The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  There was an architect in his kitchen then, looking to move a wall to accommodate a larger kitchen. He was ready to spend more of Night’s money.

  “How’s the new screenplay coming?” he asked. It was a little joke, as if the project’s budget was tied to Night’s next paycheck.

  “Awful,” Night said.

  He paused. In a screenplay he’d call it a beat.

  “But it’s gonna be great.”

  For inspiration, he’d think of Michael Jordan. Night was awed by how much Jordan believed in himself, and how, right through his final game, everybody knew it. You could see it in the sweat on his shaved head, in his wagging tongue, in his backward canter after holing another long jump shot. Night could have made calls and arranged to meet him, but he didn’t. What he knew from a distance was all he needed.

  “He’s playing his last game in Philadelphia,” Night told his agent. “That’s got to mean something. That’s got to be some kind of sign, right?”

  “Only to you and the other twenty thousand people,” said the agent, Jeremy Zimmer.

  “Bullshit.”

  Night went to the game and snapped pictures. Twenty thousand other people did, too.

  Night knew there was something telepathic going on between him and Michael Jordan, him and Bob Dylan, him and Walt Disney.

  While writing his new script, he read the David Halberstam book about Jordan. He studied it. The hours “Michael” (as Night referred to him) logged in the weight room and at the free-throw line, long after everybody else had left. That image helped keep Night at it. Bhavna had once shown Night a book, a study of prodigies. The most common trait among prodigies was the sheer number of hours they devoted to their talent. Night took notice.

  Night knew that Jordan not only made more game-winning shots than any other player, he missed more potential game winners than anybody else, too. Night liked that. He was ready to fail, to fall on his face, as long as it was spectacular. (For all he knew, he was doing so right then, with his new script.) Jordan came up at odd times of the day, unconnected to anything. “With the game on the line, he wanted the ball,” Night said to me one day. It was early in the morning and he was already preaching. “He always believed he’d make the next one.”

  When he was starting out, before The Sixth Sense, Night was meeting with some businesspeople from Apple, the computer company, at Jeremy Zimmer’s office in Los Angeles. The conversation turned to basketball.

  “I believe if I had unlimited time to practice, after two years, I’d be able to shoot with any NBA player,” Night said. The room went quiet.

  Who is this guy? Who thinks that way? Who says these things to strangers?

  The meeting ended, the room cleared, and Jeremy Zimmer said, “You can’t say stuff like that.” He knew how it sounded: grandiose, unrealistic, egotistical.

  Night was unfazed. What he had said was true. That is, he believed it.

  As a kid, Night once gathered his cousins around a table and cleared everything off it except a cup.

  “Okay, if everybody stares at the cup, stares at it hard and really believes that we can make the cup move, it’ll move.”

  A half-minute passed.

  “It’s not moving.”

  “C’mon, man, concentrate, concentrate. Think, We can move the cup!”

  Another half-minute.

  “Hey, I think I saw it move!”

  “You see? See? That’s what I’m talking about!”

  The goddamn script! It was giving him panic attacks. There were sleepless nights, cold sweats, bouts of uncontrollable crying, odd dreams. In the movies, the image of the writer up in the middle of the night, tapping away while the rest of the world sleeps, is romanticized. For Night it was hell. One day, as he was describing his struggling self, I said, “But your life’s good, isn’t it? You’re healthy, you’re rich, your wife’s getting her doctorate, your children…” His girls were a delight—little pixies.

  “These movies I make?” he said. “They’re who I am.”

  Every school day was the same. Get up with Bhavna and the girls, put on jeans and a T-shirt and work boots, drop his daughters off at school, and drive to his office at the farm, where a blinking cursor would greet him and mock him for the next nine hours. He didn’t go out for lunch. He didn’t schmooze with friends on the phone. He’d sit at the keyboard and write a line. Look at it. Hit the backspace button. Write a line. Look at it. Hit the backspace button. Write a line. Look at it. Not hit the backspace button. Another chip.

  He had a title: Lady in the Water. He had the names of the two main characters, a woman named Story and a man named Cleveland. He knew who would play Story: Bryce Dallas Howard, his lead actress in The Village, in which she played a blind woman. He knew the story he wanted to tell. The themes were so broad, he had no idea how he’d fit them on a movie poster. It was about a secretive building superintendent who falls in love with a sort of angel—a “sea nymph,” Night was calling her—who lives under the super’s pool. It was about strangers coming together. It was a recipe for the repair of the world. It was a comedy. It was a horror movie. It was a bedtime story, one he had invented for his daughters, one he had told them night after night. He wondered why he was struggling so to get it to work in the form of a screenplay, the writing form that defined his life. And then he figured it out. This movie was more personal to him than anything he had ever written. It carried all his prayers. It was a self-portrait.

  When he finally got a first draft done, he read it with no pleasure at all. His notes in the margins were slaps to himself.

  Bad writing.

  Makes no sense.

  Common!

  That last one stung particularly. His parents had escaped the Indian caste system, which bound them to the worn-shoe life of the working class; they had become, despite the pull of their family histories, medical doctors living in America. They had a backyard swimming pool. They were leading the good life. In the Shyamalan family, common was a loaded word. To be ordinary, how perfectly awful. His parents were loving, spiritual, engaged people—and strivers of the highest order. A certain kind of traditional American immigrant. They valued education intensely and sent their daughter and son to the best private schools. Night was the only Hindu at his all-boys coat-and-tie Catholic grammar school, Waldron Academy, and everybody there knew him by his given name, Manoj. The parents chose the school for its discipline. The students there were required to work.

  For high school, his parents sent him to Episcopal Academy, a private school loaded with high achievers, athletic, social, and academic. Night was scrawny and dark, and only academically was he a notable. He was a good HORSE player on the playground basketball court but had no chance of making a varsity team that included a future NBA player. His lone social triumph came late in his senior year. A pretty girl needed to retrieve something from a baseball player’s car. The ballplayer tossed her the keys.

  “I’ll come with you,” Night said, suddenly bold.

  “Okay,” the girl said, cooing.

  The athlete glared at Night and said, “Whoa—I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I can trust you two.”

  The girl tittered. Night found the moment intoxicating.

  He applied to New York University, to its Tisch School of the Arts, Martin Scorsese’s alma mater. Night applied early decision. If he was accepted, he’d have to commit right away. The letter came back thick.

  “Dad, I got in to NYU,” Night said that evening. “That’s where I’m going to go.”

  His father, an internist with a specialty in cardiology, had hoped movies would be a passing interest for Manoj, and that at some point he’d follow his parents into medicine or the law—some real profession. With Night’s verbal scores and his extreme fluency, it was easy to imagine him becoming a high-profile trial lawyer, an F. Lee Bailey, somebody like that.

  Dr. Shyamalan was watching a hockey game, and he was silent for a long moment. They were close, but the father could be t
ough with his son, comically so at times. When Night was young, his stomach was often upset. “Eat more toast, you’ll feel better,” his father said. Toast was his panacea for everything.

  Dad, I think I broke my knee.

  Eat more toast!

  Dr. Shyamalan knew why kids enrolled in the film program at NYU, the dreams they took there. He knew what the news meant for his son’s future. He kept staring at the hockey game.

  “It’s not Princeton,” he finally said.

  Over the summer before he left for NYU, Manoj started thinking about a middle name for himself.

  “Why don’t I have a middle name?” he asked his parents.

  “Manoj Shyamalan is a fine name,” his mother said.

  “I have no middle!” the son said. Not just a middle name but a middle, period.

  His parents didn’t know what he was talking about. That was often the case.

  “Why don’t you call yourself Jaya?” said his mother.

  “Jaya? That’s your name,” Manoj said. “I’m gonna call myself by my mother’s name?”

  A lot of Indian immigrants in America, males especially, were using American names. Manoj knew there were many Indian Bobs and Mikes and Sams driving cabs and going to grad school and working at Wal-Mart. He wanted something distinctive. For a while, he used his father’s first name, Nelliate, but it didn’t fit. At the time, Manoj was developing what turned into a sustained interest in American Indians. The idea of finding God in the outdoors, worshiping nature, sounded better to him than anything else he was hearing. He admired the English versions of Indian names. (The author of Blue Highways was William Least Heat-Moon, to cite one prominent example.) Reading about the Lakota Indians, Manoj came across the name Night and liked it immediately. Adopting it took years. “Manoj had to go through the rituals of death,” Night told me. “I had to earn the name Night.”

  In time, he did. In time, he came to own it. He took possession of one of the most common, essential basic words in the English language, one of the first words infants learn. There’s mama, milk, baby, day, and night. You might say night, what, thirty or forty times per day? It’s everywhere. Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 5: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Depending on when you Google it, night turns up around three million references. The first one I saw was the Elie Wiesel book. The second was an astronomy site named for the van Gogh painting. The third was Saturday Night Live. The fourth was M. Night Shyamalan.

  He could have sold his screenplay for Lady in the Water without writing a single word. He was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the business and any studio would have been happy to pay him upfront, like a ballplayer getting paid on the expectation of future home runs. But Night didn’t want that sense of security. He worried that it would make him lazy and satisfied. He wanted to write his screenplays, then sell them. He called the draft he’d send off his sale script.

  It was a mind game for Night. He knew he was writing Lady in the Water for the Walt Disney Studios, the company founded by one of his heroes. Disney was Night’s artistic home. He had made The Sixth Sense there and his three following movies. There was never idle speculation in The Hollywood Reporter about what studio would pay the bills for Night’s next movie. Technically, The Sixth Sense was released by Hollywood Pictures, and the three next movies were made by Touchstone Pictures, both divisions of Disney. Those four movies were too edgy—too scary—to go out under the Disney name. Still, Disney was his studio. Not since Mr. Walt Disney himself had any one director been so associated with Disney.

  Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman, came to the screenings and openings of Night’s movies. He had stood with Night in the parking lot of a suburban multiplex after a test screening of Unbreakable and, without the benefit of a single test score, said, “The best Disney movie in twenty-five years.” Eisner’s praise meant the world to Night. He liked the idea of pleasing the boss.

  Night wanted to make Lady under the Disney name, see it stamped in the opening credits by the tidy cursive Disney signature, with the flittering Tinker Bell dotting the i. His daughters loved the magic of Disney. He could imagine their faces when they finally got to see it, the story that began in their beds.

  Night made two movies before his Disney years. The first, Praying with Anger, was shot in India and paid for with money that Night, still a student at NYU, had borrowed from family and friends. It played on one screen for one week in 1992 and was never shown again.

  His second movie, Wide Awake, was about a little boy trying to solve a big riddle: Where do we go when we die? (It’s a preamble to The Sixth Sense.) Wide Awake was shot at Night’s Catholic grammar school in 1995—Rosie O’Donnell played a nun—and released in ’98 by Miramax Films, then a small, frugal independent production company founded and run by the brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein and owned by Disney.

  On Wide Awake’s first day of filming, Night stopped action, and the cast and crew watched Bhavna as she performed a ritual Hindu service in a colorful ceremonial skirt. It was a prayer for the camera. Her husband was making a union movie, his first, with name actors and a crew of seen-it-all movie pros, and they all just stopped and watched, perplexed and delighted. The idea that they were doing something odd never occurred to Night.

  After Night shot the movie, Harvey took over. He was famously tyrannical, an enormous man who had a reputation for squashing careers. He didn’t like the footage Night had shot and didn’t trust him to turn it into a profitable movie in the editing room. He pushed Night aside.

  Night asked one of Harvey’s lieutenants, “Why is he doing this?”

  “Because you’re not an A-list director.”

  “But could I be?”

  Night heard Harvey screaming in the silence: You’re not, and you never will be.

  The movie bombed, as it had to. It had been made in bad faith.

  Night swore that no matter how desperate he ever became, he would never make another movie for Harvey. To anybody else, that sounded absurdly bold. After Wide Awake, nobody was beating down a path to Night. The truth was, Harvey owned Night. He had a contract with Night for two more movies. But in his mind, Night was firing Harvey. The conventional thing, the political thing, was for Night to try to smooth things over with Harvey, so he could get more work. But Night had another idea.

  He’d write something spectacular, so spectacular that competing studios would outbid one another for the right to own it, at a price Harvey would not dream of spending. So spectacular that the winning studio would agree to Night’s demand to direct his own script. So spectacular that the winning studio, the one that would buy Night’s script and permit him to direct it, would work out the contractual problems with Harvey, spend big money on lawyers, if need be.

  Night wrote The Sixth Sense out of ambition and desperation—to get out of Harvey Weinstein’s suffocating grasp. He labored over it obsessively, day and night, rewriting scenes again and again, permitting no one to see the script until he had every detail worked out. He believed he could write his way out of his hole. All he had to do was put in the time, concentrate the right way, believe in the voices. He wrote the line “I see dead people.” He took it out. He put it back in. The voices had spoken: Sometimes what doesn’t make sense works.

  Night asked Jeremy Zimmer to impose these conditions on the sale: He wanted a minimum bid of $1 million; the guarantee that he would direct the movie; and for the auction to begin and end on the same day. All the scripts were sent by messenger and delivered at the same time, except for one: Harvey’s, which went out by U.S. mail. Night could do that because the Weinsteins owned him as a director but not as a writer. The conditions would have been preposterous, except that Jeremy believed in the script as much as Night did, and he hadn’t even read it. He could hear Night’s belief in the script in his voice, so Zimmer ran with it. He called up one executive after another and said, “I’m going to send you a script, and I think you’re going to want to clear everything and
read it right away. It’s that good.” Night wasn’t an unknown. His script for Stuart Little had been widely praised, as was an unproduced script called Labor of Love. But Zimmer was talking like he was about to send them Psycho. What Night had engineered was a study in chutzpah but also self-protection. He wasn’t going to let Harvey Weinstein subvert his career and his life.

  Four studios passed on the script within hours of receiving it. Nina Jacobson at DreamWorks read it and loved it. So did Michael Lynne at New Line; he put in an extraordinary bid, $2 million. Zimmer convinced David Vogel, the president of Disney Pictures, to cancel his lunch plans, read the script, and get in. Vogel did so. He thought it was the kind of over-the-transom script that a movie executive might read once in a career. Zimmer encouraged Vogel to better the New Line offer. Vogel wanted to end the auction immediately. He offered an astonishing amount for the script, $3 million, and added another $500,000 for Night to direct. A done deal.

  Harvey was fine with it, as Night suspected he would be all along. Harvey was a bargain shopper who didn’t spend one tenth that on a script, especially if a mediocrity (Night’s take on Harvey’s take) like M. Night Shyamalan was demanding to shoot it. Harvey insisted on a piece of the profits, on the off chance that the project would make any money. In the end, for Harvey, it was money for nothing.

  Night’s moves were spectacular. With no business experience, with no training, he had engineered a complex and lucrative deal. In 1998 he was a young outsider, twenty-eight years old and from suburban Philadelphia, and he had found a way to get a trio of powerful and experienced Hollywood men—David Vogel and Harvey Weinstein and Jeremy Zimmer—to do exactly what he wanted them to do. The experience was empowering.

  Less than a year later, during the first test screening of The Sixth Sense, something was wrong with the projector. The reels were wobbling and so was the picture on the screen.

  “You better stop the screening,” Night’s editor, sitting next to him, said. He knew a wobbly picture would not endear the movie to the audience.