Sixth Sense filmmaker changes his approach to focus on emotion and spirituality

Jahnava Nitai Das · August 8, 2002

By Glenn Whipp

Los Angeles Daily News

Aug 5, 2002

M. Night Shyamalan knows you didn't like Unbreakable as much as you did The Sixth Sense, and it bothers him. Deeply. This is a man whom actress Cherry Jones describes as an "utter showman," and the showman was bothered that people didn't turn out in big numbers for his last movie. So he wanted to rectify that with his new film, Signs.

We'll let Mel Gibson, who stars in Signs, tell the story.

"He was sitting in Denny's one day, kind of scratching his head, and he watched this family come in and go to the smorgasbord," Gibson says. "And they were all eating and laughing and having a great old time. And he watched them for a while; he really likes watching people. And he thought, `I know why I wasn't as happy with Unbreakable as I was with The Sixth Sense. I forgot about those people there, the family eating the $5.99 pancake buffet.'

"So he wanted to make a movie for everybody -- the parents, the kids and the grandkids -- and sort of unite himself to the human experience," Gibson continues. "And to me, that's the mark of a great filmmaker, the desire to make great art that everyone can enjoy in a vicarious way and not be the slightest bit elitist about it."

Of course, elitists don't usually eat at Denny's. And elitists don't set out to make movies that will set box-office records, much less tell the world that that is their intention. So when Shyamalan's slow-moving superhero thriller Unbreakable did about a third the business of The Sixth Sense, he knew he needed to go back to the drawing board to reclaim his audience.

"What I realized with Unbreakable is that it doesn't matter if you have technical prowess if you don't connect with the people in the theater," the 31-year-old Shyamalan says. "So I decided to just let myself be myself on this one and show the two things about me that I don't think I've let audiences see -- joy and emotion."

That said, Signs remains very much an M. Night Shyamalan movie. As he did with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Shyamalan with Signs takes another B-movie genre -- in this case, the alien invasion movie -- and uses it to spin a tale of faith and belief.

Gibson plays a former minister and father of two who has renounced God in the aftermath of his wife's tragic death. The family, which includes the minister's good-natured younger brother (Joaquin Phoenix), has never really dealt with the shock of the loss, but some extraordinary circumstances (in the form of extraterrestrials) force them to finally come to grips with what has happened.

The film has everything you'd expect from Shyamalan -- an unsettling atmosphere, ethereal children, gripping tension -- and a few things (namely humor) that will come as a surprise. Mostly, though, Shyamalan used Signs as a vehicle to heighten his characters' emotions and eliminate the detached, distant feeling of his last two films.

Without emotion

"My first two little movies were so emotional in tone and did so poorly that I thought that was something that was not connecting with audiences," Shyamalan says of Praying With Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998). "So I held myself back a lot on The Sixth Sense and only let myself feel emotion at the end. And the response was so great, I thought, `I'll hold back even more on Unbreakable.'

"And in the process, I feel I forgot a part of myself because the emotional side is a big part of me. So I just went back to that, and I'm really glad I did."

Shyamalan, aware of Gibson's Catholic faith and large family (the 46- year-old actor has seven children), wrote the part of the conflicted minister with him in mind. He phoned Gibson, and the two talked for half an hour, and Gibson agreed to take a look at the script. That same day, Shyamalan sent his cousin to Gibson's Los Angeles home to hand-deliver the screenplay.

"It came with a padlock and chains on it," Gibson jokes. "I was instructed to never show it to anyone else or I'd be left in a shallow grave somewhere."

That kind of secrecy points to another Shyamalan trademark -- the twist ending. Yes, Signs contains a revelatory moment, but it arrives in a different context.

Explains Phoenix: "The epiphany is there, it's just that it's more subtle and it's for the characters" relationships. What the audience did at the end of The Sixth Sense, the characters do here. They say, `Oh my God, this is what it all means. There is purpose.'"

Shyamalan is big on purpose and meaning. If he's first and foremost an "utter showman," he is also determined that his movies tackle some Big Issues. In Signs, it's clear the crop circles and flying saucers and aliens are merely plot devices that spur Gibson's character to examine the meaning of life. For Shyamalan, the scariest thing in Signs isn't the possibility of an alien invasion. It's that a good man could lose his connection with God.

"The humanity in the film comes from the spiritual element," Gibson says, "because all of us have within us an instinctual thing that wants to reach for a higher place, that has a suspicion that there is a higher realm outside ourselves that exists and influences who we are. We all ask that question: `Why the hell am I here?' That's human nature. And Night gives us a big dose of that human nature in the film."

Shyamalan says he doesn't consider himself "religious." He was born in India but raised in the affluent Penn Valley suburb of Philadelphia. Shyamalan went to Catholic school for 10 years, so he had the dual influence of his parents' Hindu background along with what he learned in school. Ultimately, he considers himself a mystic who's interested in spirituality but not organized religion.

A man of faith

"Faith is something very different than religion for me," Shyamalan says. "Religion is some group saying their particular version of God is the right version, and that's hard for me to accept. The world has become such a smaller place. It makes it hard for me to believe that the guy in Nepal and the little boy in Africa and the old man in Maine, all three of them with different versions of God, and yet maybe none of them are right. I just can't believe that. There has to be some unifying thing."

The central theme of Signs -- that there are no coincidences -- pops up in just about every religious teaching. The fact that a movie about the resilience of the human spirit began shooting on Sept. 13, 2001, wasn't lost on anyone, particularly Cherry Jones, an acclaimed stage actress who came directly to the rural Pennsylvania shooting site from her apartment in New York City.

"You want to talk about coincidences? The parallels are a little eerie," says Jones, who plays a police officer in the movie.

Adds Shyamalan: "We just all kind of shook our heads at the parallels between the movie and what happened on 9/11. If you wanted to, you could read a lot into this fictional story of this alien threat and its implications on one family. So much of the dialogue was now loaded with meaning."

And some of that meaning may connect with audiences. Then again, it might not. Signs has so many different layers that it will likely provoke very different reactions from those who see it. Some people will dig the sci-fi thriller aspects of the movie; some will appreciate the spiritual subtext. And probably more than a few will scratch their heads and say the combination doesn't work.

For Gibson though, that strange synthesis of elements was the reason he signed up for Signs.

"Films do three things if they're really great," Gibson says. "They entertain, they educate, and they take you to a higher plane of existence or a spirituality, reaching outside your own realm. I think Night has pulled off the hat trick with this one."