The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Night devoted one afternoon to the scene in which Paul asks Cindy to look up the word narf for him. Night watched different takes of it at least a hundred times. Finally, against all previously stated logic, Night chose the first take from the first time he shot it, when Paul went AWOL from the script and opened the scene with an impromptu “Hey.” Yes, there were water droplets on Paul’s glasses and Cindy felt confused and Night felt he had lost her. But that was then, on the day. Five months later, in the editing room, at the end of a long day, Night saw it differently. He loved what Cindy had done. In it went. He thought about it all night. The next morning, it was out.

  His desperation was showing up in unexpected ways. In the dead of winter, and in the middle of editing, Night left Lady and went to New York for a few days to direct a two-minute spot for American Express, part of a series called “My life. My card.” Night dreaded leaving the Lady editing room, but knew the break could only help him, and that the campaign would generate interest in Lady—if he ever actually completed the movie. Tiger Woods was in the series, and so was the actress Kate Winslet and Mike Lazaridis, the inventor of the BlackBerry. Night wrote his own spot and in the kicker says, “My life is about finding time to dream.” You see him trying to find a restaurant where he can do nothing but fall into the lives of the strangers around him. He imagined saying, My life is about finding time to think. Editing Lady had been an assault on his senses. All through editing, he felt like he did that day in the gold-and-silver Bubchik apartment—he couldn’t clear his head.

  There was a print component to the series, with an Annie Leibovitz photograph and a questionnaire, filled out by the ad’s subject. Each subject listed on dotted lines his or her first job or last purchase or wildest dream. For “alarm clock,” Tiger Woods had written “5:00 A.M. sharp!!” Night, in cramped schoolboy print, wrote, “Preoccupation.” For “biggest challenge,” Tiger had written, “How can I become a better person tomorrow?” Night wrote, “Not letting work make me unhappy.” But his work was making him unhappy. How could it not? He was trying to make the most important and personal movie of his life for a new studio that would be spending $140 million on it, and the people who were watching early versions were leaning the backs of their heads into Night’s well-upholstered screening-room seats, bewildered or bored or both. Be a better person tomorrow? Night was just trying to get to tomorrow. He tried to contain his desperation. He kept up appearances.

  When the spot was all set to go and not before, Night told his mother about the American Express campaign.

  “It’s not like an ad,” Night said. “It’s more like a two-minute movie. It’s going to premiere during the Oscar telecast. Millions of people will see it, all over the world. The print part’s going to be everywhere. It’ll be in The New Yorker!”

  He was assuming the role of needy son, still trying to impress his parents, still looking for praise. He knew from experience it wasn’t easily done.

  “Then maybe something good will come out of it!” Night’s mother said cheerfully.

  In late February, after working on editing the movie for four months, Night flew to Los Angeles and in a screening room on the Warners lot showed Lady to Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov, along with other studio executives and Lady crew members. After four months, the movie should have been pretty close to done, but Horn and Robinov had a muted response. They said encouraging things, but Night could tell they were worried. They knew it wasn’t there yet, and Night did, too. Listening to the responses of the group during the movie, and to what was said afterward, Night felt he had discovered the movie’s fundamental flaw: Lady was coming across more like a play—where words trump action—than a movie.

  “I think I need more time with it,” Night said to Horn. He wanted them to consider what they had just seen as a rough cut, even though, by the look of it, it was way beyond that by then. Night knew if he had another month he could come back with something much better. Among hundreds of other things, he wanted to make the scrunt scarier. He wanted you to feel what peril Story and Cleveland were in. Night was nervous as he asked for more time. They were still getting used to each other.

  “Then you should take the time,” Horn said.

  No hesitancy, no doubt, no second-guessing. Night was not accustomed to that from a studio executive.

  “Really?”

  “Of course. If there’s anything I can do to help, call.”

  By saying everything with almost nothing, Horn had inspired Night. His spirits lifted. Horn was saying to Night what Night had said to Cindy Cheung: You know what you’re doing, and if you don’t, I’m here to help.

  The voices kicked in.

  You’ve been screaming in the wind for years and finally someone has heard you.

  Horn?

  Yep.

  Alan Horn, karate expert and reserved studio boss?

  Yes!

  In Night’s head, there was a beat.

  Maybe.

  Still, Night left the Warners lot relieved. He felt like a student facing expulsion, saved by a professor’s extension. Leaving the Warners lot that day, even though his movie was a mess, Night had a feeling of assuredness. Somebody believed in him! He suddenly felt seized by the need to see…Nina Jacobson. All through the Lady shoot, he had wanted to chase the oval picture of her out of his head, but he was never able to do it. For the nine weeks of shooting, he had never found his peace. But now, with a new lease on life extended to him by Horn, Night realized something he didn’t know during the shoot, that Nina was not the enemy. She had made Night better—as a writer, as a director, as a boss. In their years working together, Night had wondered if he would always be a child to her, but now he had figured out that she had actually helped him grow up. He wanted her to know that he’d pull her out of a burning building. It was the old Night mojo talking, out of nowhere, odd, half-crazy and inspiring. It was the same thing he’d wanted to tell the stewardess, the same thing he wanted to tell Chris Doyle, the same thing he did tell Cindy Cheung that day in the audition room. He quickly set up a breakfast date with her.

  They met at the Hotel Bel-Air. It was nothing like the breakup dinner at Lacroix. Night ate huge pieces of French toast, and there was no fighting. They talked about Lady, and about other movies, too. Night now knew things he hadn’t known before: It wasn’t Nina’s fault that she didn’t “get” the original Lady sale script; it was Night’s fault. And now, after all the script revisions, after all the shooting, after four months of editing, there had to be a movie in there somewhere, if Night had enough game to find it. And none of that had anything to do with Nina. All Nina did was dismiss a flawed script. Sure, she could have seen beyond the flaw, or shown faith. But she didn’t, and that’s what led Night to Horn. It worked out. Or it could, if Night could do his job. It was all on Night, and he liked it that way. It was late in the day, but he had found his peace.

  He had a month of work ahead of him. A month to make Lady a picture people would want to see, his E.T. One month until he would return to the Warners lot and show the movie again to Alan Horn and prove to him that his faith in him was justified. Night knew how minute changes had ripple effects throughout any movie. E.T. had proved that to him. He saw the movie when it first came out, in the summer of 1982, shortly before he turned twelve. The movie transported him. Twenty years later, he took his older daughter to see it when it was re-released. There were added scenes, changes in the score, the beats were different. The movie they watched had no impact on his daughter, and did nothing for Night. Night felt like a piece of his childhood had been robbed from him. He couldn’t figure out the problem. Had he changed in a fundamental way, or had the movie? He ordered a DVD of the original version and, when he was working on Lady, showed it to his younger daughter and a group of her friends in the screening room at the barn. Everything came flooding back to him, the magic and fantasy and dream of the 1982 movie. The young girls loved it, too. Night was convinced: It was all in the editing.

  March was all
fury. He made hundreds of changes. I’d tell you about them, but I didn’t know much about what he did myself. Night and I were talking regularly, but I wasn’t over his shoulder during editing. He wanted me to see the movie when it was closer to complete. He wanted me to see it with fresh eyes, like an ordinary moviegoer. The main thing he wanted to do to Lady then was to drive the play—the theatricality—out of it.

  At the end of March, Night returned to the Warners lot, to watch it with a few dozen people, mostly Warner Bros. executives and Night’s crew members. Bryce was there with her fiancé. (I had wanted to come to this screening, and Night was fine with that, but Horn wouldn’t allow it.) Night felt the movie was ready for Bhavna to see, and she and Night sat together, off by themselves. As Bhavna watched Lady in the Water for the first time, Night spent the entire movie reading her, noting when she squeezed his arm, when she laughed, when she cried, when she held her breath.

  When they had married, there was no promise of professional success for Night. There were a million aspiring screenwriters and directors on the NYU campus in the early 1990s, or so it seemed. The only thing they both knew was that Night would work hard. Night’s in-laws, at first, were dubious about his ability to make a living in his chosen field. What he did didn’t seem like proper work. In the early months of their marriage, Bhavna and Night lived with Night’s parents, the doctors Shyamalan. They had proper professions. And now Bhavna was sitting in an opulent screening room in the company of the Warners president, watching a movie written and directed by her husband and inspired by a story he had told their two daughters, a movie that would open on thousands of screens across the world, supported by a $70 million marketing campaign—if he could finish it. Night was like Vick, the author character he played in the movie. Vick couldn’t finish either.

  Bryce loved the movie and the crew was praising it and Horn and Robinov were talking about how they would market the movie and what it would do overseas. Everybody was looking ahead, except Night. He knew the movie had not made progress. In fact, over the course of a month, it had gone backward. He could tell by Bhavna alone. She had said to him, “I love it, but it’s not your most important movie.” Bhavna knew him better than anybody in the world, loved him more and supported him more, and even she wasn’t seeing the movie. Night blamed himself. If he really had made the movie he wanted to make, it would have been obvious that Lady—by far—was the most important movie he had ever made. He felt completely alone. The voices returned.

  It’s not Horn.

  No, it is Horn. You’ve been praying for somebody to hear you and now someone finally is and it’s Mr. Alan Horn!

  I wish it were that easy. It’s not. It’s not Horn. It’s not Chris Doyle. It’s not Paul Giamatti or Cindy Cheung. It’s not Nina. It’s not the stewardess on the Warner Bros. jet. It’s not the kid from NYU. It’s not Bhavna.

  Why? Why must it always be so complicated?

  What I’m trying to do, you do alone.

  You’re not alone. You’re surrounded by people who help you.

  Without them, I’d be lonelier still.

  In early April, when Night returned from Los Angeles, I got to see the movie, nearly four months before its release date. At Night’s invitation, my wife, Christine, joined me. We had met Night nearly two years earlier, on that balmy evening when his energy invigorated an entire dinner party. As I got to know him, I found him to be only more invigorating. I never got tired of listening to him or watching him in action, spinning his rings and laughing crazily, tying his boots while spewing words faster than his listeners could absorb them. I was learning from him all the time, about storytelling, about reading people, about working hard. He became more than a subject for me. In ways, he became an ideal.

  I’d come to see what Bhavna had known for a long time: Beneath Night’s zeal were great reserves of sadness and desperation. His outsized ambition and determination made him crazy, but they also kept him sane. He really did want to make art for the masses, not just profitable filmed entertainment, and he was suffering for it. That may sound pretentious, but it’s the truth. Night, generally, was agonizingly honest whenever he examined himself, which was often. During takes he’d sometimes say, out loud and to himself, “Why can’t I get this to work?” I was rooting for him and his movie. Maybe that sounds like the writer getting too close to his subject, but to me, honest reporting is you dig as deep as you can and you write what you find, and what you feel.

  When Christine and I arrived at the farm, in very late afternoon, the air was cool and windy. Maddie escorted us to the barn. Any other time I would have just walked there myself, but this was an event. Night greeted us warmly. He was still-jet-weary from his Los Angeles trip, and from everything else. He walked us into the screening room. It was half past five. He gave—most atypically—just a few words of instruction, pointed to the projectionist, and he was gone.

  The yellowish overhead light dimmed slowly. Our anticipation was exquisite: Christine and I were on a movie date, our grandest one ever. We had left our cell phones in the car, along with our everyday lives. First came the company credits, the Blinding Edge Pictures logo of the diving man. And then, with no warning, Paul Giamatti’s bearded face and bold eyes filled the screen. He was looking to squash a bug. Behind him was the movie’s chorus, the Perez de la Torre sisters. They were screaming. We laughed. We were off.

  The screening room had forty seats, but we were the only people in it. At one point, the plan had been for us to watch it with a test audience, to watch it with forty civilians, forty people unknown to Night. They would have been given scorecards and Night would have analyzed their results. But Night had canceled the test screening. He knew the movie wasn’t there from Bhavna’s response alone. Still, he screened the movie for Christine and me. Forty responses from strangers might overwhelm him, but one or two from people he knew was different. Maybe we could help.

  Night and I had spent a lot of time together. He liked being examined. When I didn’t know what he was talking about, he’d figure out another way to explain himself. I could not imagine a more emotionally available subject. Night, to me, was Andre, from My Dinner with Andre, a movie Night watched on my suggestion. All the movie shows is two people engaged in a dinner conversation in an elegant restaurant. Except at the beginning and end, Andre, a theater director, does nearly all the talking. He describes to Wally his trip to a forest in Poland with forty strangers just to see what happens, and the other desperate things he does to get out of his comfort zone. I have always felt like Wally, who lives on the hope that today might be the day his agent calls with good news about one of his plays and in the meantime he’s comforted by home delivery of The New York Times and other simple pleasures. (Paul Giamatti has a lot of that in him: Happiness is being in a Vietnamese restaurant, reading an Ian Fleming novel while a steaming bowl of egg noodles warms your face, nobody bothering you. To me, Paul was as familiar as Night was exotic.) In My Dinner with Andre, Andre is inspiring and Wally is inspirable. That played out for Night and me. I think of optimism as a form of prayer, and maybe it is, but Night made me realize that hope is not enough. To him, positive thinking was a single brick in the foundation and nothing more. I never heard him begin a sentence with the words “I hope.” He didn’t confuse hope with faith. Faith was born in effort.

  Watching Lady in the Water—the version I saw of it—was a devastating experience. By far the biggest obstacle for me was that I couldn’t figure out Story. I didn’t know if she was a human being or a mermaid or what. The idea of her as a narf, a sort of angel, went right over my head. Story—and here I must detach Story from the lovely real-life Bryce—cried too much. She spent a lot of time in the shower and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like she had to stay wet. I didn’t know anything about Story’s life. She felt too abstract, and that made the movie feel abstract. Where did she come from? Where was she going? Why should I care?

  There were good things. The whole look of the movie—Chris Doyle’s phot
ography in particular—was sumptuous. Night was natural in his role as Vick Ran, writer in despair, wanting to save the world; the role fit him. Paul did an excellent job. He gets to do more in Lady than in any other movie he’d been in: He’s angry, he’s droll, he cries, he carries Story while running from a scrunt, he’s on the screen for two hours, and he’s good the whole time. (As Night’s mother would say, maybe something good will come out of it for him!) Sarita was outstanding as Night’s sister, Anna Ran. Their relationship was, for me, one of the most believable things in the movie, and I saw the movie more through her eyes than anybody else’s.

  In fact, late in the day, when Anna stands in the mailroom with Young-Soon and the five Perez de la Torre girls as one of the seven sisters, Lady in the Water became the movie I had hoped it would be. From that point on, I was swept away. It became, for me, about Cleveland, and not Story, and that made all the difference. I still didn’t care about Story, but I wanted to know if Cleveland would be healed. In the last fifteen minutes, I finally had a rooting interest. It was soaring. It wasn’t too little, but it was too late.

  The closing credits came. I wondered if my parents would like it. They like esoteric movies. I waited to hear Youssou N’Dour singing Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” But it never came.

  By prearrangement, Night was not there when the screening concluded, and I was relieved. Christine and I left the barn in stunned silence. I knew she felt as I did. We stepped out through doors designed for horses and were surprised to see how much light was still in the sky. We walked down a minor hill and to our car, drove through Wyeth country, found a restaurant, and over dinner compared our similar notes.