The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  The president of Disney’s legendary film company had short hair and John Lennon glasses. She was wearing a chic suit of fine wool and leather work boots that could have stomped anything. She was a few years older than Night.

  M. Night Shyamalan was a pivotal figure in her life—The Sixth Sense helped make her career—and she had a lot to say about him.

  You could see immediately how she and Night would have gotten along famously, and how they would have battled. They both had enough words and phrases and analogies to turn you around on anything. When I heard her speak, I realized that Night, as with his Johnnie Cochran imitation, had Nina down cold. He could do her voice, intense, scratchy, somewhat whiny, but also authoritative. She seemed sure of herself. She had a penchant for sweeping statements: “Night captures that moment between the sacred and the profane.” I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded awfully good.

  When I told her about the oval head shots—Nina and Dick Cook and Oren Aviv, the We Don’t Get It Trio, drifting in and out of Night’s crowded head—she seemed surprised. In Nina’s mind, she was the jilted one, and she offered proof: During the breakup dinner at Lacroix, Dick Cook had pleaded with Night to make Lady for Disney. It was Night who had said goodbye. Nina was left feeling broken. He was the one who got away.

  “When we got back to the hotel, Dick said to me, ‘You’ve got to realize in these relationships, you’re going to give more love than you get,’” Nina said, recounting an event now nine months old. “And he’s right. That’s how it’s always been: The patron gives the love, and the artist receives it.” She didn’t see it from Night’s side: When the patron rejects the art, the artist is left feeling all alone, no matter how much success he’s had.

  But Nina’s play-by-play of the dinner was mostly consistent with Night’s version. She, too, remembered numerous petite courses; tables too close together; Night talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe; a tense dinner that went on forever. But she said Night was wrong if he thought that Nina and her boss and her marketing man had come to the dinner without a plan. Their goal was to tell Night the script needed more work, and that maybe it should be shelved in favor of writing or directing something else. “I said to Night, ‘This script is like the pregnant woman looking at her ultrasound and seeing an embryo at four months,’” Nina recalled. “And Night said, ‘Are you saying the script needs five more months?’”

  Nina said that if they couldn’t get Night to abandon Lady, they were prepared to let him make it, but with a smaller budget than he had for The Village. They never expected Night to walk. What Night said to Cook at the elevator—“I thought we were going to ride into the sunset together”—Nina could have said to Night.

  She did not believe, as Night did, that Disney had turned into a soulless, vacuous corporation wanting Night to make nothing but supernatural thrillers that would satisfy the fan base, open big, do $200 million in domestic and $100 million more with international, DVD sales, and everything else. But what was she going to say? Yep, he nailed it; that’s who we are today? She was a Disney employee. She had a big high-paying job with stock options and all the rest. You’d see her name near the top of those lists of the most powerful women in Hollywood. Anyway, she didn’t think the Disney movie division was in such dire shape. The Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, looked promising.

  We talked a lot about The Village. If Signs had been a three-run home run, The Village was a one-run double. But The Village’s numbers had no influence on how she’d read the Lady script. “Our assumption was that we were going to love it,” Nina said. She was drinking unsweetened cranberry juice out of a plastic water bottle and fidgeting. She was in constant motion without ever leaving her chair. “We all had a lot of excitement about reading it.” Excitement. One of Paula’s favorite Hollywood words.

  Nina said that when Night’s longtime assistant had made her L.A. rounds that Sunday afternoon in February to hand-deliver the script to the troika, there was nothing to read into Paula’s three awkward encounters. I asked if Disney had wanted to reassert control of the relationship, starting with Night’s rules for the way his new scripts would be read, but Nina said that was not the case.

  “It was a ritual for us, a Nightism,” Nina said of the Sunday afternoon deliveries. “He loves good drama. The only reason I was late for Paula was because I had to take my son to a birthday party. The priority for me is family first, then job. We’re not people who delegate our child care.”

  That sounded reasonable—parenting first, work second. (It was a mark of affluence to be able to order things that way.) My Disney visitor’s badge—bar-coded, with the telephone number for security below a picture of Mickey—was stamped October 31, 2005, and Nina was making arrangements to get Halloween costumes from wardrobe: a Cinderella dress; a belly-dancer outfit in the style of I Dream of Jeannie. Another perk of a big job.

  Night, like Nina, tried to keep his weekends clear to be with his family. But he didn’t put his life in boxes: writer here, director there, father here, husband there. He saw his own childhood in his two girls. When one drew a Halloween pumpkin with blood dripping down its cheeks, Night was delighted. Lady had begun with his girls. They had visited the set often, with Bhavna. For Night, his various roles blurred together into his life. That was why he didn’t know where he was Clark Kent and where he was Superman; it was changing all the time. There were Sunday afternoons when he had to write, or make a call, or watch audition tapes. Bhavna and the girls would wander in and out.

  To Night, the three Disney executives should have treated the reading of his new script at the appointed time on the appointed Sunday as part of the fun. If Nina had really been on board, she would have left the party a half hour earlier and kept her date with Paula, and with Night’s script. It would have been a symbol, nothing more, that she actually was excited. But Paula was on time and Nina was not, and on that Sunday evening, Night went to bed (or tried to) without knowing what Nina thought of the script. Sometime between The Sixth Sense and that Sunday afternoon, Night had lost Nina. He no longer inspired her.

  “Any guilt I might have felt over Night’s anxiety on that Sunday night was lessened for me by my knowing that my children know that they come first,” Nina said.

  They were in different places. When you’re the writer and director, you own the script, financially and emotionally. Night had no boss except himself and his standards. He had no money worries. He was freed up in a way few people are.

  Nina was an executive, with layers of bosses and a paycheck that kept her in low-carb soups and children’s birthday presents and all the many expensive things demanded by modern life in tony Brentwood. She’d been drawn to the business by her love of movies, then lured to Disney by the promise of The Sixth Sense. But that was seven years and many movies ago. Things had changed. When The Sixth Sense was in movie theaters, Disney was a $40 stock. By the time of The Village, it was a $23 stock. Nina’s job was to make movies that made money, the more money the better. Lately, there hadn’t been much profit to report. The Wall Street Journal had been writing that story for a while.

  I asked Nina if she was frustrated that Night hadn’t taken more of her suggestions on The Village. Maybe the movie would have made more money if he had. “All in a day’s work,” she said. “The chief requirement in hiring a director is not compliance.” I couldn’t tell if that was a yes or a no.

  My interview with Nina kept returning to the night of the Lacroix dinner, to the breakup. “I remember Night saying, ‘I feel like you don’t have faith in me,’” Nina told me. “And I said, ‘We’re not talking about our regard for you.’” It sounded like faith and regard were the same things to Nina. They were not to Night.

  They were both still hurting. Nina wanted to know how the shoot had gone; Night, helping the girls sort through their candy at home, wanted to know what Nina was saying. In their search for peace, they were both stuck.

  Without Night in the room to debate her, Nina’s most important poin
t sounded logical: “What was I supposed to do when I read the script and didn’t get it? Lie to him? When he was writing, he talked about this script with me more than any of his others. He said, ‘This could be my E.T.’ I was prepared to love it. And I didn’t.”

  If Night had been there, he would have come out swinging: You should have given me the space I’ve earned. You didn’t even try to understand it. You’re too scared to take a chance. But in his absence, Nina’s simple declaration made sense. In a way, what she did was brave. The easy thing to do would have been to say yes to a director who always made you money.

  I asked Nina about the news stories in the trades, the ones Night had read when leaving the Hotel Bel-Air that February morning, the ones announcing that Night was leaving Disney for Warner Bros. She knew that the mention of creative differences had set Night off, that he felt the Disney side had violated the terms of the divorce.

  “It was honest,” Nina said. “We did have creative differences. We agreed that we would treat each other with respect and kindness. We kept silent so Night could sell the script elsewhere. I feel we acted very honorably.”

  I asked what she thought about Night taking Lady to Warner Bros.

  “I thought that would happen,” she said. “I knew how much Alan Horn loved The Village.”

  In February I spoke to Nina again, on the phone. She asked if I’d seen the movie yet. I hadn’t. Night and Barbara Tulliver and a team of editors were editing every day, and all there was to see so far was a rough cut. Night wanted me to see something much closer to finished, and that was at least a month away. Nina asked if I’d read the review of Lady on a website called Ain’t It Cool News. I hadn’t heard of the website, knew nothing of the review, and couldn’t imagine how it even existed. Night had been showing the unfinished version—no music, uncorrected color, extra scenes, rudimentary sound—only to handpicked groups, looking for feedback.

  “The reviewer had the same problems I had,” Nina said. She started to describe the points made in the review—too many rules, too many peculiar words—and suddenly stopped herself short. Maybe she heard her own tone: I told you so.

  Nina didn’t know who had written the review. Evidently, it was unsigned. The significant thing to her, it seemed to me, was that the first review was negative.

  It was sad, really, to hear a woman of Nina’s intelligence finding validation from an anonymous reviewer critiquing an unfinished movie that had been made—if nothing else—with integrity. If Lady in the Water turned out to be a failure—and Night knew that was a possibility—it would fail honestly.

  I couldn’t find the review. It had been removed from the website. When I asked Night about it, I imagined he’d be furious every which way: at the reviewer, at the review, at the website that had posted it. Furious turned out not to be the right word.

  “We screened a rough cut in the screening room in the barn,” Night said, falling immediately into the tone of storyteller. “A friend brought a friend, a kid who goes to NYU who wants to be a director. The second I heard about the review, I figured it must have been this kid. He was the only one we didn’t know. So we called him. At first he denied it, and then he admitted it was him.”

  Next you might have expected, And I read him the riot act. That was one of Night’s regular phrases. He went another way.

  “I wanted to meet him, face-to-face. I was going to New York anyhow, so I arranged to see him at some little dark place downtown, near NYU, like a small restaurant-bar.

  “When the kid first came in, he was like I’m the big man here. Very arrogant. First he gets all this attention for the review, now the director wants to meet him, that whole thing.

  “The first thing I said to him was ‘Let’s leave aside how completely wrong it is to come to a screening like the one you came to, where I tell you the movie’s unfinished, that what you’re about to watch is a rough cut, that it still needs a lot of work, and that you can all be helpful to me by telling me what you think, and then you go out and write a public review about a private experience. I find all that unbelievably troubling, but that’s not even on my radar screen compared to what I’m about to tell you.’

  “And by this point the kid is trembling. He has no idea what’s coming next.

  “Then I say, ‘I can find anybody who will come watch a rough cut and say, “It was good—I like how you used the butterflies,” or whatever. That doesn’t do shit for me.

  “‘But you come in and you have real opinions and real criticisms. You’re the kind of person who can help me make the movie better. Because I’m going to use every last second I have to make this movie as good as I possibly can make it, and I’m going to listen and see what I can learn from you.’

  “And by this point the kid’s apologizing, saying he’s sorry and he should never have done it and all that. But that’s not what this meeting is about. He had very valid criticisms and he cared about movies.

  “I say to him, ‘Do you know Francis Ford Coppola added one hour to The Godfather from the time he first started showing the rough cut until the time the movie was released? One hour. It would never have been The Godfather without that hour. But Coppola couldn’t work that way today, because somebody would sneak into a screening of the rough cut, post a review on a website, say that the movie’s just another gangster picture, the studio would lose faith, and that would be the end of it.’

  “Now the kid’s locked in with me. I say, ‘Do you want to be the director of Dukes of Hazzard VIII? Do you want to be part of the generation that supports only movies like that? Or do you want to have an original voice?’

  “He says, ‘Original voice.’

  “‘That’s what I’m trying to do, too—have an original voice. Say something new. I’m trying to take a chance. And someone like you can help me. And you actually did. Even though you did it in the forum that you did, and as wrong as it was for you to do it that way, I still learned something from your review, and I still want to thank you because you’re going to help me make my movie better.’ And he was all wide-eyed.

  “‘But if you’re ever in that situation again, be a man and say it to the director’s face. Say it to my face. Say it artist to artist.’

  “And now he looks like he’s gonna cry. I say to him, ‘Someday you’ll be editing your movie, trying to make it better before it goes out to the world, and I hope I can do for you what you did for me. We need more African-American directors. We need more points of view. But as directors, we all need the space to find our voices, where we can take chances, see what works and what doesn’t, and that’s what editing is all about. They spent a year editing The Exorcist, you know? That’s why I’m showing rough cuts, to get responses before I go out to the world. All right? Cool?’

  “We hugged. He got the website to remove the review. He wanted to do that. We were together for a long time, close to two hours. And I had all sorts of shit going on, but I felt this was the most important thing I could be doing. For myself and for him. It actually was very, very cool.”

  That was Night’s response to a would-be director who had trespassed on his property, real and intellectual. But Night didn’t see him as a trespasser. Well, at first he did. At first he was furious. But not by the time he met him. By then Night saw him as another person he could turn around, another person who was lost, another person he could inspire. Along the way, the kid—the anonymous before-the-start-gun reviewer who helped validate the opinions of one of the most powerful women in Hollywood—did Night more of a favor than he could ever know.

  Night left the NYU student, the would-be director, on a sidewalk in lower Manhattan, and went back to work in a mixing studio. As he walked down the sidewalk, in the brisk winter wind, a powerful feeling washed over him. The episode was so unexpected—reading the review, meeting the reviewer, the different emotions the whole thing had wrought: anger, denial, forgiveness, acceptance. Night practically ran to the studio, the strap of his backpack bouncing off his shoulder with every step. He w
as ready for whatever was next.

  Regarding the movie, Night knew the kid was correct. It had serious problems. Night had a month to try to improve it, to find his voice, the director’s own voice, amid all the other ones in the movie. At that late hour, it wasn’t there yet.

  When he was done with his work, the kid would like the movie. That was Night’s goal.

  April 18, 2006

  Night had a quiet and peculiar day at the farm on a gorgeous weekday in mid-April nearly half a year after shooting wrapped.

  I know there’s something I should be doing now, but what is it?

  At seven P.M. that evening, Night would be screening Lady in the Water for a group of strangers, forty of them, scorecards in their hands. Civilians, Night called them. The people for whom Night made movies.

  After shooting had wrapped in late October, Night went into hibernation with Barbara and her team. For most people, editing would be a study in tedium, but it’s a productive outlet for a certain strain of obsessives, Night being Exhibit A. Night had blocked off November and December 2005 and January and February in the new year for editing. His job now was to pull the right parts from the right takes and order them the right way. His job was to turn his Bristol footage into a movie. Every so often, looking for feedback, he’d show a rough cut of the picture, or parts of it, to small groups of hand-picked people. That’s how the kid from NYU, slipping through the cracks, got to see it. The would-be director from Night’s alma mater said publicly what a lot of the others were saying to Night in the safety of the barn: They didn’t get it. If they knew Night, they might be afraid to say it to his face. It didn’t matter. Night could tell what they thought by the positions of their heads while watching the movie, or through their facial expressions afterward. They weren’t laughing, they weren’t startled, they weren’t moved. Night knew he had something. The actors’ read-through had gone so well. The mock teaser—with Brick Mason’s simple storyboard pictures and the snippet of opera—was so beautiful. The dailies were strong. But it wasn’t coming together as a movie. Night felt like a hamster in a tiny cage, furiously going nowhere.