Trap Director M Night Shyamalan On His Love For "Strange" Ideas: "On A Gut Level, The Tone…"

Indian-American filmmaker M Night Shyamalan says he has this belief, perhaps a naive one, that people look forward to new ideas, and the way he likes to get their attention is by doubling down on the “bizarreness” of the stories he is telling. The director, known for his mastery in suspense and twist endings, has now come up with Trap, starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donaughue, and Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka.

Warner Bros released Trap in India last week.

“It is a belief, maybe a naive one, that people are excited to feel something new if we can get to them… I tell my partners, Warner Bros, the thing that’s different about the movie is the thing to celebrate about it. Double down on how weird and different it is,” Shyamalan told PTI in an interview.

Trap sees Hartnett playing Cooper Adams, a regular father who is a dreaded serial killer known as ‘The Butcher’, with Donaughue essaying his teenage daughter Riley.

Asked how difficult it is as a filmmaker to make original movies when most of the Hollywood films are franchises or superhero projects with strong IP (Intellectual Property), the 54-year-old said in such an ecosystem there is no point in making something “usual”.

“The other aspect is that you need to sell the bizarreness of the new idea and really tell them why this is a new tone. I have an accent in the way I tell stories. Make sure I have that accent. I used to have conversations with the trailer makers. And I would say ‘Don’t cut it like it’s everyone’s movie’. You’re stealing the thing that’s unique about it. And that’s our weapon,” he added.

The Puducherry-born filmmaker, who grew up in Pennsylvania, made his breakthrough in Hollywood with The Sixth Sense in 1999, which earned him Oscar nominations for best director and screenplay. He followed it up with hits such as Unbreakable, Signs and The Village.

Then followed a string of poorly reviewed big-budget flops such as Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth,

Recalling that lean period in his career, Shyamalan said it made him realise the futility of trying to do it “the way the system wanted”.

What he did next was something he doesn’t recommend to others, but luckily, it worked for him and resurrected his career with The Visit (2015).

“I wasn’t succeeding, I wasn’t happy… I was so unhappy that I went like, ‘I’m just going to make a movie. I’m not going to ask anybody. I’m just going to go shoot a movie and mortgage the house. Let’s see what happens’.

“And that started this run, through Trap and Servant (series) and all of it. I do not recommend what I did, by the way. But it gave me a fire and an autonomy, which kind of leads to this hyper original (storytelling) that the audience can feel.” In his second innings, the filmmaker has directed Split, Glass, Old, Knock at the Cabin.

In Trap, he has collaborated with musician-daughter Saleka. She plays Lady Raven, a Taylor Swift-like persona, whose concert Cooper is attending with his teenage daughter when he comes to know about the trap set up for him.

Is the movie, with its elaborate musical set-up, the closest he has come to directing a Bollywood-like musical? “Saleka would say, it’s kind of in our genetics. So, doing an entirely music-based movie feels not as strange as you would think. She talks about that a lot and maybe it’s there in my head. It’s fascinating.

“If I was more fluent in the languages of India, to work from the South… My parents speak Tamil, but if I was more fluent, I would consider doing some version of something. I love it,” he said.

Asked about his love for strange ideas, Shyamalan said as a storyteller, he just wants “to know what happens” next.

“On a gut level, the tone and the angle of the story is exciting to me. When I was younger, I probably couldn’t have articulated it the way I just did, which is, there’s an idea and then an angle to it. I’ve come to realise you need both before the ignition goes off.” Mostly, the director said, he begins with an idea, and in the case of Trap, it was about a guy trapped at a concert.

“But the angle is you’re with him. You’re the dad, you love him and you have to figure a way out. That’s what made me want to make the movie.” His original name, as per internet, is Mec Nelliyattu Shyamalan. How and when Night became a part of it? Shyamalan said he chose his middle name when he was 17 or 18, and got the National Merit Scholarship, a government-funded scholarship given to a few students.

“To accept it, I had to be a citizen but I had no middle name. In some ways, I felt like I was inventing myself. I was very much at that time interested in Lakota Indian (a Native American tribe) culture. I read this name (Night). It was actually a woman’s name. At the time, it was more about connection to things we don’t know and nature, which felt right to me.

Later, when I ended up living in the thriller genre, it felt, coincidentally, tonally right for what I do for a living. But that wasn’t the intention. It felt like a moment of ‘Hey, this is your second version of yourself’,” he said.