M. Night Shyamalan
Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan[1] (/ˈʃɑːməlɑːn/ SHAH-mə-lahn;[3] born August 6, 1970)[4] is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. His films often employ supernatural plots and twist endings. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3.3 billion globally.[5]
M. Night Shyamalan
Indian
American[1]
- Film director
- producer
- screenwriter
- actor
1992–present
Padma Shri (2008)[2]
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India, and raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. His early films include Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998) before his breakthrough film The Sixth Sense (1999), which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. He then released Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004). Following a string of poorly received films—Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013)—he experienced a critical and commercial career resurgence with The Visit (2015), Split (2016), Glass (2019), Old (2021), and Knock at the Cabin (2023).[6][7][8]
Shyamalan is also one of the executive producers and occasional director of the 20th Television science fiction series Wayward Pines (2015–2016) and the Apple TV+ psychological horror series Servant (2019–2023), for which he also serves as showrunner.[9][10]
Early life[edit]
Shyamalan was born in Mahé, India, a town in the Union Territory of Pondicherry.[11][12] His father, Dr. Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Mahé and a JIPMER graduate; his mother, Dr. Jayalakshmi, a Tamil, is an OB-GYN.[13]
Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old.[14] Shyamalan was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan was raised Hindu.[15] He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to hell.[16] When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade in religion class and [he] wasn't Catholic".[16] He later attended the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar.[17] Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan,[18] graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted "Night" as his second name.
Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies.[19] On each DVD release of his films, beginning with The Sixth Sense and with the exception of Lady in the Water, he has included a scene from one of these childhood movies, which, he feels, represents his first attempt at the same kind of film.[19]
Books[edit]
While working on his film The Happening, Shyamalan developed an interest in improving the delivery of education in American schools. He hired doctoral student James Richardson to do most of the background research and as a result published I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America's Education Gap through Simon and Schuster in 2013.[58] John Willol of NPR reviewed the book by stating "I Got Schooled is a breezily written, research driven call to change America's approach to education. Shyamalan is smart and sincere, and his innovative ideas are unbound by the educational establishment."[59]
Personal life[edit]
Shyamalan married Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he met at New York University.[60] The couple have three daughters, including director Ishana and musician Saleka.[61][62] His cousin is actor Ritesh Rajan.[63]
Shyamalan and his family live near Philadelphia at Ravenwood, a 125-acre (51 ha) estate, built around a 27,000-square-foot (2,500 m2) 1937 Georgian Revival house.[64]
Shyamalan is a season ticket holder of the Philadelphia 76ers.[65]
In 2023, Shyamalan bought a 218-acre (88 ha) estate from the Rockefeller family in Willistown Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, which has five historic houses and two barns for $24 million.[66]
Controversies[edit]
SyFy Channel hoax[edit]
In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media hoax with SyFy Channel, which was eventually uncovered by the press. SyFy claimed in its "documentary" special The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of The Village, that as a child, Shyamalan had been dead for nearly a half hour while drowned in a frozen pond in an accident, and that upon being rescued he had experiences of communicating with spirits, fueling an obsession with the supernatural.
In truth, Shyamalan developed the hoax with SyFy, going so far as having SyFy staffers sign non-disclosure agreements with a $5 million fine attached and requiring Shyamalan's office to formally approve each step. Neither the childhood accident nor a supposed rift with the filmmakers ever occurred. The hoax included a nonexistent SyFy publicist, "David Westover", whose name appeared on press releases regarding the special. SyFy also fed false news stories to the Associated Press,[80] Zap2It,[81] and the New York Post,[82] among others.
After an AP reporter confronted SyFy Channel president Bonnie Hammer at a press conference, Hammer admitted the hoax, saying it was part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to generate pre-release publicity for The Village. This prompted SyFy's parent company, NBC Universal, to state that the undertaking was "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and we value our relationship with both."[83]
Plagiarism accusations[edit]
Robert McIlhinney, a Pennsylvanian screenwriter, sued Shyamalan in 2003, alleging similarities between Signs and his unpublished script Lord of the Barrens: The Jersey Devil.[84][85]
In 2004, Margaret Peterson Haddix claimed that The Village has numerous similarities to her young adult novel Running Out of Time, prompting discussions with publisher Simon & Schuster about filing a lawsuit.[84][85][86]
In response to both allegations, Disney and Shyamalan's production company Blinding Edge issued statements calling the claims "meritless".[86]
Orson Scott Card has claimed that many elements of The Sixth Sense were plagiarized from his novel Lost Boys, although he has said that enough had been changed that there was no point in suing.[87]
Pop culture and racism[edit]
After the release of The Happening, The Guardian's Kim Newman questioned, "Can it be a kind of racism that the Indian-born, Philadelphia-raised auteur is hammered for his apparent character (or funny name) rather more than, say, Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee?"[88] The British Film Institute (BFI) also discussed the impact of racism on Shyamalan's career, pointing to frequent mispronunciations of his last name.[89] By 2017, Vice said that "Shamalamadingdong" had become the "agreed-upon mockery of his name".[90]
BFI asked if critical attacks are the result of egotistical statements on Shyamalan's part. They question whether his strong statements of self-assurance coupled with the remarkable success of The Sixth Sense set up a fall from grace which was soon realized when a run of very successful films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village) seemingly collapsed with a string of critical failures (Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth).[89] In 2019, Tim Greiving of The Washington Post said that "his confidence was interpreted as arrogance by some, especially after he cast himself in Lady in the Water as a brilliant writer whose book is prophesied as a world-saver." Greiving continued, "Howard, who expressed pride in him for forging ahead despite his turn among critics, noted how rare it was for such a young filmmaker to write, direct and produce original material. He wondered whether that placed a bigger target on his back, as his reputation for doggedness was perpetuated within the industry and reinforced by critics."[91]
