about the streets they recognized. We were blown away by the surprise ending, like everybody else. You know the supermarket chain Trader Joe’s? When I’m in it, I can never tell if it’s a grocery store for foodies or a big-box discount place. I had the same kind of thing with The Sixth Sense. I didn’t know if it was an especially entertaining movie—or something more momentous. I was curious to meet Night, but not in any crazy way. Meeting the famous and the faintly famous, it’s an occupational hazard in my line of work. Barry Bonds did a whole verbal rage thing on me once. All part of the fun.

  Before I get to Night, let me tell you about his wife, Bhavna. She is Indian, like Night, with traces of a British accent, from her Hong Kong childhood, and a quiet, poised manner. Listening to her, you knew she was an academic heavyweight, but she had the stillness and manners of a princess. She had a delicate beauty, like that of an idealized Miss India, with glossy lips and the figure of a swimsuit model. Night had coaxed her into his camp when they were undergraduates at New York University, when he was just another kid writing scripts and borrowing money to rent cameras and spotlights. He must have had some major mojo going, Austin Powers and then some. I’m sure he wasn’t a total schlub, but please. He was a writer. I’ve been there. It’s not easy.

  And then there was Night, with his drooping earlobes, bug’s-life eyes, curling lips, nasal voice. He was slender and boyish, with gym-built arms and jet-black hair that had a few silver strands hanging just over the tops of his ears. He was wearing high-fashion jeans and a short-sleeved, post-nerd un-tucked plaid shirt, wide open at the neck, and a leather necklace that held a Sanskrit prayer in a silver case, like a miniature mezuzah. He and Bhavna arrived last, holding hands as they made their way through the small Saturday-night-fever crowd. In almost no time, Night looked completely comfortable. He was warm, friendly, interesting—amazingly energetic. He laughed readily, as if you were saying funny things. He’d enter any debate without ever getting haughty about what he knew. I go down the New Age road skeptically, but I felt a powerful force coming off the guy.

  Outside the big house and down a hill there was a giant tepee and a roaring bonfire nearby that, late in the evening, was encircled by the menfolk. There was a Native American theme going on at the Burches’, and it worked for Night. He talked about his next movie, The Village, and how at the start of the shoot, the main actors—William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Sigourney Weaver, Bryce Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter, he pointed out)—had gone into some sort of sweatbox built deep in the woods where an American Indian holy man led them in meditation. He was talking about big stuff—community, faith—with strangers, and we weren’t looking at our shoes. It was all very 1967. Night’s shirt was half open—Tom Jones in his prime. “It was my idea, as a bonding thing, but it was for the actors. What happened in there, what they wore, what they talked about, I don’t know,” Night said. “Pretty cool, right?” I was amazed at the effort he was making—that’s not recommended in the celebrity handbook—and by how open he was and how trusting. Also, by how much he loved to talk.

  Earlier, Night had asked Jim Courier about his tennis career, about his training methods, about the tennis academy he’d attended for high school. Night said he’d followed Courier’s professional career as a player on his own high school tennis team. Night spoke of how he had disliked it when his opponents came on the court with a stack of virgin rackets, aluminum, titanium, whatever. “My feeling was always, What did you do to deserve those rackets?” Before long, Courier was asking Night about his days in junior tennis as if they were significant, and to Night, they were.

  With Brian Roberts, Night was much the same. Brian’s company, Comcast, was trying to buy Disney at the time. That was all over the papers day after day. Night had made three big movies for Disney, starting with The Sixth Sense, which had grossed close to $700
million in worldwide ticket sales. He had made The Village, not yet out, for Disney, too. The first two movies starred Bruce Willis and the third Mel Gibson, but The Village would be sold on its director. Brian asked Night a series of incisive questions about the movie business and its players, about Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein and Night’s prediction for the future of movies in the movie house. Listening to Night’s long, involved, articulate answers, you would have thought he was Michael Eisner’s boss. Brian is an excellent reporter and listener, and you could say he was leading the whole thing, getting the information he wanted, but something else was happening, too. Night was having exactly the conversation he wanted to have with Brian, the man he’d be making movies for if the Disney deal went through.

  Night didn’t anoint himself the star of the evening. The rest of us did that for him. I had often seen Bob Burch or Brian Roberts or Jim Courier or Aileen Roberts in that role, but not this evening. Night told us excellent star-of-the-show stories, the kind you hear on late-night talk shows. One involved, as these stories often do, his parents, both doctors, both émigrés from India.

  Night: I’ve got exciting news.

  Mother: Yes?

  Night: I’m gonna be on the cover of Newsweek.

  Mother: That’s nice.

  Father: Not Time?

  Night: No, not Time. I’ll be the first director ever on the cover of Newsweek.

  A beat.

  Father: Doesn’t Time have a much bigger circulation?

  Night laughed and then everybody else did, too. The underlying burden implied by the story—his parents’ titanic expectations—was ignored.

  You could tell that Night—with his sagging ears and swollen eyes—heard and saw everything going on that night. I watched him watching a housekeeper remove a wineglass from a serving tray, hold it up to a light, and disqualify it for soap streaks. How Night read this simple act of professionalism, I do not know, because I did not ask. My thing as a reporter has always been to get to the bottom of something, ask the right questions of the right people. Night’s methods, I guessed, were totally different. I got the feeling that he had some secret move up his sleeve, one that let him come up with a big idea, invent a killing phrase (“I see dead people”), and sell close to $700 million worth of movie tickets across the world. I wondered how he did it.

  On the car ride home and on the phone the next day, I polled some of the other guests on the subject of Night. They used different words—smart, quick, fun, cocky, likable, boyish, odd, captivating—and had different impressions, but all had felt the force of his personality. They could remember what he was wearing, the phrases he used, the way he twisted his rings while talking.

  I sent Night a letter saying that I’d be interested in writing a book about him, about his methods, about how his head worked. Through his assistant, he invited me to his office, in a farmhouse on an old horse farm. We talked for several hours and followed that with several lengthy telephone conversations. By then he had read a book of mine about a big public high school in the Philadelphia suburbs. In the book, an eleventh-grader dies after a night of drinking. A female teacher has a relationship with a male student. A senior boy and a junior girl have a baby. It’s all real names and real events. A boy with cerebral palsy, a social outsider, makes it to the prom.

  “If you wrote about me the way you wrote about the kids in that high school, I’d read that,” Night said.

  “You realize that nobody from the high school had any say about what went in the book, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d need the same thing from you.”

  “It would have to be that way. If it wasn’t like that, the book would have no credibility. I want to see somebody else’s take on what I do. I want to learn something.”

  On that basis—no contract, no lawyers, no agents, nothing but a handshake—I started hanging out with him.

  For a long time afterward, I thought about that balmy April evening at the Burches’. I wondered: Was the whole thing some kind of movie? Did Night direct us—without saying a word—on where to stand, what costumes to wear, what to say? Did he get Susan Burch, in some telepathic way, to put her son on a pony in their apple orchard as a magnificent piece of background scenery?

  If he had these powers, where did they come from? Could another person develop them?

  And if he could have that kind of power over a dinner party, what kind of power could he have over one of the largest entertainment companies in the world?

  What kind of power could he have over me?

  And what else could he do with his powers? Was there a great, good thing he could do?

  Anyway, Night began as an intriguing subject. What he would turn into I could not then know.

  1.

  I started making occasional visits to the farm, for lunch and a talk in the farmhouse. Everything was well-ordered: the hand towels, the water bottles in the refrigerator, the posters of Night’s movies. There were six of them, now that The Village was out. There was a special shelf for books Night hadn’t read. The floors and the walls and the furniture were pretty much all brown or beige. Near Night’s office there was a secret room, with no doorknob on the door. You had to press on the right part of the wall to get in it. It was off-limits.

  You might have said the whole setting was severe, but the sofas were plush and comfortable. You sank into them, but there was no chance of falling asleep. Night’s voice—electric and squeaky, posing questions, pontificating about something—was always in the air. He was writing a new script and he’d break for lunch at noon—or thereabouts. He wasn’t a total slave to ritual.

  He had his own chef, and Night’s assistant, Paula, and the man who ran his production company, Jose, ate lunch with him daily. If Paula talked about her upcoming honeymoon, Night might offer a theory about honeymoons as a predictor of married life. If Jose brought up Shaquille O’Neal’s struggles as a free-throw shooter, Night might offer an analysis of the giant basketball player’s arc problems. With Night, you didn’t just sit there. There was no discussion of the weather.

  He said his new script had been nothing but a struggle. He hadn’t wrestled so much with a screenplay since writing The Sixth Sense.

  For the longest time, on that one, all he had was an idea. Night had gone to a funeral. A boy there was talking to himself. Night wondered what the boy was thinking. He went home and wrote down four words: I see dead people.

  It was a start, but that’s all it was. He began writing from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. As a kicker, he had the boy say, “I see dead people.” He reread the line. It didn’t work. I see dead people, it sounded too young for a smart ten-year-old. It sounded like something a six-year-old might say. He drew a line through it.

  “And then the voices came,” Night told me.

  “The voices?”

  “The voices told me to put it back.”

  “What did they say?”

  “‘Put it back.’”

  It was interesting, but I really didn’t know what he was talking about. I mean, we’ve all taken multiple-choice tests where you fill in one circle, erase it, fill in another circle, erase it, and go back to what you had the first time, right? What was different here?

  “I had faith in the voices. I was just then learning the power of listening to the voices.”

  I asked, “Do you think everybody has these voices?”

  Over $1 billion dollars, that’s what The Sixth Sense did in worldwide ticket sales and DVD sales and in the sale of broadcast rights. It was an entertaining movie and a phenomenon. The movie came out and before you knew it “I see dead people” was on T-shirts, in commercials, in Saturday Night Live skits, in reference books. People would come up to Night in restaurants and whisper, “I see dead people, too.”

  There’s a joke in movie marketing: when that greetings-from-God voiceover comes on during the trailer, deepened by a lifetime of smoking, and says, “This Christmas, the heartwarming story
for anybody who’s ever been in love—or wanted to fall in love.” In other words, a movie for the population of the world, or that segment who can afford a $10 ticket. That’s what The Sixth Sense was: This summer, the spooky story for anybody who ever wanted to know what the hereafter is like—or for anybody who thought they did.

  Night wrote it, directed it, produced it. He appeared in it. After one good movie, people were calling Night the next Hitchcock, with the cameos and the smart creepiness, and he wasn’t even thirty. He was praised as a director who loved actors—witness the understated performance he drew from the action hero Bruce Willis. It was 1999, and Night was like a rock star.

  Night’s three following movies all made lots of money. There were people who loved them, and of course people who didn’t, but they were successful movies by nearly any definition. They weren’t, though, phenomena. Night had the idea that the new one could be.

  He had started writing it in the spring of 2004, when he was putting the finishing touches on The Village. He stayed with it through the summer and the fall. It was resistant to paper, way off-kilter, but he kept writing. That’s what the voices were telling him to do, embrace a strange, beautiful, audacious idea. Late at night, he’d sit in the basement of his home in the suburbs of Philadelphia, his wife and two young daughters in their beds fast asleep, and stare into his red notebook, his skin tingling with anxiety.

  He’d get down a good half page here, and a couple of worthless pages after it. There were scenes that sounded good when he talked to himself—which he often did, his lips actually moving—but not when his characters did the talking. There were family vacations where he went through the motions of cheerful beach lounger, distracted all the time. The occasional party, where everyone thought he was in charge. Good acting. Always, somewhere in his mind, was his next movie.