The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Night saw Levinson at a Directors Guild dinner. “Did you really hire Doyle?” Levinson asked.

  “Yeah.” Doyle’s fame had stayed within the cult of moviemaking. Most people who pay for movie tickets would not know his name.

  Levinson was shaking his head, and Night knew what it meant. He was crazy.

  The experience of writing Lady, the experience of leaving Disney and signing up with Warner Bros., it had left him a little crazy. At his core, he wasn’t a changed person. He was still his disciplined, responsible self. But there were pockets of madness where there hadn’t been before. Night was okay with that. A little inspired madness would improve Lady.

  One day, in the midmorning tranquillity of a workday at the farm, Chris Doyle arrived.

  “Good morning!” Paula said. She had that cheerful quality.

  “What’s good about it?” Doyle answered.

  He immediately launched into a recitation about Betty Ford, something about her being so desperate she was drinking hair spray. He asked Paula to get him a cup of coffee with “this much” whiskey, holding his bony thumb and index finger about an inch apart.

  Doyle was wearing a faded green short-sleeved turtleneck and thin tight cotton pants with no belt. (Who knew that turtlenecks came in short sleeves?) His arms were hairless and tanned. For shoes, he wore bizarre zippered contraptions, thick green rubber pads that might have served as loafers for moon dwellers, unzipped so they flapped around his heels when he walked. His black goggle-style glasses—chic in Soho and few other places—hung around his neck on a black cord. No jewelry. He was just a slip of a man, not much bigger than a jockey, with a weathered face. He looked like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, all weathered. He wore his hair in the Lyle Lovett manner, an abrupt updo shaved nearly to his scalp on the sides, then puffy and curly on the top.

  At his request for a drink, Paula went nowhere. Standing at her tidy antique desk in Night’s beautiful farmhouse, Doyle launched into an introductory discourse. This—not verbatim, but close—was how Night’s hand-picked DP introduced himself to Night’s assistant.

  I am still on Hong Kong time, or maybe I’m on London time, I’m not certain, but I do know that I spent last night at the Rittenhouse Hotel in the city of Philadelphia, and did you realize, you beautiful thing—what did you say your name was? it really doesn’t matter—did you realize that the bars in Philadelphia close at twoA.M., and there are no decent bookstores in the city, and the porn offerings both on the hotel TV and in other parts of the city are banal and middle-class and terribly dated, and could you kindly get me that coffee, ahem, as soon as you possibly can, my dear beautiful Paula, you vision of loveliness, of course I know your name—and by the way, how do you feel about three-ways, but we can undress that later, I mean address, address, ha, ha, ha!—but could you kindly contact the production people or whoever is responsible for my hotel accommodations and inform them, or she or him or it, that I cannot, under any circumstance, stay overnight in Philadelphia again for the duration of my work on this grotesquely overbudgeted, potentially extremely beautiful movie I will be making for the very honorable, the very reverend, His Majesty Dr. M. Night Shyamalan, and that for the duration—the six months or six years or whatever the fuck it turns out to be—to please arrange a room for me at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York, New York, and that the services of a car and driver will be needed daily, and, ahem, nightly, preferably a yellow driver, ideally female, fluent in Cantonese, who is very tall or, at the least, very, very leggy…

  The cinematographer had arrived. This was Night’s man.

  Night came in and Doyle said, “The Philadelphia traffic, it’s as bad as the traffic in Bangkok. It takes longer to get from downtown Philadelphia to your farm than from lower Manhattan.”

  This was comically untrue. New York was over two hours from the farm by car, Philadelphia maybe a half hour. Night laughed easily and then Doyle started laughing, exposing his little teeth, yellow and dry. Before long he was saying, “I got this haircut at the Bangkok airport. Never get your hair cut at the Bangkok airport. Fifteen minutes later, I was still feeling horny, so I went to the other side of the airport and got a shave.”

  Doyle was able to change moods without notice or provocation. He went from cheap sex in the Bangkok airport to the beauty of the orange evening sky in downtown Bangkok, and how the evening sky in Venice is green “because of the canals,” and he asked if Cleveland Heep’s apartment building was meant to be in Philadelphia or in the suburbs so that he could start thinking about light, about evening skies, and about what Cleveland Heep’s bungalow would look like at dusk. It was a theme a minute with him, and before long he was talking about an early scene where Story is in Cleveland’s bungalow. “I see her with bare feet, wet, leaving water marks where she’s been, the whole thing imbued with wetness.” And before the loveliness of the image could settle in, he went on, “And we all know what wetness is a metaphor for.” He put his hands on his hips and simulated a sex act. “All my references are from Japanese porn.”

  All the while, Night was laughing. He was face-to-face with a manic person, a person who had so obviously rejected societal conventions, a person who made such a blatant effort to stand up and scream, I’m an artist! Night was happy. Night, who kept careful track of how many pages of script he and Brick Mason waded through every day while storyboarding, who knew when his kids had dental appointments, was not at all scared or worried about Doyle’s lunacy. He found it inspiring. Night was purging the things that made him comfortable, purging himself of Disney.

  An insight came to Night immediately about why Doyle was so blatantly vulgar: It enhanced the beauty of his art. It made it even more unexpected.

  Night and Doyle and Brick went into a converted barn on the property where there was a small screening room and a big, airy meeting room above, to start going through the script. In the meeting room, there was a model of a scrunt at the table where they were about to work, and Doyle said, “May we move that?” His chair had a cushioned pad on the seat, attached by little strings. He removed it entirely. His script was already dog-eared and marked up, many pages crammed with notes, drawings, and doodlings. He may or may not have been ready to work. He sipped occasionally from a bottle of Heineken (Paula kept him away from the whiskey) and described his annual mourning every January 3, the anniversary of Freddy Heineken’s death. He also made references to John Milton and Salvador Dalí and Philip K. Dick, the writer. At one point, when Night was talking about how a scene could be shot, Doyle popped out of his chair, made a lens out of his thumbs and index fingers, and stalked the creaking floor as if carrying a handheld camera. Once an hour or so, he’d say cryptic, semi-poetic things, like “the basement is the underground of life.” Night liked that one in particular. Stephen King had once advised Night to write in his basement, to make himself uncomfortable, and Night had taken him up on the suggestion. It wasn’t one of those creepy cellars, with puddles and bugs, but it was underground, and it was there that much of Lady in the Water had been written.

  The poetic moments were only occasional. When Night asked Doyle if he wanted some hummus—Doyle ate almost nothing—his retort was “Hummusexual?” When Night reminded Doyle that he and Brick were on page 69, he sang, “Everything’s fine when you’re doing sixty-nine!” When Night talked about the movie’s “broken rhythm,” Doyle said, “The rhythm method!” When Night said to him, “Don’t ever give me an Americanized Chris Doyle—I want the Asian Chris Doyle,” Doyle grunted back, “Yellow.”

  In the weeks after that first visit, Doyle came to the farm from New York day after day, but only because he had to. He was unaccustomed to Night’s regimented workday, and to the formality of storyboarding. In Hong Kong, working with Wong Kar-Wai, he had taken years to make movies. Not only was there no storyboarding, there was no script. Night was Kar-Wai’s opposite. He had to plan out everything. There were few directors who did such thorough storyboarding. Doyle was forcing himself to adjust to life
on a clock.

  One day Night announced to Brick and Doyle, “You have me until three-forty-five.” (He’d remind his collaborators periodically that he was the boss.) The time came and Night departed, leaving Doyle and Brick in the room. Brick, despite his best efforts, could get no work out of Doyle for the rest of the day. He theorized about this and that, pontificated about the state of film, went into long monologues about his sex life and his drinking, and waited for six o’clock, when one of the production assistants—a young man with a Polish surname from Philadelphia and not a leggy Asian woman—was authorized to take him back to the Soho Grand in New York.

  When they started working together, I was eager to hear how Brick and Night and Doyle would approach the first scene of the movie. It’s a comic scene, of no particular consequence that I could tell. There are a bunch of screaming Spanish-speaking sisters, terrified by a hairy bug of some sort, and Cleveland comes in and squashes the thing. I was interested because Night had once told me that the most significant thing he had done as a filmmaker was in the first scene of The Sixth Sense. The scene shows a woman in a cellar illuminated by a bare lightbulb. Night said he’d had a creative breakthrough that related to that opening scene. It came in waves: first while he was writing it, then while he was storyboarding it with Brick, and finally, while he was shooting it. There’s not a spoken word in the scene. The first sentence in the script is an instruction: “A naked lightbulb sparks to life.” The woman runs her fingertips over some wine bottles in the basement. She wears a narrow smile. She sees her breath. She suddenly leaves. There are no spoken words. The whole scene is described in the script in twenty-two short sentences. The last two are: “The lightbulb dies. Dripping black devours the room.”

  “Everything I did in The Sixth Sense, and everything I’ve done since then, is because of what I learned in writing that opening scene,” Night said. “It shows up in everything I write. It influences everything I read.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you.” He said this playfully. He said almost everything playfully. It made you take notice when he used another tone.

  “Does Brick know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will he tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “I’ll confirm it for you if you figure it out.”

  So when Brick and Night and Doyle were discussing the first scene of Lady in the Water, I paid close attention. I thought maybe the secret related to openings and I would get an insight through Night’s handling of the shrieking Perez de la Torre sisters (named after Jose’s mother). Night said things like “I want to set the tone early that this movie is fun.” Brick talked about whether you’d have Cleveland in the same frame with the screaming sisters. Doyle asked whether the sisters would have wet hair. I tried to read something into it, and got nothing.

  There was something ungoverned about the Friday in late May, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, when Sheetal came to the farm. Night wasn’t calling her “Ash’s girl” anymore. She was the actress he might be playing opposite, the actress who would carry much of the movie’s humor. It was a big day.

  When Night introduced the young actress to his director of photography in the morning, Chris Doyle kissed her hand and did an elegant little waltz with her, carrying her away to another room, half singing, “Come away with me.” He ran his fingers through her luscious hair and stared clinically at her translucent eyes. He pronounced her a gift to the camera. She went with it all very easily. You would have thought she was an old pro. Doyle said, “She will be a star.”

  Chris Doyle was filled with declarative statements that day, some of them decidedly uncharming. The long, structured workdays were taking a toll on him, his days made much longer by the commute of his own choosing. He was spending at least four hours each day on the road, being driven from lower Manhattan to Night’s farm on the outer reaches of Philadelphia’s Main Line each morning and then being driven back each night. A lot of time on the New Jersey Turnpike.

  It was a gorgeous day, and Michael the chef served lunch outdoors. Afterward, Night and Sheetal went to the paved driveway to shoot baskets while discussing the part. When they were gone, Doyle said to me, “Everybody knows I drink too much and I fuck my brains out, but on the set I’m all business.” He often made a case for himself, even if nobody was asking him to. “I made seven movies with a man who uses no script. Now I’m with a guy who storyboards everything.” He was like that with Night, too, mocking him by establishing how foreign Night’s methods were to him. He said scripts, in general, were “inconsequential,” and he was including Lady in that assessment. But what he liked, he said, was Night’s view of the world and, most significantly, the subject of the movie. I asked him what that was. He said, “The poetry of people.” That was the best description of the movie I had heard yet.

  We could hear Sheetal dribbling. When Night played basketball on Tuesday nights, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see him shoot five three-pointers in a row. But with Sheetal, he was letting her do most of the shooting. He was working the whole time, sizing her up as his kid sister.

  She read for Night in the barn, with Jose reading Night’s lines. As Night looked at her, he cocked his head at strange angles, as if that would change his perspective. He seldom looked at the script on his lap. He was tougher on her than he had been at her New York callback, when Doug Aibel had read the part of Vick Ran, but he had warned her that he would be. “I’m gonna be brutal, as if we were shooting today,” Night said. He was sitting on a hard, austere wooden bench, something you’d see in a Quaker meetinghouse or on the set of The Village. Night asked her “to convey an idea that’s not on the page.” They were not rehearsing a high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Night was treating Sheetal as a seasoned pro, despite her greenness.

  She was leaning so far forward in her chair that only half her bottom was on it. She was scratching her palm with her fingers; she looked anxious but sounded confident. When she was confused about how to read one line, she asked, “Can you give me something here?” She talked about her frustration with directors who won’t tell you what they want. “You wanna say, ‘Dude, just say it.’” She asked, “Do you rehearse a lot?”

  Night thought that was a cheeky question but consistent with her character, both her real-life character and the character she would play. He was enjoying her work. Night’s “brutal” was actually quite civilized. He said, “I’m not buying the way you said banned there, but I’m digging everything else.” Later he said, “There was a lot of good stuff in there, but you got too sincere too early.”

  When she was about to leave, Night gave her a hug and said, “You did really, really well. I’m psyched.” (With Night, there was a lot of hugging.) He thought she had the job, and she must have, too. Her trip to the farm had confirmed what he’d felt in New York: She was Anna, as written. He could live with her for five months. She could make the part come alive. Chris Doyle was even more effusive. He predicted she could be the next Nicole Kidman.

  The next morning, the Saturday of the three-day weekend, Night woke up in a spare bedroom at a relative’s house in Maryland. The bed was unfamiliar and the walls were bare and his first thought that morning was about Anna and who should play her: Sarita, the older downtown New York actress with the European kiss, and not Sheetal. In that guest room, stripped of his regular surroundings, Night realized it did not matter whether Anna was his kid sister or not. Night knew Sarita would play the role differently from how he had written it, how he had intended it. She would improve it. If Paul or Bryce—or Night—wanted to try something different on the day, Sarita would make the corresponding moves. For his movie, he needed Eric Stoltz, not Michael J. Fox. Maybe Chris Doyle was right; maybe Sheetal Sheth would someday become Nicole Kidman. But Night knew her potential as a future Nicole Kidman would not improve Lady in the Water now. Sarita would make Night a better actor. She would raise his game and improve the whole mov
ie. Or she could.

  After spending about two minutes watching Cindy Cheung’s audition with Doug Aibel on videotape, in which she had so dutifully dressed in her Britney Spears getup, Night called his casting director and said, “Let’s bring her in.” He liked her enough to see her in person.

  To prepare for her callback, Cindy was invited to Doug’s office at the Vineyard Theatre to read the entire script. Cindy spent two hours with it, with earplugs in. Doug was solicitous. “Do you have enough light? Would you like some water? Do you have everything you need?” He had an abiding respect for actors and acting.

  Cindy was impressed by the size of the part and the peculiar beauty of the script, in that order. Before she left, Doug had some more fashion advice for her. For the callback with Night, she should dress “as neutrally as possible, pretty much the way you are now.” She was wearing mid-ankle khaki cargo pants, a loose gray T-shirt, her hair up in a high ponytail, and almost no makeup. “It makes you look younger.” He knew Night was looking for someone who could pass for twenty-five or younger. Doug also told Cindy to allow one hour for the callback. She was surprised. Most of her auditions lasted between thirty seconds and ten minutes. She was given a date for the callback, a weekday afternoon in early June, at the Three of Us audition space.