The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  “You are Korean,” Bonita said softly.

  Outside, it was a hot August day. Eight floors below, a parade of midday cars and cabs and trucks trudged north and south on Broad Street, but the traffic noises were muffled by the time they reached Cindy’s open windows. Out at Bristol, Lady in the Water was in full swing. Cindy wasn’t there because she had no scenes scheduled for that day. Most days she had no scenes. The only actor on the set every day was Paul. The only stand-in there every day was Chrismandu.

  Cindy started moaning in Korean. She was rolling her head around and saying, “Ching gu ga re keyau chaud deh yo. Oh-ma, oh-ma!” Again and again. “Oh-ma! Oh-ma!” Before long she was shouting. A housekeeper armed with fresh towels made a quick entrance and exit.

  “What animal comes to you?” Bonita asked.

  Cindy went to the floor, supporting herself on her hands and knees. Her head was going crazy now, like a mad dog’s. She made an exhaling noise that sounded like a horse sneezing. She made a muted groaning noise, like a dolphin underwater.

  And then, without any instruction from Bonita, Cindy stood up and started dancing wildly, as if she were Young-Soon in her dance-club scene. Cindy twirled her hair and repeated one of her lines over and over: “What’s up, baby? What’s up, baby? What’s up, bay-be.” And then other lines from other scenes, but all the while dancing: “She wants to know who told you this word. Who told you this word? This word. This word. Who told you this word? A narf, the bedtime story says, is a sea nymph. A sea nymph. A sea nymph.” She was growing quiet now. “A sea nymph. A sea nymph.”

  “Keep the animal inside you,” Bonita said with urgency.

  “Oh-ma! Oh-ma! O-o-oh-ma! She says she talk about it a little bit.” Cindy sounded a little drunk.

  Her real-life cell phone rang. Cindy checked it, put the phone down, and said, “Why can’t you be more like your sister? She married a dentist.” It was a line from the movie.

  “You’re two years old,” Bonita said.

  “She wants to know who showed you this word,” Cindy said.

  “Now use your legs,” Bonita said.

  Paul had a whole bit about actors using their legs, but it involved the elaborate crossing of legs in parlor-room murder mysteries. Cindy was jumping up and down.

  “Use your feet,” Bonita said.

  Cindy continued jumping up and down.

  “Feet,” Bonita said quietly.

  Cindy started running her toes through the thick carpet as if it were beach sand. She made a circle.

  “Now you are the age when you first heard the story.”

  “It’s an ancient bedtime story, Mr. Heep. An ancient Eastern bedtime story. My great-grandmother used to tell it. Ancient story, Mr. Heep. Ancient bedtime story. Ancient. Mista Hee-pa. Mista. Heepa.”

  When Cindy came out of her trance, if that’s the right word, Bonita said to her, “I think it’s helpful to think of animals when you’re playing that scene, to help you go from one culture to another.”

  Cindy explained herself to Bonita. There was, it turned out, no mad dog or singing dolphin or sneezing horse in her work. Nothing like it. The only animals Cindy had in mind were a mink and a baby elephant. It was her secret with Bonita. Night would never know.

  A couple of days later, Cindy was doing the “could you look up narf for me” scene with Paul. It had been nothing but hurdles, for Night when he was writing, for Cindy when she was auditioning, for Paul and Cindy when they were rehearsing. It was the one when the moviegoer would take a first step, or not, into the narf world. Cindy could make or break the movie right there. How can you not know what a narf is? You know about Little Red Riding Hood, right?

  Cindy was sprawled out on the actual poolside chaise, in her bikini with the fluorescent yellow straps, a book on her lap and others at her side. She hadn’t been expecting to do the scene that day, but Night, through one of his four assistant directors, had called her in. For all his planning, he could turn on a dime and often did. It helped him feel fresh and maybe a little dangerous. For Cindy, showtime came with no notice.

  Night started shooting the big scene in an afternoon drizzle. There were tiny raindrops on Paul’s glasses. Cindy found it distracting. She was supposed to be sunbathing. Bonita was nowhere in sight.

  On the first take, Paul, unscripted, began the scene by saying, “Hey.” Cindy was surprised, because if there’s one thing she knew, it was that in an M. Night Shyamalan movie script, every word was there for a reason. It was not the decline of modern civilization as we know it, but it was pretty bad. And now, with one added hey, all bets were off. She made an unscripted grunt back. She went to hand Paul some books, as they had rehearsed, but now the books felt unbearably heavy. Cindy became terribly self-aware. She had one foot up, the other down. As Doyle was peering in on her, Cindy could feel her awkwardness. She could feel that she was clinging too much to what she had been working on with Bonita. She was not doing what she had done in rehearsals. She was not seizing the moment—the moment was seizing her.

  Later, I asked Night how it went. He said, “It was like Cindy rehearsed it too much, overthought it. She didn’t trust the moment, like she did in the audition. She wasn’t trusting me as the director. It seemed like she had too much stuff in her head.”

  Night said that without knowing anything about the work Cindy had been doing with her old drama coach. Or maybe he did know, just not in the conventional sense.

  They reshot the scene several days later. Before the cameras rolled, Night saw Cindy with her nose in her script. He told her to stop rehearsing. He said, “On the day, whatever happens, happens.” He was telling her to do what she’d done at the audition. Steal the moment. Feel the weight of the shaving cream in your hand. Cindy found that direction liberating, the best acting advice she had ever received, really.

  From the first take, Cindy nailed the reshoot. In the space of two minutes, she was funny, bratty, curious, seductive, kind, smart, dismissive, respectful, American, Korean. In the days to come, there were times when Night felt she was the only thing working. The whole salary negotiation thing, it wasn’t even a footnote to him anymore. Night was looking for angels wherever he could find them. So far he had Paul, and now he had Cindy. He had his rides to Bristol with his cell phone off and Dylan on. Whenever he felt unsure about the script, a siren would go off in his head and remind him to do the damn work.

  All through the set, and through the shoot, there was a Dylan thing going on. It was there from the beginning, at the read-through. Night had asked everybody to think of their own personal narf, and lean John Boyd, one of the smokers, had thought of the woman from Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” That evening, at the Cuban restaurant where the cast congregated for dinner, Boyd and Paul, a Dylan fan, had compared notes. Labor Day came and went. School began. September turned into October. Some of the overnight shoots were cold and windy. All the while, the Dylan vibe got more and more intense. One morning Night went to Paul’s trailer to discuss the movie but ended up talking mostly about Dylan. Night was discovering the singer then, but Paul had been listening to him for years, his interest in Dylan flowing from his interest in Woody Guthrie, guitar-strumming poet of the American worker, mid-twentieth century. In the fall of 2005, Dylan’s Chronicles was a national best-seller, and the Martin Scorsese documentary on Dylan, No Direction Home, was getting a lot of attention. The regular reports of body counts from a troubling distant war made certain lyrics seem especially heartbreaking and urgent, even if all the symbols and imagery and attached meaning were, according to Dylan, a cosmic accident. Paul would sometimes go over to Boyd’s cramped trailer with Dylan CDs, some of them rare, the ’61 recordings from a Minnesota hotel room, stuff like that. Boyd was at the age when you still think you can figure lyrics out, and Paul had some of that in him, too, but his questions were more rhetorical. (“‘Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore,’” Paul said, citing the “Oh, Sister” kicker. “What does it mean, what the fuck does it mean?”)
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  Paul liked Boyd. Part of it was that Paul had worked with John Boyd’s father, the actor Guy Boyd, when Paul was starting out. Most of it was that Paul saw Boyd doing a lot of good acting in a tiny role, moving his head in interesting ways. Before Lady, Boyd, guitar in hand, had auditioned for the director Todd Haynes to play Bob Dylan in a studio movie. He had the laconic quality you associate with Dylan, and he liked to ride trains. The director loved Boyd’s audition, but the role went to an actor who was far more of a name, Christian Bale. That was one Boyd had wanted bad. He was not shy about playing and singing in public, and one evening Night stopped the golf cart he sometimes used to get around the set and listened to Boyd playing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Paul walked by just then and said, “Get back to work, ya bunch of damn hippies.” Near the end of the shoot, on a crisp fall night, Boyd played Dylan hits for an assortment of actors, extras, the guy playing the tartutic, a teamster, a dishwasher from catering, and a few others who happened by. Nineteen sixty-seven all over again. This congregation was an illustration of Night’s point: There was something about Dylan that brought outsiders together, made them feel connected to something bigger than themselves. Night was trying to do the same thing in Lady. The characters in the movie were supposed to come together, and Night hoped the community of moviegoers would, too, even if the Disney CEO was predicting the demise of the theater experience. After The Village, when the Disney people were throwing their hands up, Night had told Nina, “You can’t trust me—you don’t know where I’m going.” Dylan had spent his whole career saying that, and people followed him anyhow. It seemed like Dylan didn’t care. Maybe it was an act, maybe it wasn’t, there was no way to truly know.

  Night was different. He did care, and he was up-front about it. He wanted to go any damn place he pleased, but he wanted you and me and everybody else to follow him there. It’s an expensive decision, movie tickets costing what they do and free time being in such short supply.

  When Franny drove him to the set, Night would sometimes listen to the bands under consideration for the party scene, the band that would play two Dylan covers. Night had two songs in mind, “Maggie’s Farm” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” As he listened to the bands assembled by Sue Jacobs, the movie’s musical supervisor, he had no idea what they looked like or where they were from. There were fifteen or more in the running. They were from all over the United States, and they were all obscure. There was one group that caught his ear, a heavy-metal band, all wailing guitars and frazzled nerves. Night heard something in their voices he hadn’t heard in any of the other bands. They were true originals desperate to make the music their own. Night said to Sue, “Tell me about Silvertide.” Of all the bands he was listening to, Silvertide turned out to be the only one from Philadelphia: five young guys about three years out of high school, from Northeast Philadelphia, where Chrismandu lived. The band had opened for Mötley Crüe and Van Halen and Alice Cooper and had put out three records. Night was intrigued.

  One night, after a thirteen-hour day on the set, Night went to a recording studio outside Philadelphia to hear Silvertide play “Maggie’s Farm” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” The lead singer, Walt Lafty, a twig with long blond hair, was wearing a leather vest and no shirt and sort of pulling it off. The band had a presence. Their “Maggie’s Farm” was a pure, sweaty screech, and Night rocked out listening to it.

  But the band was playing “It Ain’t Me, Babe” at Dylan’s tempo and with Dylan’s emphases. It wasn’t what Night was looking for. He said, “They’re playing it like a love song.” He was wondering if the song could have a punk element to it. He liked the band Green Day.

  Silvertide’s producer, separated by a large window from the five band members, was sitting at a massive control panel. He said to Night, “Maybe you want something like this.” He started smashing the heel of his heavy boot on the studio floor, and with each hit, he said, “Bop, bop, bop; bop, bop, bop,” hitting his chest with his chin on every third bop. “Something more English Beat,” the producer said. “More of a Birmingham sound.” The Birmingham in England, where the English Beat was formed.

  The producer went into the band’s room, said something briefly to Walt and the boys. The transformation was immediate. It was like Night giving Paul Giamatti a suggestion on how to deliver a line.

  Walt—in a staccato way, with a pause between every word—started screaming, “But it ain’t me, babe. No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe. It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.” Really fast and very, you know, Birmingham. If the song ever had any tenderness, Silvertide stripped it clean and turned it into something angry. There was nothing remotely sweet about it. Night was ecstatic.

  One day Night tried out Youssou N’Dour’s version of the Dylan song “Chimes of Freedom” on the five smokers and some others. Night was considering it for the closing credits. “Chimes of Freedom” is a powerful 1964 Dylan protest song that a really progressive college radio station might play once or twice a year. N’Dour is an amazing talent, like nothing you hear on commercial American radio. His voice is both tribal and melodic, and he sings in French, English, and Wolof, the language of Senegal, the West African country where he lives. But the combination, N’Dour singing Dylan, was strange and slightly annoying. Maybe not as annoying as the treacly 1985 do-gooder hit “We Are the World,” featuring Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson and many other stars, but that gives you the idea. The smokers listened respectfully as Night played N’Dour’s version of “Chimes,” but they responded with silence and odd looks. Then Night said, “It’s a family movie.” The Cove’s resident smokers responded as a chorus: “Oh. We get it now. Yeah. Right. Okay. A family movie.” Still, it was a hard piece of music to fall in love with.

  But it wasn’t for Night, and that’s the point. You had to see Night as he listened. N’Dour’s “Chimes” was as sweet as the Silvertide version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” was angry, but Night was beaming and grooving, his head bopping up and down like a jackhammer. He had been transported. He completely believed in it. He believed in the enigmatic lyrics, in the African rhythms that would be so unfamiliar to white America, the whole thing. If he used it, it wouldn’t be commercial and it wouldn’t be calculated. Just the opposite. N’Dour singing Dylan was another version of Night’s movie, outsiders coming together. It was Night listening to himself.

  8.

  Night was making dangerous moves. He was shooting very little coverage, movie filler that can be dropped in during editing to cover up glitches. After wrapping long, complicated scenes with multiple actors, various deputies would ask Night again and again if he wanted to shoot coverage. All directors shoot coverage. Without coverage, one actor with a momentary vacant stare can wipe out an otherwise perfect two-minute scene. The question was commonplace until the day Night said, “How many times do I have to say it? No coverage, no coverage, no coverage.”

  You heard that tone from him sometimes, a tone that suggested he was all alone. When those same deputies pointed out certain imperfections—Paul had an infected pimple on the back of his neck for a day—Night’s answer sounded almost like a mantra: “The crooked nose on the beautiful girl makes her look more beautiful.” It was weird. Within the realm of a fantasy, and that’s what Night was making, he wanted something that looked and felt real. In moviemaking, real is a tightrope.

  Night was shooting Lady dangerously dark. The darker you shoot, the harder it is to keep the camera in focus, a job that fell to Glenn Kaplan, the focus pull, who stood beside Chris Doyle on take after take with a focus dial in hand. Doyle was dwarfed by Glenn, an XXL barrel-chested Californian who often wore colorful beach shirts and a faded Red Sox cap. Glenn was awed by Doyle’s talent. “A great DP like Chris Doyle doesn’t see the world the way ordinary people do,” Glenn said one day after watching dailies. “For them, colors are richer, everything moves faster than for normal people. Chris Doyle is like Wayne Gretzky playing hockey, always knowing where the puck’s gonna be next.”


  Watching dailies, Night saw that some of the takes—sometimes the best takes—were out of focus. One day during dailies, he said, “Are we ever gonna get this movie in focus?” After that, Glenn stopped coming into the screening room and instead stood with the operator in the cramped projection booth. Glenn thought the projector was part of the problem, and so did other people. He said to the projectionist one day, “You gotta get this projector in focus—my job’s on the line here.” Eventually, a new projector was brought in, but nothing changed. All the while, Glenn never complained about how darkly Lady was being shot, even though it made his job much harder. He was a proud man and had just come off another difficult show, Jarhead. “The two things you can’t improve after you wrap a movie,” Glenn told me, “are the actors’ performance—and focus.” The only person more aware of that than Glenn was Night.

  One day after lunch, Glenn played some hoops with Night. The game seemed to be about more than basketball. Glenn wasn’t a good shooter, but he outweighed Night by maybe a hundred pounds, and he killed Night under the backboard. Frustration was pouring out of him along with his sweat.

  But the most dangerous decision Night made—more dangerous than shooting dark; more dangerous than forgoing coverage; more dangerous than casting himself or Paul or anybody else—was the hiring of Chris Doyle. During one take Night said to Chris, with rising urgency, “Stay on the actors, stay on the actors—the actors!” There were times when Super Chris seemed to be shooting another movie. Elaine—Doyle’s assistant, driver, therapist, and surrogate mother, who was often on a search mission for her boss’s misplaced cell phone or wallet (he had no keys)—believed he didn’t really get drunk, that he just needed a sort of alcohol drip to keep functioning. But Night and others didn’t buy her theory. Doyle’s behavior was too erratic to support it. After a take that had gone especially awry, somebody on the crew said in a stage whisper, “He might be drinking.”