In nuance lies his strength

There are almost as many differences between Shyamalan and Spielberg as there are similarities. The maker of ``Signs" is actually more Hitchcockian, says UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA.

Manoj Night Shyamalan... charting the course of his dreams.

WHEN ASKED in an interview for his high school yearbook what his dream was, Manoj Night Shyamalan decided that it was to be on the cover of TIME magazine with the heading: "NYU graduate takes Hollywood by storm."

The dream has not quite come true. Not, that is, if you are semantically inclined - for the release of his latest film "Signs" saw Shyamalan on the cover of Newsweek instead. A perfect Shyamalan coincidence. A sign, if you like.

Life could not be better for this 32-year-old son of Indian doctors. In Hollywood's idiom of success, Shyamalan's last two films, ``The Sixth Sense" and ``Unbreakable," grossed nearly a billion dollars at the box office.

"Signs", which got him twelve and a half million dollars to write and direct, has, in its first weekend, collected over $ 60 millions. The wunderkid has come of age, and the NYU graduate has hit Hollywood like an Indian monsoon wind.

``The Sixth Sense" brought its director into the limelight.

Indian, did I say? Born in Pondicherry, because his parents wanted him to be an Indian citizen, Shyamalan has more than a touch of Indianness in his craft, manifesting itself in a deep-rooted faith in the spiritual - even if he does locate Bangalore somewhere at the centre of the subcontinent in his latest film ``Signs."

Meanwhile, Manoj has become M, Neliatte has been Americanised to Night, and he is a self-professed bacon-cheese-burger-eating, basketball fan.

At the end of the day, an all-American filmmaker. They call him the new Spielberg.

Like Spielberg, Shyamalan started early. When, aged 12, he saw Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark", his life changed. He started making movies with his father's 8-mm camera, and when he wanted to join NYU to study filmmaking, leaving behind the family profession of medicine, nobody was really surprised.

And like Spielberg, he likes to make a movie in the old-fashioned way - to tell a good story with good old family values, suburban settings, some humour and something other-worldly, and above all to entertain the audience.

In 1992, at 22, Shyamalan made his first feature, "Praying With Anger," writing, directing and playing the lead role in the film that was named debut of the year by the American Film Institute. Two years later, he sold a screenplay to Twentieth-Century Fox. The next year, Shyamalan was asked to co-write the screenplay of "Stuart Little," the mouse film, based on an E. B. White classic, that went on to become a huge success.

In 1998 came Shyamalan's second feature film, "Wide Awake," which drew from the 10 years he was in an Episcopal school in Philadelphia. The film, shot entirely in Philadelphia, focusses on a boy's belief in heaven. It got noticed but sank without a trace commercially.

By now, Shyamalan had directed two small-scale feature films, sold an unmade screenplay and co-written a reasonably successful if uncomplicated children's film. Definitely nothing spectacular.

And then "The Sixth Sense" happened. The rest, after all, is movie history. Released in August 1999, coinciding with Shyamalan's birthday, the movie grossed $ 27 millions over the first weekend - and went on to become one of the top 10 grossing movies of all time.

``Unbreakable" did not enjoy the same commercial success as ``The Sixth Sense''.

More important, it told a story, and the audience was rapt. To Shyamalan, the making of a movie is an attempt at some kind of a cultural phenomenon, and "The Sixth Sense" definitely was one.

People were discussing the film, rabbis were preaching about it, Jay Leno was focussing on it and Haley Joel's "I see dead people" line fast became one of the most quoted cinematic lines, until even Bart Simpson was writing, "I can't see dead people. I can't see dead people" on the blackboard.

Here was a film that used less blood to tell its story than a "Nightmare on Elm Street" would use in one shot and yet managed to scare people many times over. Shyamalan has said in an interview, "Freddie Krueger with the blood - that doesn't really scare me. What scares me is something like this: if I had a photo of my wife on my desk, and it was face down, and I put it up and I walked out of the room and I came back and it was face down again. That's scary." Shyamalan returned the next year with "Unbreakable," a classic comic book to real-life transformation of superhero and the arch-villain. More cerebral than "The Sixth Sense," the movie did not enjoy the same unprecedented commercial success - after all, ``The Sixth Sense" was a hard act to follow. The denouement in ``Unbreakable" did not satisfy everyone, and the esoteric world of comic books was not quite appealing to a part of the audience. But if ``Unbreakable" was less of a success, Shyamalan's latest August release, ``Signs," with its visually exciting crop circles and its ``Panic Room"-style besieged-family drama, is rolling like a juggernaut towards box office records and critical acclaim. Nevertheless, there are almost as many differences between Shyamalan and Spielberg as there are similarities.

Both take B-grade stories and make A-grade movies. But if Spielberg is all light, love and little creatures, Shyamalan's craft is in the unsaid, in making the audience uneasy. Believing in the principle that less is more, he says more through his silences than others, including Spielberg, do with their multi-million dollar special effects. When the attention span of the average filmgoer is becoming shorter by the day, Shyamalan challenges the audience, forcing viewers to look out for nuances and details, from shattering bones to huge crop circles, to half-empty glasses of water left around the house.

"Signs," as many critics have noted, is like a darker version of Spielberg's furry feel-good ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Suspense, in a Shyamalan film, is like an invisible animal in the room.

There is a sense of foreboding, something hidden within the atmosphere that is about to attack — but decides to leave just before it attacks. As he has said, "I don't like to show everything, I like to prolong the revelation. I like to show the footprint of the creature without showing the creature." Again, definitely more Hitchcockian than Spielberg's rather popcorn-crunching style.

Shyamalan is in many ways like Spielberg in reverse, in the sense that he's darker, spookier, and also has a religious faith. Family is important in Shyamalan's films.

Suspense and subtle emotions make up ``Signs,''

Like Spielberg and, closer home, Mani Ratnam, Shyamalan revels in directing children, from Joseph Cross in "Wide Awake" to, famously, Haley Joel in ``The Sixth Sense," and Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin in "Signs."

Watching Breslin in "Signs," one is reminded of little Drew Barrymore as Gertie in "ET."

In a phone-in chat with Indian journalists, Shyamalan was matter-of-fact about the subject: "Actually I am shocked that kids are not in every movie. They are a third of the planet and are a gigantic part of our lives and not to have them in a film seems strange."

Children, in an M. Night film, bring with them a fearful irony: they are young and sensitive enough to sense the uncanny much before the adults, but they also suffer much more when faced with the supernatural.

Shyamalan is also a careful craftsman. In true filmmaking tradition, he believes in storyboarding, working with a storyboard artiste (Brick Mason) on detailed sketches on every scene of a movie. There is a careful, almost aching slowness in his films. And, of course, there is the much-vaunted Shyamalan signature of spirituality and faith. "Wide Awake" was all about a child's belief in heaven.

In "The Sixth Sense", Cole's sanctum sanctorum in moments of utmost terror houses all the gods. ``Unbreakable" is about a world, albeit a comic book one, of clearly defined good and evil. And now, "Signs" is all about the loss and regaining of faith. Night's heroes are suffering heroes, with souls, and they go through a process of discovery that goodness is a powerfully positive force in their world. They are also united in their love for their families - in "The Sixth Sense," the doctor's lifecycle is complete only after he has finished telling his wife what he wanted to say. In "Unbreakable" David gives up football for his wife's sake. And in "Signs", a preacher loses his faith after the death of his wife.

With such plot-dependent films, do Shyamalan's films make for more than one viewing - have they got that elusive quality called staying power? They certainly do: a second viewing of a Shyamalan movie is like going on a long drive along a familiar and beautiful countryside. In "The Sixth Sense" the clues are all there - the first time, we see the movie for the twist in the tale; the second and third times, we see it just to admire the way the plot builds up without giving anything away.

The scene at the restaurant where the Bruce Willis character keeps talking to his wife on their anniversary is a cinematic tour de force - it is only on the second viewing that you notice that the chair does not move when he sits down; and there is only one place set at the table.

When Cole says that he sees dead people, he also adds, "They don't know they're dead. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see." An almost perfect description of the doctor - but try catching it on your first viewing!

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