M. Night Shyamalan

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2014 issue of World Screen.

What started a few years ago as a slow trickle of feature-film talent to television has become a seemingly endless flow. And it’s no longer just the premium and basic-cable networks benefiting from this trend. Take Wayward Pines, a FOX and FOX International Channels event series for 2015. The actors lined up for the production, based on a series of novels by Blake Crouch, include Oscar nominees Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard, plus Oscar winner Melissa Leo. M. Night Shyamalan, whose credits include The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Last Airbender, was enlisted to direct the pilot and help craft the show as executive producer.

***Imagen***WS: How did you come to be involved in Wayward Pines?
SHYAMALAN: We [at my production company Blinding Edge Pictures] were thinking about getting into TV for the first time. We started having conversations about ways of doing it, about stories we could tell. I was very hesitant. I felt like there should be a gut [response to an idea]. I didn’t want to think it through so much. And then Ashwin Rajan, who works with me here, read this script. I had walked into his office as he was reading it. He had this look that said, “I’m reading something here, let me finish it.” So I walked away. He called me and said, “I read this pilot and I think it’s great. I don’t want to tell you too much. You should read it.” I read it late that night in bed. I called him and said, “I need to know what happens. If it’s too similar to something I’ve done before, I don’t want to do it. But if the answer isn’t something derivative, I’m interested!” Chad Hodge, who wrote the pilot, got on the phone and told me what the story was. I was like, “Ah, I can do that! That’ll be great!” It had that kind of David Lynchian tonality, and there was an explanation as to why everyone was acting like they were in a David Lynch movie. [Laughs] I said, Let’s just do it. There was no thinking. There were all these other things I had been thinking about doing, had been deliberating for months and months. This was a very gut reaction. That’s always a good sign, when internally you feel at peace with the decision. It turned out to be the right decision, now that I’m on the other side of it, just finishing up the last episode. It was a very positive experience for me.

You’ve caught me in a philosophical moment. I’m finishing this TV show and a new movie, so I’m [at a point where] I’m evaluating my life and my decisions. How do I feel about myself and what I did over the last year? I’m really happy.

WS: How has the transition been for you, moving into directing television?
SHYAMALAN: When you’re writing and directing your own movies, it’s a long cycle. When I’m doing my thrillers it’s probably two years, at the fastest a year and three-quarters, between movies. The last two movies I made were big CGI studio films. There were three years between [each release]. In fact, because they were big CGI movies, I didn’t have that intimacy of the art form that I thrive on. At the end of the day, the dinner table scene is my favorite scene.

[Wayward Pines] allowed me to work with a battalion of actors that I wanted to work with. If I read a movie that simply doesn’t have enough parts that are fit for a whole bunch of actors I’d like to work with, well that’s another two years that I can’t work with them. My selfish goal is to tell stories that I’m interested in, in a long form on TV, and then put world-class actors in all the roles. That excites me, it motivates me.

You’d think that if you’re adding something to your plate, you’re going to diminish your endurance and your ability to create. That isn’t what happened. In fact, there was so much back and forth between my [new] movie and Wayward Pines, and it wasn’t enervating—it was fueling me. First of all, you have to work really fast in TV. So you’re stripping away all your comforts and bad habits, especially when coming off two giant movies. The beauty of the TV show was, as we were [in production], the network and I would say, “We really love this scene,” or “This character has now blossomed, I’d love to put that moment in the pilot,” or “I need to bring this out in this character.” It was a fascinating experience, because it also taught me a kind of permanent vigilance through the process of post-production. I didn’t think of it in the traditional film format of, you prep, you shoot, that’s it, let’s see what your grade is at the end of it. You think of it as listening to the story the whole time, and you work that into how you’re making the [show]. That was really nice. I could go in like an assassin and shoot for two or three days to fill in episodes. I remember being in my hotel room saying, Your only job is to get X, Y, Z from the character—concentrate on that. Get Matt [Dillon], Melissa [Leo], whoever, focused on giving you this particular thing. It was a new part of the art form. Rather than being so macro focused, it allowed me to go in and do some surgical work, which I found super satisfying, as did the actors. The story is so luscious and big, and it just rolls like a big 18-wheeler over you. Our job as storytellers is to make sure it has genuine idiosyncratic human qualities in it. So we were able to make it more of a director’s medium than [TV] normally is. We hired really wonderful directors that brought a slightly different touch to each of their episodes. When we felt like we found a partner, we asked them to do a second episode.

WS: Is there more involvement from network execs than you’d find in the movie business?
SHYAMALAN: Putting aside my two big CGI studio movies, my thrillers are very much like independent movies [where studio execs will] see the screenplay, they’ll approve the budget, and then I go shoot it and show it to them and they’ll say how they feel about it. Then I go away and work on cutting this and doing this, and then I come back and show them another cut. Then we test it. That’s the end of it.

I found [the relationship with the networks] was healthy. Yes, there were more people involved, naturally, but I needed them to be involved. I wasn’t directing and writing every episode. After my pilot, I laid out the structure of the piece with the writers. Other than the casting and the hiring of the directors and the crew, where my oversight was strongest was being an architect over the story. The minutiae of, “Hey the kitchen scene needs to be shorter,” I let [the writers and the network executives] work that out and then they would show it to me. I’d come back and say, “I love it,” or “You gutted it—you need to put it back!” They always listened. We were very much in sync over the tone. That’s the advantage of having the pilot written before you sell [a show]. You’re not going to have a partner that doesn’t get it. Maybe one day I will sell a TV show on a pitch. But I could see how that could cause [confusion]—“Oh, you wanted to do that with it? You wanted to make it funny and weird?” “Yeah.” “We didn’t see that [in the script] at all!”

WS: In serialized shows, audiences will often complain about being given more questions than answers in the course of a season. How did you decide how much to reveal as you mapped out the episodes?
SHYAMALAN: We made a pretty bold decision. In retrospect [the decision we made] was very unlike me, but, again, this is why it’s great to try a different format, to test yourself a little bit. We made a decision right away to do a big reveal right in the middle—the big reveal. We could have easily strung it out for the run, but we didn’t do that. I wanted to live in that world where we as audience members understand everything and now we’re dealing with the ramifications. In many ways it morphs from one show to another as you’re watching, which I really like as well.

WS: We have to talk about your amazing cast, many of whom are also making their first move to TV.
SHYAMALAN: Most of them had never done television before, or if they had, it wasn’t their primary job. I basically cast it like an independent movie. There was a tone I was going for, a grounded and quirky tone [where the actors] complemented each other. The first day of rehearsals, we all had dinner together at my house. Sitting around the table, I thought, This is amazing! They felt excited knowing that no matter what scene they were in, they were in it with a world-class actor. In the movie industry, if you’re not making X, Y, Z comic-book version number ten, if you’re not interested in that or don’t fit into that dynamic, there’s not a lot of space for you. At least 40 percent of movies now are that. We’re certainly not making Terms of Endearment or Kramer vs. Kramer anymore. So there are a lot of world-class actors on the table. I think that’s what the pull of TV is right now—it’s honoring resonance. And that’s a great thing for all of us.

WS: I know it’s being billed as a limited event series, but does the ending leave room for a second season?
SHYAMALAN: Blake Crouch has written many books. With him we deviated from the books, but we informed each other. He was writing his [book series] and we were writing our show—so it was almost like two versions of the same conceit from two storytellers. You never know. I’m intrigued by the way it ends. And that was what I wanted. I wonder what happens next. It certainly fits that mold of a Twilight Zone episode!