They shook hands. Night noticed there was a science-fiction book in Giamatti’s coat pocket and fresh paint on the sleeve.
“What happened there?” Night asked playfully.
“Oh, yeah—wet paint,” Giamatti said. He shrugged and made a face.
They had lunch. They talked some about movies but mostly about books, about science fiction, about Ian Fleming. They had dessert. Giamatti was funny, and Night laughed often.
Night had come to the lunch hoping to get some kind of confirmation. He suspected that the most critical casting question of the movie could be answered with the least likely of choices. Night made his decision about his lead actor the moment he saw Giamatti’s brown shoe and halting step, descending the stairs to the Mercer Kitchen dining room. He made possibly the most important casting decision of his career on the basis of a shoe. The voices were there, turning instinct into analysis.
It’s so human, that shoe.
Dude, it’s a shoe.
Actually, it’s not. Paul’s the guy for the job.
When Night recounted that whole scene for me, with the voices showing up in the end, I still didn’t get it. We all have conversations in our head, to sort things out. Or we replay a mental tape of conversations we’ve had, who said what, and what did it actually mean. But as Night explained it, this was different. Paul could have said, “Your movies suck, they bore me to no end”—and it wouldn’t have mattered to Night. Why? Because Paul’s shoe was talking to Night, telling Night what was really in Paul’s heart, triggering an in-the-head conversation.
I know, I know; what bullshit, right?
Alan Horn sent a Warner Bros. jet to Philadelphia to fly Night to Los Angeles. The plane had low ceilings but was commodious in every other way. It had two pilots and one short, perky stewardess. The plane could have easily fit a dozen or more people, but the only passengers on board were Night; Jose, who had once been Night’s assistant; Marc Glick, his New York lawyer; Paula; and me. The cabin was all polished wood and marble, and everywhere you looked, there were baskets piled high with fresh fruit. There were strawberries and melon slices and kumquats. There were newspapers and magazines to read, all crisp and new. It was exceedingly elegant.
Night, a voracious eater, had French toast with hot syrup and scrambled eggs with fresh avocado for breakfast. There was a library of movies to watch, and Night went straight to the U section, hoping to find Unbreakable, like a kid rifling through baseball cards in search of his favorite player. Unbreakable was his favorite of his pictures, the misunderstood child, the movie that haunted Night. But under U, the only thing he found was a Steven Seagal movie.
“Under Siege 2?” Night asked the flight attendant incredulously. “How can you not have the original?”
The stewardess laughed and said, “Nothing but Warner movies on this jet.”
Night and I, with her cooperation, began a little competition to see who could guess more biographical facts about her on intuition alone. Night won: She was from the Midwest, unmarried but still looking, still hoping for children, the clock marching on. But there was something maternal about her. When she said her favorite movie was The Notebook, a love story based on the Nicholas Sparks novel, Night nodded knowingly. Of course, of course. It was like he was testing himself, seeing if he could still get inside somebody else’s skin, wondering if the Disney breakup had robbed him of his most essential skill.
As we neared Los Angeles, Night went into the lavatory to change out of his jeans and T-shirt and into a white dress shirt and an elegant black suit, the suit he would wear to meet with Alan Horn. It had been made for him in Italy, for the Italian premiere of The Village. When he came out, there was a round of light applause. He looked so in control. I wondered if he was getting his game back or if he was acting.
“You know, if you and our stewardess were in a burning building and I could only save one of you, I’d save her,” Night said quietly. He says things like that, provocative, odd, interesting things. Amused and startled, I asked why.
“You already believe in something. All she’s got is hope. No faith, just hope. She’s trying so hard. She’s trying with her hair, trying with her makeup, trying with her smile. But life’s beat her down. Her expectations are low. She’s hanging on by a thread, but she’s hanging on. Save her from the burning building, she’d have faith for the rest of her life.”
To a mortgage officer examining financial statements, it would seem that the stewardess and the writer-director had nothing in common. But of course they did. The whole time, it seemed to me, Night had been talking about himself: He was hanging on by a thread. He was having his faith tested. Night needed to know there was someone who would pull him out of a burning building. In a manner of speaking, he was looking to be saved.
His movies were rich in faith. Devout Christians flocked to The Sixth Sense, which Night found intriguing. He was not Christian, but he had gone to a Catholic school through eighth grade and an Episcopalian school from ninth through twelfth, and images of Jesus of Nazareth had surrounded him all his life. “I find it much more poignant to think of Jesus as a man, doing what he did purely on faith,” Night once said. “By making him a god, he can’t be an example to me. If you have every piece of magic available to you, and then you walk on water, what’s the big deal? I can’t emulate that. But if he’s a man—if he’s Martin Luther King, if he’s Gandhi—that’s real. That’s attainable. That’s a model. If Jesus made a blind man see on faith alone, that’s awesome. If he went to the cross as an ordinary man with just unbelievable faith, how inspiring is that? I’d be in awe of that man. I’d put his picture on my desk, even though I’m not Christian. But by making him a deity, by giving him magical powers, I think you reduce him.”
As a child (but never as an adult), Night would pray for things: for a coach to put him in the game; for a girl to like him; for the voices to go away. (He didn’t know how to use them then.) But in his boyhood prayers, he never thought of his God in any sort of human form, not even when he was eight. He was being raised by Hindu parents, and he thought differently from all the other second-graders at his Catholic school.
The stewardess could not have known Night’s purpose in flying to Los Angeles, but she was rooting for him. She said, “This is the funnest flight I’ve ever had.” There was a bonding thing happening on the plane, because of Night. He was emitting a spectacular energy, just as he had that evening at the Burch house. But this time it was different, twinged with nervousness and vulnerability. We all felt it.
When the plane was on the tarmac and heading for the Warner Bros. hangar, I saw that Night had two Lady scripts on his lap. I wondered when, if ever, I’d get to read it. And at that exact moment, Night said to me, “When you get to the hotel, Paula’s going to give you a copy of the script, if you want to read it. Cool?”
With everything he had going on, how did he have time to calculate when I should read the script? Could he have known that I was thinking of that subject right then? His timing was improbable. I had always thought there were coincidences. You’re at the gas station, you’re thinking of calling a friend for Ping-Pong, and there he is. You say, “What a coincidence!”
In any event, I had never been so well managed—and I don’t mean that crassly—in all my life.
There were two gleaming black SUVs and several muscular, we-mean-business security men waiting in the gleaming Warner Bros. hangar. (“Their specialty is the cavity search,” one of the SUV drivers later said.) Night, in his black suit and his white cuff-linked shirt, went directly from the plane to the Warner Bros. lot to see Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov, the president of production at the studio. The rest of us went to the Hotel Bel-Air, an oasis amid the mansions, low and rambling, with bougainvillea and lilac and roses growing everywhere. Paula instructed me to bring the script back to her as soon as I was done reading it.
When Night had told me he asked his basketball buddies and his housekeeper and his nanny to read the script, it struck me as unr
ealistic. It’s far more difficult to read a screenplay than a book or even a play. If you’re reading the screenplay of a movie you know, that’s different. Annie Hall, The Sound of Music, Goodfellas, I thought those scripts all made for excellent reading, but I had already seen and loved those movies. Doing it the other way, script first, is tough. It’s hard to be moved by a screenplay. You know what you’re missing: music, colors, movie stars, the company of strangers. I read the script for Jerry Maguire before it was made. (It was given to me by an NFL agent I was writing about, the impossible Drew Rosenhaus; he claimed that Tom Cruise’s part was based on him, but it had to be another character in the movie, Bob Sugar, the agent played by Jay Mohr who steals Cruise’s clients.) I thought the Jerry Maguire script was obvious and unrealistic and trite. You had me at hello. Please. Who talks like that? Couldn’t stand it. But when I was sitting in the movie house with Christine, and Renee Zellweger delivered that line, I bought the whole thing.
I brought some history to my reading of Lady in the Water. I knew the outline of the story but not its details. I knew the Disney people didn’t get it, and that as I was reading it, Night was delivering it to the bosses at Warner Bros. I knew Night wanted Paul Giamatti to play the lead and that he had already asked Bryce Howard to play the female lead. I had their faces in my head. I had heard about the dedication page. Now, shortly after flying cross-country in a private jet for the first time in my life, as a temporary member of Team Night, I was seeing the script for the first time. It was striking to turn the cover page and see the dedication.
To my daughters,
I’ll tell you this story one more time
But then go to bed.
It was stranger than I had imagined. Really, very strange. I struggled with Lin Lao Choi, the gigantic Korean party girl/university student who had tripped up Nina and Zimmer. The vocabulary—narf, tartutic, scrunt—I found daunting. My tastes are simple, and this whole thing was in the category of mythic bedtime story. (My bedtime stories to my kids were about falling through the ice while skating and other real-life horror stories with semi-happy endings.) The scary parts of the script—the scrunt, for example, with its long wet teeth—weren’t scary on the page. There was bathroom humor I found coarse. It was not conventional in any way. There was something crazy about it. Almost nothing happened.
And yet…
It was funny, moving, odd in a good way, deeply beautiful. I liked the feeling of claustrophobia implied by the script, of getting inside an apartment complex and never leaving it, and all the while you’re dying to get out and see the rest of the world. It reminded me of Rosemary’s Baby that way and in other ways. There, the residents of the apartment building come together for satanic reasons. People also come together in Lady in the Water, but in Night’s script, they’re defending an angel. It reminded me of no other single movie. It was The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain meets Harold and Maude, if that means anything, and it probably doesn’t. It was talky, like Mountain, and humorously morose, like Harold. Nobody saw those two movies, not compared to Signs. But they’re both excellent and memorable. To my taste, Lady in the Water worked in the same way. There was something odd, fun, and moving about it. It was inspiring.
Cleveland Heep, the building superintendent, was sad, humorous, realistic, overqualified and overeducated for his job, desperate to connect with another person. (Night had to get the perfect person to play him. Any misstep there would just kill it.) I didn’t think of Story, Bryce Howard’s character, as a pool creature—or a “sea nymph,” as Night described her—but simply as a magnificent young woman with red hair, and I didn’t imagine she and Cleveland were ever going to get together because that seemed too easy. It was unrequited love, but not like anything you’ve seen before. The apartment filled with the fivesome of smokers I found funny. Early on, I was making one note after another, but at about the halfway mark, I stopped. There was a race-against-time quality to the script, and I got caught up in it. It read vividly, much more so than any other screenplay I had ever read. It felt like the kind of movie Christine and I would see with pleasure on a Saturday night, or on a drizzly weekday with the kids at school.
But not at a suburban multiplex loaded with kids eating gummy bears. To me, it read like the kind of movie we’d see at the Ritz Five, our favorite art-house theater in downtown Philadelphia. There was something magical about the script, but also rare. How it could open on seven thousand screens across the world, how it could be a movie for the masses, I had no idea. Then again, I had thought the script for Jerry Maguire was banal.
When Night asked for my reaction to the script, I gave him the whole thing.
“Oh, I like that,” he said. He was laughing. “Keep telling me that: ‘How can this be anything other than an art-house movie?’ That’s good.”
There were so many qualities of the athlete in him. The more you challenged him, the deeper he reached.
“Don’t let me forget that.”
When Night went to Warner Bros. that day—Warners, the Hollywooders call it, as if Jack Warner and his brothers still ran the place—he was experiencing sensory overload. He couldn’t shut it off. As he was waiting to be ushered into Horn’s office, he looked out a window and saw a hedge. Most people would have said it was perfect, straight out of the barbershop. It was not to Night.
There’s something wrong with that hedge. What is it?
He kept staring at it. The hedge was like Paul’s shoe. The hedge was yapping away at him.
That hedge shouldn’t be next to a trash compactor. That’s so demeaning to the hedge. Somebody robbed that hedge of all its art.
Night knew he was fixated on what any teacher would call the “wrong” thing, but he couldn’t help himself. That’s how he was. He’d look at a page he had written and his eye would go straight to the problem. He’d look in the viewfinder of a camera and Bruce Willis would be in the middle of it, in costume and makeup, ready to work, but Night’s eye would go to a tree behind the movie star, a tree that was too green, too vibrant, somehow wrong.
Night was carrying the two scripts from the plane, one for Horn and one for Robinov. An assistant suddenly said, “Do you want me to take them for you?”
The voice startled Night. She couldn’t possibly know how Night guarded his scripts. But Night managed to say the socially appropriate thing. He usually did, no matter what he was thinking.
“No, that’s okay, I’ll hold them. Thanks, though.”
A door opened, and Night heard another assistant from another direction say, “Mr. Shyamalan, Mr. Horn will see you now.” But his name got twisted into shy-mo-LION. It made him nervous. It made him wonder if he would be able to inspire Mr. Horn.
Night set the two copies of the script on a coffee table dominated by a potted plant. Everybody was anxious. Horn’s office was spotless and austere. He was a tall, fit man with wire-framed glasses, still and intense, like Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast. Robinov was shorter, quirkier, less exacting. They were both asking Night questions, picking his brain. Night was pleased. That hadn’t happened at the Lacroix dinner.
Warner Bros. has a reputation for marketing its movies astutely overseas, and Robinov asked Night for his theories on why Hollywood had traditionally struggled when marketing black stars as leading men in many parts of the world.
“Well, you have two groups. You’ve got guys like Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence and Bernie Mac, great comic actors. And you’ve got guys like Denzel Washington and Sam Jackson and Morgan Freeman, some of the best dramatic actors working today,” Night said. “Foreign audiences are happy to be entertained by black comic actors. Chase movie, guy jumping out of a plane, whatever. They’ll go there. But if you’ve got a black guy walking down the sidewalk and he falls in love with the girl in front of him—the kind of thing where the audience has to be in the guy’s shoes—foreign audiences are less willing to do that than we are. The thing that gives you hope is that the chasm has been getting smaller an
d smaller here, so it should happen there.” Night felt Robinov was connecting to what he was saying.
After a while, not even a half hour, Horn glanced at the coffee table, at the scripts. Everybody knew that everything now rested on what Horn and Robinov thought of the script. It was 11:15 A.M. They would be reading it as soon as Night left. It’s not easy to get two top executives to read a script on your timetable, but Night had managed it.
Horn asked, “Would it suit you if I picked you up at your hotel at four-forty-five?”
“Of course,” Night said. One of the rules of sales is always be agreeable.
Night checked in to the Bel-Air, in the hotel’s presidential suite, a $3,500-per-night mini-house with fresh flowers and fresh fruit and a fireplace stacked with seasoned wood. Normally, he found staying in expensive hotel rooms—particularly when he was paying for them himself, as he was here—empowering. He felt he had earned the right to be in them. This time, he felt nothing but frayed nerves. He was one thing in public, and another by himself. He got out of his salesman’s suit. He knew he could do nothing about Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov by force of personality now. Night’s need to lead, his need to connect with other people, his gifts for talking and coaxing, none of that mattered right now. The only thing that mattered was the script and how people responded to it. And at that exact moment, Night’s faith in the script was weak. Once he had thought there was something great about it, but now he was not sure.
Thank you, Nina Jacobson.
He imagined 4:45. Night would get into Horn’s car, and they would drive silently somewhere. There would be attempts to start conversations about some inconsequential thing, but they would go nowhere. Horn and Night would arrive at some fancy restaurant at an absurdly early hour, when the waiters were still putting out silverware. They would sit in an empty cocktail lounge—drafty, bad music—and Horn would finally say, “We want to be in business with you, but not on this script. What else you got?”
The Man Who Heard Voices Page 8