The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  But Night was at peace. All he said was, “It’s okay—let it go.” He could feel how the audience was responding to his movie, he could feel it in his tingly fingers, moist eyes, dry throat, and pounding heart.

  When the movie was over, there were gasps. There was wild applause. In the lobby, Night was mobbed by people who hadn’t known his name three hours earlier.

  Hey, there’s the guy who wrote it.

  He didn’t write it, he directed it.

  I heard he did both!

  With one movie, Night’s status had changed. For the foreseeable future, or for as long as his movies made piles of money, he’d have the right to final cut, the last word in how his movies would look upon release. From then on, Night would also have a significant say in when a movie would be released in the United States and overseas, which actors would be hired, what the poster and the trailer would look like, and where he’d shoot. The list of big-budget directors who have that kind of say is short. There’s George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, Ron Howard, maybe ten others. The Sixth Sense got Night on that list not because he had directed it but because he had written it and directed it. He had come up with an original idea and brought a whole world to life. He got people to think about his movie long after they left the theater.

  After The Sixth Sense, Night no longer had to move the chess pieces himself. Others would do that for him. All he had to do was write and direct movies people wanted to see. Such power and freedom can corrupt, of course. But Night was lucky. He didn’t want a harem, a mansion in Bel-Air, his picture in Us Weekly. All he wanted to do was keep making movies.

  By the standard of his Disney debut, Night’s next three movies were lesser events. But viewed collectively, Disney, from the accountants right up to Michael Eisner, had no reason to be anything but happy. Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis as the unscratched lone survivor of a train wreck, earned $249 million in worldwide ticket sales. Signs, with Mel Gibson as a lost minister/farmer trying to figure out the mystery of the crop circles appearing in his fields, grossed $405 million in ticket sales. The Village, the weird and dark one, marketed as a movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, grossed $256 million. Then there was the sale of DVDs and broadcast rights generating tens of millions more. The movies made enormous amounts of money, for Disney shareholders and for Night.

  There was murmuring. There always is when somebody’s getting rich fast. There were people saying Night had peaked early with The Sixth Sense. There were people—Disney executives, moviegoers, reviewers—who had him in a box: the writer-director who makes dark, creepy movies with surprise endings. Each time out, there were big pens who were kind to him, but even more taking free swings.

  Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times on Unbreakable: “Copycat films are a fact of life in Hollywood, and once writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense grossed more than $600 million worldwide and earned six Oscar nominations, it was inevitable that someone would use all the same elements to produce an inferior version. Unbreakable is the knockoff we’ve been expecting, but what’s surprising is that it’s Shyamalan himself who’s at the helm.”

  A. O. Scott of The New York Times on Signs: “Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular—and as empty—as those bare patches out in the cornfield.”

  Then there was Roger Ebert, with his famous thumb pointing movies toward oblivion or fame. His contempt for The Village was outsized. In the Chicago Sun-Times, he wrote: “A colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn.”

  You read that stuff about yourself, it takes a toll. It seeps in. The movie Night was writing then, was it a colossal miscalculation? Lady in the Water wasn’t like anything playing in his neighborhood multiplex. It had no conventional three-act structure, no turning point, no dramatic love scene or fight. It was a story in which the characters don’t know if what they’re doing or saying is real. There were times when Night felt he was making an artistic breakthrough, as Steven Spielberg did with E.T. (an alien with a heart), as Quentin Tarantino did with Pulp Fiction (killers double as wry social commentators), as William Friedkin did with The Exorcist (coexistence of good and evil in one young girl). And there were times when the script made no sense even to him.

  Night was walking a plank. The Village had been a departure for him. The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Signs were about faith. The Village asked you to question authority. (To me, it was his most interesting picture.) The Village was a movie for heretics, and the fact that it exists at all is a testament to Night’s powers of persuasion. Disney would have been delighted to see Night forever make reruns of The Sixth Sense, or even Signs. (The headline for the review of Signs in the New York Post was telling and funny: I SEE GREEN PEOPLE.) By any normal measure of a movie’s success, The Village did extremely well. For a movie from an original script—not from a TV show or a game or a best-selling book or another movie—without any sex or guns or car chases, its success was stunning. But because of The Sixth Sense and Signs, Disney had spectacular financial expectations for Night’s movies. The profits of The Village showed him going in the wrong direction. The movie did not represent onward and upward.

  And now Night was writing something weirder still, an original fable. If he could make it work, worlds would open, for him, for other writers and directors, for people who saw the movie, for anybody who just wanted once in his life to say to the boss, Haven’t I earned your trust? Let me try to do my own thing here, okay? For anybody dealing with his own Harvey Weinstein.

  If Lady failed, Night knew what it would mean: The Disney bosses would push him back in his box. And there was no air left in that box. Night felt the Disney executives had never embraced The Village, never gotten its darkness or why it had no movie stars, though they had let Night make it. And it was not, to them, a home run. It was not another Signs. Night understood that whatever he did after The Village could not be in a minor key. On his good days, he knew that the script he was writing would be nothing like minor, if he could get it to work. If, if, if. If it came together, it would be like Dylan and Clapton and Springsteen and Eminem and Kanye West and Miles Davis and Bonnie Raitt and Joan Armatrading and Jerry Garcia and every musician you’ve ever loved joining George Harrison and belting out the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” at the same time. But how often in your life—your life, my life, Night’s life, anybody’s life—do you hear that chord?

  Night was trying to write this ambitious, crazy, inspired, inspiring screenplay, and a lot of the time he had no idea what he was doing. Which meant that, at age thirty-four, with his Oscar nominations and his money and his farm and his beautiful wife and his adorable girls and his party invitations for which he controlled the guest list, Night was feeling more desperate than he ever had. More desperate, even, than when he was starting out.

  He knew that if he wrote the wrong words, if he screwed the thing up, he could be viewed as a kook or worse. The forces of the industry would require him to become an assembly-line director, or to retreat to the art houses, and once you’ve had a taste of feeding the masses, you don’t want to do that. It was the most powerful kind of drug, and he was addicted to it. With Woody Allen, you get the idea that if he’s playing big in Duluth, he thinks he’s doing something wrong. Night was just the opposite. He had to reach Duluth. He had to connect, to win you over. The world population was growing all the time, so there were always more people to reach. He wanted to get in your head. Making money was great as long as he was being true to the story he wanted to tell. His feeling was that if he wasn’t constantly trying something new, moving ahead—then a piece of him, the liveliest piece, would die. He would no longer be the person his wife had married.

  He felt like he was writing through a f
ever. This time he wasn’t writing out of ambition. He was writing out of inspiration. He was writing for his daughters, and he was writing for himself. He’d create an artificial deadline for a new draft and pull an all-nighter to meet it. Every day he was a wreck, delirious and moody, but no one who saw him would have known. His secretary, his office manager, his cook, his driver, his daughters’ nanny, the housekeeper, the farm’s caretaker, the guys he played basketball with on Tuesday nights, his architect, his daughters, the guests at the Burch dinner, we all saw someone ready to laugh at anything. He could turn any little nothing—the pretentiousness of the phrase take a meeting—into a comic bit that would last for days. Only Bhavna saw her husband’s desperation, his underlying sadness, his resolve.

  Lady in the Water started to work. He put in the hours, day after day, night after night, carting around the script, physically and mentally, wherever he went. He got through a first draft, a second, third, fourth, all of them for his eyes only. The fifth he liked. He gave it to twenty-three carefully selected readers, including Bhavna, their nanny, the editor of Signs, and one of his basketball buddies. Each reader was given a numbered script, a strict due-back date, and a pointed questionnaire that he had used for his other scripts as well.

  Night turned their responses into numeric scores on a ten-point scale, then compared them to the scores his other scripts had received. He chose readers who would give him what he wanted. Some would give him candor. Others would hold his hand. He’d use all of it.

  The nanny, a bright young woman who had taught at his kids’ school until Night and Bhavna hired her away, told Night she thought the script was strange, illogical, sacrilegious for Christians. The power of Night’s myth overwhelmed her own religious values. “I love it!” Night told her. He didn’t view her as a critic but as a sparring partner, somebody who could help make him better.

  One reader thought it was too scary for children. Another said the script did not make her cry. Jeremy Zimmer thought the dialogue of one key character, Lin Lao Choi, was “stilted,” but his feedback was positive in most every other regard. Night gave his agent’s response a hand-holding 8.75. The composer who scored Night’s movies, James Newton Howard, said it was “amazing, very cool, masterful, laugh-out-loud funny.” Night graded his response a 9.5, and it made him feel better.

  Night picked up on an odd pattern: Men liked it more than women. Usually, women liked his scripts and his movies more than men. Night theorized that women are more comfortable with believing in the supernatural, and they brought men to Night’s movies. But for Lady in the Water, many of the first female readers found the humor too coarse and said it distracted from the underlying message. He knew what he had to work on. One more draft and he’d send it to Disney. Draft 6 would be his sale script.

  He began work on Draft 6 on February 1, 2005. He wanted the movie to come out in the early summer of 2006, maybe even by Memorial Day, so that it could be sold as a summer “event” movie. For that to happen, he had to start shooting by August 2005. Which meant Disney had to have the sale script in February.

  Night, who thrived on tension, chose a date: The three key Disney executives would get the script on Sunday, February 13. Paula, Night’s assistant, would fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles that morning with copies of the script and hand-deliver them to the homes of Dick Cook, the chairman of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group; Oren Aviv, the head of marketing (Disney did not make movies that it didn’t know how to sell); and, most significantly, Nina Jacobson, the Disney president, who had moved from DreamWorks to Disney specifically to work on The Sixth Sense. Nina’s tastes largely dictated what kinds of movies Disney made. Later that evening, on an itinerary established weeks earlier, Paula would collect Cook’s script, then Aviv’s the next morning. Night wanted to know where his scripts were at all times. Nobody kept them for very long.

  Except for Nina. She could keep them. She had worked intimately with Night on all four of his movies for Disney. She was described to me as a quirky, opinionated woman, skinny with worry, which she expressed in a fast-talking squeaky voice. Her personal habits were amusing: biting her knuckles or applying lip balm while making an important point, which she did with a great torrent of words, like water from an open hydrant. She was like Night that way; they were both talkers. She used fuck so often it became gratuitous, little more than an affectation. At other times her language was out of the corporate manual; she spoke of certain movies being “Disney-branded.” But she was not an empty suit. She was smart. You could tell her punk sensibilities were being thwarted by her job. When she wore Prada, it came off as sarcastic. Because she had worked with Night from what Disney saw as the start—The Sixth Sense—Night granted her one special dispensation. She could keep the script. Night trusted her.

  Six o’clock, Saturday night, February 12. The date and time was embedded in his head. That was when Night would give Paula a disk with the sale script on it. He and Bhavna would go out for the night while Paula went to the basement copier at the farmhouse and made copies. Draft 6 needed every minute he could give it, and he had already given away so many minutes. His schedule was a mess. Why had he agreed to talk to a group of film students at NYU? That would cost him most of a day. Why had he agreed to fly with his father to Jacksonville, Florida, to watch the Philadelphia Eagles play in the Super Bowl? He doesn’t like to fly (turbulence makes his stomach queasy, and toast does not help); he’s afraid of large unruly crowds; he didn’t think the Eagles would win (they didn’t); and it would cost him a day and a half. Why had he agreed to go to the twentieth reunion of his graduating class from Waldron Academy, being held on the Saturday night before Paula would fly to Los Angeles? He could have been working that Saturday night. And then there was his other life, the one at home. He had always been involved in the lives of his girls—the new script had started in their bedrooms, after all—but now he was needed more. Bhavna was writing her doctoral thesis, about cultural differences in emotional responses, and two afternoons a week, Night was needed at home when the girls returned from school.

  The self-made Saturday-night deadline and the insistence on the secretive distribution of the sale script were adding to Night’s burden. Because of the twist ending to The Sixth Sense, and the surprises in his other three movies, Night had to keep his scripts under tight control. The script for Unbreakable had been leaked on the Internet months before the movie came out. Night was determined that would not happen again, and it didn’t. Secretiveness had become part of how he marketed himself. There were no public records of where he lived or worked. He gave few interviews. When Paula used the farmhouse copier that could handle only twenty pages at a time, each page was stamped with a name or a serial number superimposed in large light gray type over the text. If this established Night as untrusting, which it did, it also established him as mysterious and neurotic, and he was okay with that, because it was true and because it served him well.

  There was another advantage to having Paula hand-deliver the new script on a Sunday. That turned its arrival into an event, just as Night had done when selling The Sixth Sense. It promised his script immediate and undivided attention on a day of the week when phones rang less, when time slowed down, when people were closer to their emotions. He was comfortable getting in the middle of people’s weekends. He felt that the reading of his script should not be considered work. It should add to the weekend’s pleasure.

  It was a feverish twelve days. The changes from Draft 5 to Draft 6 were major and minor, but more than anything, they were shifts in tone. By Draft 6, the apartment building had become a character. For comic relief, he had an apartment of young smokers, five guys in their mid-twenties still tethered to their dorm-room bongs, trying to solve the riddles of the world. The film-critic tenant was deliciously pompous, too full of himself to realize the smokers were mocking him. When Night had read the role of Vick, the writer—a part he had reserved for himself—he felt weak and exposed, exactly how he wanted to feel. Lin Lao Choi,
party girl/university student, was sounding more real. (And what a visual: Night had her at six feet, with rolls of fat and a Britney Spears wardrobe.) And then there was the enigmatic love between Story and Cleveland, the super who was in almost every scene of the movie. Some days they seemed like a potential couple, on others like father and daughter. Night didn’t know, and it did not bother him.

  It wasn’t The Village. This one, Night said, had no cynicism. The more he worked on the script, the more the characters came together, as the story wanted them to. By Draft 6, they were a world. By Draft 6, there were no more notes like Common!

  In a moment of euphoria, he called Jeremy Zimmer and said, “I want to put up half the budget.”

  Night and his agent had talked about this before, but only in theory. Night wanted to personally finance half the movie and therefore be in for half of the movie’s profits. Night had been thinking about making such an investment for years, long before Mel Gibson had financed The Passion of the Christ himself. Lady in the Water would have at least a $60 million budget. Night figured he could put up $30 million without going to a bank, though it represented most of his liquid wealth. But if the movie grossed $300 million, Night would double his money, even after all the muddled Hollywood accounting. And if the movie turned into a phenomenon, as Night thought it could, his haul might be $100 million or more. He liked the idea of investing in something he could control.

  And then the voices came just as he was about to hand the disk to Paula. In the past, the handing off of the floppy disk had always been momentous for him. He’d kiss the disk, give it to Paula, pop open a bottle of champagne, and make a toast: “To the sale script!” Not this time. As Night was handing the disk to Paula, the voices suddenly barged in, unannounced and unwelcome.