The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Story has no armor, verbal or otherwise. She talks very little and for parts of the movie, she wears nothing but one of Cleveland Heep’s work shirts, or less. Her strength comes from her willingness to accept her fate and her wish to see Cleveland healed. At one point she admits she’s a lousy narf.

  “That’s interesting. I think the opposite,” Night said. “When I think of strength, I don’t think of armor. I think of someone who is open about being vulnerable.” He was defining himself. The rehearsal pressed on, three people trying to figure out the script, and one another.

  Night’s parents, both retired doctors, spent their days together, except when Night’s father was on the golf course. They often ate lunch out, and got around in a big Mercedes. Their house was a tiny oasis of calm. There was something not quite American about it. There were almost no gadgets in it. It was filled with the music of their singsong voices.

  Night’s father was born in 1937 in southwestern India, in a town of thirty-five thousand on the Arabian Sea called Mahe, under French rule for centuries. Shyamalan was his given name, not his father’s surname. People called him Shyam.

  Most of the people in Mahe were Hindu, and there was a small Catholic and Muslim population, too. Religious tolerance was the norm. Shyam’s family were faithful Hindus. Shyam’s father died when Shyam was six and his father was working as an estate manager in Malaysia. Shyam’s mother put flowers on her husband’s forehead and said goodbye. A holy man sprinkled water on the body. Young Shyam sat on a stone wall under a giant banyan tree and saw white smoke rise from the crematorium, fifty yards away. He thought his father had turned into a cloud. He could smell the sandalwood burning. The aroma was pleasant.

  In Mahe, Shyam lived with his mother, four brothers, and one sister in a small house with clay-and-cement floors. They could not afford rugs. There were five temples within a short walk of their house. They went to temple almost nightly, and their mother would tell them to pray for sustenance. One temple had a large spring-fed pool next to it. Shyam and his family would bathe before prayers and eat rice dinners afterward. After Shyam’s father died, the boy’s mother sold her family jewelry to stay in the house. Even though the caste system was not as strong in Mahe as it was in most of India, there was no possibility of Shyam going to university; they were far too poor.

  There was an oval rock wall around the pool, maybe fifteen feet high and three feet wide and smooth at the top. One day when he was twelve, Shyam was sitting on top of the wall, his legs dangling toward the pool, when a prankster started running at him as hard as he could. He was planning to jump over Shyam and into the pool. But the other boy jumped too late and caught Shyam square in the back with his foot. Shyam fell headfirst and should have smashed his head against the craggy, rocky wall—a likely death. But he fell outward before going down and landed on his hip in water deep enough to prevent any serious injury. From then on, his trips to temple stopped feeling like a duty.

  Shyam aced his national achievement tests in high school, and scholarships were offered to him as Indian culture changed under Nehru. He went to college and then on to medical school, where he met his future wife. They came to the United States in the 1960s to get more schooling, and they stayed. They started in an apartment in Philadelphia and ended up in a house on the Main Line with an outdoor pool, an indoor pool, a tennis court, and a Japanese garden. They raised a daughter and a son, Indian kids in a land of white people, eating Sugar Pops in a kitchen that smelled of curry. Veena and Manoj learned about the gods, heard the stories, went to the festivals, ate the food. None of it held any meaning for the son, not that the father could tell. Except when it came to storytelling. From the time he was a boy, Manoj loved to hear the stories, the more ancient the better.

  From time to time I’d see Night’s parents at their house. Sometimes we’d have tea there or go to an Indian restaurant where the family had been eating for years, or to a local deli with Formica benches. Night and his father had the same giggle and the same habit of twisting their rings while talking. Night had his mother’s warmth. He made regular visits to his parents. He was close to them.

  Night’s father’s medical practice had been in North Philadelphia, in a rough part of the city. Most of his patients were indigent Hispanics and blacks on Medicaid and Russian émigrés paying cash. He often made house calls in unpredictable neighborhoods and worked many more hours to earn the same kind of money the Main Line doctors made, but he hadn’t become a doctor just to make money. After The Sixth Sense, Night was in a position to encourage his father to retire, and his father did.

  “In his movies, Manoj is explaining the supernatural, and doing that is part of the Hindu tradition of storytelling,” Dr. Shyamalan said once over lunch. His English had the rich accent of his homeland. “I tell Manoj, ‘There are things that are inexplicable.’ I told him how I sometimes can still smell my mother helping me when I was a child, the feeling that she is right there. And I think maybe he took a little of that when he was writing The Sixth Sense.”

  He was proud of his son’s career, but he remained convinced that Manoj could have been an outstanding doctor or lawyer. Either one.

  Night’s mother, Jaya, grew up near Madras, in southern India, in a house permeated by Hindu culture. Her father was a deputy police superintendent, and Jayalakshmi, her full name, was the oldest of eight. She was a renegade in her own unassuming way. Had she not gone off to college, she would have been married by arrangement. She evaded the caste system with a rare combination of determination and intelligence and became an obstetrician and gynecologist. Four of her siblings followed her into medicine. One became a hand doctor, another a kidney specialist, another a surgeon, another a psychiatrist. All of them moved to the United States, and all of them married doctors. There were years when family weddings had at least ten doctors present. Manoj used the children of those doctors as his actors in many of the forty backyard VCR movies he made (and starred in) in high school and before. Sometimes, they re-created hospital scenes.

  One of the cousins, playing a female patient: “I’m pregnant.”

  Young Manoj, sounding like a soap opera MD: “Lie down, everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to put you on a Pitocin drip.” He had no idea that Pitocin was used to induce labor, but he’d heard his mother say it over the phone, and he’d seen Pitocin on the sides of the pens in the kitchen.

  For years, Dr. Jaya Shyamalan held the record for the largest ovarian cyst any doctor had ever removed from a surviving patient at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, on the outskirts of Philadelphia: eighty pounds. (No wonder Night was such a stat man.) She had also delivered thousands of healthy babies, as well as some who were not. One pregnant woman, near term, did not believe that her unborn infant had died. Silently, Dr. Shyamalan handed the mother her stethoscope and held the grieving woman through her hysteria. Night’s mother had debilitating arthritis and reluctantly retired in her early fifties, in the early 1990s, when her son was turning into Night at NYU.

  When Brooke Shields wrote about her postpartum depression, Dr. Shyamalan read about it with interest. She knew it was a common problem in the United States, and uncommon in India, where the tradition was for mothers to spend several weeks at their own mother’s home after delivery, one generation looking after the other. That was what Jaya had done with her own children.

  Jaya and Shyam were still living in India when Veena was born, but they were living in the United States when Jaya became pregnant with their second child. Jaya spent the last five months of her pregnancy at her parents’ house, which was then in the South India city of Pondicherry. Shyam stayed in Philadelphia, working and taking care of Veena. Manoj was born in a hospital in Pondicherry and spent his first six weeks at his maternal grandparents’ house. He returned to India every two or three years until he was in his early twenties, when he started to go more irregularly.

  When Night graduated from NYU, he told his mother he wanted to shoot a movie of his own in India. He had an idea�
��American college student of Indian descent returns to the motherland—but no script. His mother learned that scripts written by nonresidents had to be submitted to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Ten days later, Night had a script written. They submitted the script, raised money from family and friends, and went to India to make a movie. They rented cameras, hired an experienced cinematographer, rounded up a crew, and navigated India’s bewildering permit requirements. Night hired the least inexperienced actors he could find by taking out ads in newspapers. In the tradition of Woody Allen and Spike Lee, Night played the lead.

  Trying to leave the country with the exposed film, Night was required to put the film canisters through the X-ray security machines, and Night said, “There’s a five percent chance that there will be no movie at all.” But the film survived, and the movie he made from the film in those canisters, Praying with Anger, had a brief run in one theater in New York and a good review in The New York Times. And that was it. You cannot find a copy, and Night won’t even talk about it. His mother told me she saw it once, cried all the way through, and never saw it again.

  Night was close to his mother, but not in a sentimental way. One day, when finishing work on a scene with Brick, he said, “Well, as my mother would intone it, ‘At least that scene will work.’”

  Night loved being an actor. In the basement rehearsal room, particularly when he was working with Paul and Sarita, playing his movie sister, it was like a reprieve from the burdens of being the boss and a chance to hang out, as if he were just another actor, even though he was not. There was a sweetness to rehearsal days, amid the mustiness.

  A few hundred yards away, the apartments in Night’s mock five-story apartment building were being built, decorated, painted, and finished. A beehive of activity. On the other side of Green Lane, in the fraying black neighborhood, regular life was unfolding daily in a slow, summery way. Inside the rehearsal room, time seemed to stop altogether.

  There was no construction noise in the rehearsal room, just the whirring fan and Night laughing at Paul’s improv bits. The idea of a wig for Paul died at last, and in his relief he developed a gag in which he’d use four fingers to represent a toupee. He’d abruptly move his head a quarter-turn, like a spectator watching a tennis match, and a half-second later, the fingers would move. Maybe you had to be there, but it was funny.

  Paul seemed to barely need the rehearsals. He had his lines memorized early, and whatever time he spent “finding” his character, he must have done on his own. But whenever Night would say something like “Paul, you up for trying one more time?” Paul’s answer would be the same: “Yeah, sure—fine.”

  Paul and Night were about as different as two people could be. Night was a striver, like his immigrant parents, and he didn’t pretend to be otherwise. Paul had the sensibilities of old Yale, in which admitting to ambition was a mark of crudeness. Still, a closeness was developing between them. The watch-your-weight phone conversation had been buried. Night could give Paul shit now.

  “What happened with that remake of Apes?” Night asked lightly.

  “Oh, I know,” Paul said. In the 2001 version of Planet of the Apes, Paul had played Limbo, an ape with a sense of humor. “Hey—we tried.”

  “I saw it the night it opened,” Night said. “I’m in this big theater, filled with Ape fans, and we’re all walking out. Some guy kicks open those big exit doors and says, ‘Da shee suck.’ And we’re all like ‘Yeah, that shit sucked.’”

  Paul laughed. He knew the truth, and Night did, too. You could never tell what a movie was going to be like, not until it came out.

  Paul got the movie bug from his parents. He’d follow his mother, a high school English teacher, to pretty much whatever she was seeing. He was six when they saw The Conversation, the intense Francis Ford Coppola movie about paranoia. On Saturdays, Paul and his father would sometimes go to matinees. They’d see the Monty Python movies and anything with Peter Sellers in it, or apes, or horses. Bart loved Westerns. He talked often about writing the perfect Western. Bart was as dynamic in his family life as he was as the president of Yale or the commissioner of baseball. You can imagine the void brought by his death. Toni died fifteen years after Bart, in 2004. Toni’s father, a legendary high school football coach in New Jersey, was buried on a Friday, at age ninety-seven, and Paul’s mother died the next day. She was only sixty-seven. A month later, Sideways came out. It was a hit. After Sideways, there were fewer and fewer people saying of Paul, “Isn’t he Bart Giamatti’s son?” Now, on the Lady set, Paul was smack-dab in the middle of a studio movie, albeit a strange one. He was trying to keep the director sane, and trying to make an odd movie work. It was a tall task.

  One day I left base camp and went into the neighborhood on the other side of Green Lane, which Night was curious about. The houses belonged to members of the working class, the working poor, and the just plain poor. It was a hot weekday in August. There were a lot of people outside. There was a man selling chicken wings from his front step, six in a Styrofoam container for $3.50 with a warm supermarket soda. You could smell the sweet aroma of grilling meat from another direction. There were two men fighting on the sidewalk, nothing too vicious, but there was a small crowd around. There were kids on low-slung bikes and toddlers in diapers in inflatable pools. They could see the Cove, Night’s mock apartment building, going up through the trees across the street. Some mornings they saw the throngs of people gathered at the front gate—open calls for pool-party extras. There was enough going on in that little neighborhood to shoot a movie right there.

  A woman named Tuesday Davis, with a tiny gold bar protruding through the flesh below her lower lip, was sitting on a stoop with two other women. She saw me with a notebook and asked if I was a talent scout for the movie. She continued as if I had said yes.

  “’Cause I’m ready for my close-up!”

  Everybody laughed.

  She was an attractive woman, but she looked painfully tired. She didn’t have a job.

  She said, “I heard they got a mermaid in a swimming pool.”

  “That’s true.”

  “That’s what I want to know: How’d they get that mermaid in that swimming pool?”

  “Just, you know, movie magic.”

  “What kind of stars you all got over there?”

  “Well, there’s Paul Giamatti. He’s the lead.”

  “I ain’t never heard of him.”

  “Bryce Howard, she’s the female lead.”

  “I heard of her. I’m pretty sure I heard of her.”

  “Maybe you’ve heard of the director, M. Night Shyamalan?”

  “Yeah. He did The Sixth Sense and all.”

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah. It was okay. I fell asleep. I fall asleep in the movies.”

  “Do you go to late shows?”

  “I go at like six o’clock. But it’s too dark in there.”

  We talked about this and that for a few minutes. When I left, she said, “You tell ’em all that Tuesday Davis is ready for her close-up!”

  6.

  Night was a dinosaur. He felt a script should be done before shooting begins, and he felt all the actors should be available for a read-through, held a couple weeks before the first day of shooting. In modern moviemaking, read-throughs are often conducted with fill-ins reading from scripts-in-progress. They could be listless affairs. To Night, read-throughs were holy. For Lady in the Water, the read-through would be the only time the whole cast would be together. Whether it went well or poorly, it would set the tone for the first days of shooting, and those two or three days, Chris Doyle had said, would set the tone for the rest of the shoot. Paul, Bryce, Cindy Cheung, Sarita, Bob Balaban, the five smokers, the five Perez de la Torre sisters, and two dozen other actors gathered in a hotel ballroom at the Rittenhouse in Center City Philadelphia. This was the agenda: a delicious buffet breakfast followed by an uninterrupted reading of the script, followed by a delicious buffet lunch. Food, work, food. Night k
new from experience that the schedule worked. One of his management philosophies was never to skimp on food, in quality or in quantity. He knew it inspired loyalty and effort. Plus, he was such a big eater.

  Some of the actors had their own scripts, and others, like the smokers and the Perez de la Torre sisters, were lent scripts for the day. (It takes a while to get in the circle of trust.) Alan Horn wasn’t at the read-through, but Jeff Robinov was, looking more New Age bohemian than most of the actors, in a long-sleeved T-shirt, pants with many pockets, rubber sandals, and a sort of ski cap on his head, the kind the Santa Cruz surfers wear coming off the beach at dusk. During breakfast he showed Sam Mercer and Jose Rodriguez family snaps from deep inside his wallet, while nearby Mary Beth Hurt read The New York Times, and Cindy read The Wall Street Journal. Night worked the crowd, beaming and nervous, reaching into his pocket for TUMS when nobody was looking.

  It was a gathering of movie people, and they talked about movie-people things. Mary Cybulski, the script supervisor, described a party in New York where Bill Murray had introduced her to a tall, bald black man named Michael. She had said, “Hello, Michael. Where do you live?” “In Chicago,” Michael Jordan had said. Night’s hero was just another man at a New York party to Night’s script supervisor. Mary was better on the 1919 Black Sox. She had worked on Eight Men Out, the John Sayles baseball movie. Bill Irwin, the Broadway star hired by Night to play Mr. Leeds, had played Eddie Collins, the clean second baseman, in it. There was a lot of that going on, figuring out the degrees of separation. A lot of the people knew one another, or had an agent in common, or had some link, tangential or otherwise.

  People were talking about other projects and other interests. Mary Cybulski had been trekking all over the world as the script supervisor for Syriana. Sam Mercer had just wrapped Jarhead. The last episode of Six Feet Under, featuring Freddy Rodriguez as a budding mortician, was about to air. Bryce had a theater group that was meeting in a barn on her parents’ farm in Connecticut. She had dressed up for the read-through, wearing shimmering red lipstick and a shimmering green blouse. Her character was attracted to shiny things, and she was finding her character. On the set, Bryce said, she would be beading with shiny beads. Sarita wondered where she could find a lap pool in downtown Philadelphia, and Paul was looking for Vietnamese restaurants and secondhand bookstores. People were seeking him out, even though he did what he could to deflect attention. Everybody had something to tell him, a long series of unrelated non sequiturs, really. Paul didn’t mind. For him, the weirder, the better.