Out Of This World

Shyamalan's career seems especially significant at the moment because Hollywood at large is patently not making the nice movies. Or at least the fresh ones. This summer has been a rush of franchise pictures based on pre-existing concepts and characters. Of course, attendance is up 15 percent--and so is self-congratulation. Which means it's getting exponentially less likely that mainstream filmmakers will do anything as radical as sit down and try to, you know, think stuff up. "Signs" will have to fight to be No. 1 because its release is bracketed by two blockbusters borrowing James Bond's mojo: "Austin Powers in Goldmember" and "XXX." The latter was set to open the same day as "Signs," but the "XXX" folks opted against going head to head and moved back seven days. "They're scared to death, man," says Shyamalan. "They're absolutely terrified." That didn't sound cocky, did it? Just checking. "Night thrives on being the one original movie in a sea of sequels and derivative products," says Disney Studios chairman Richard Cook. "He loves the competition. I think that's part of what gets him going."

One morning in June, Shyamalan paces around a sound-mixing studio in midtown Manhattan. On screen, Gibson's character and his family stand shellshocked in their front hall, as booms and bangs and what sound like scuttling claws start filling every corner of the house. At a mixing desk facing the screen, sound editors "audition" a series of noises for a crucial thud at the front door. Shyamalan considers each option with what, to an outsider, seems like an extraordinarily discerning ear. He tells the editors he doesn't want some cheesy, generic boom. He tells them the characters will seem smarter if they're responding to subtler noises--and that the audience's ears won't be ruined for quieter effects to come. All the while, he teases his team to keep the energy up, at one point telling sound mixer Michael Semanick to do the opposite of whatever he did on "Attack of the Clones." Semanick laughs, and says over his shoulder, "You don't want $245 million in five weeks?" Shyamalan grins and shakes his head. "I'm telling you, if you'd done a great movie, you'd have made four times as much as that."

For the record, the "star Wars" franchise has always been close to Shyamalan's heart (see "Top 10"), and he hasn't actually seen "Clones" yet: "I'm just giving Michael s--t.". Still, the director is obsessed with understanding why audiences do the things they do. "Last year was probably the worst year for movies for me since I've been alive," he says, after settling into a leather chair. "It was the worst. The quality of movies in general. We don't have to get into specifics. And what that creates is a starvation in the audience. And, ironically, what that creates is... If they know what they're getting--like a franchise, something established--the starvation says, 'I'll take that. I'll come in droves'." "Signs" will have to earn the audience's trust. "People believe in honesty. They really do," says Shyamalan. "And integrity--all the way down to the choice of a sound effect."

He pauses and looks up at the screen, where Gibson's character is trying to calm his kids down by telling them the stories of their births. They are the stories of Shyamalan's own daughters, 5 and 2, being born. "What will come across is something pure," he continues. "Hopefully. A voice. It will be the voice of a kid who was born in India and grew up in Philly. That's the only thing I have on the 'Scooby-Doos'." Later in the week, with "Signs" minutes away from being finished, Shyamalan shoots baskets in a portable hoop in the mixing room, and jokes around some more. "Let's say I decided to do 'Pokemon 5'--would you come?" he asks Semanick, brightly. "You wouldn't come?" He turns to his film editor, Barbara Tulliver. "If I did 'Pokemon 5,' would you come? Come on! I could turn it into a metaphor for the human condition!"

Shyamalan was born with the name Manoj in Pondicherry, India, during one of his parents' trips back home to visit family. A few months later, the Shyamalans returned to the Philadelphia suburbs, where his father, Nelliate, was a cardiologist. The director remembers being small for his age, an enormously sensitive kid scared of--well, what have you got? Everything. His family was inseparable--even today, they greet each other with a flurry of hugs and kisses, though they live only five minutes apart on the Main Line--and his mother says that whenever young Manoj had to be alone she'd call him every 30 minutes. Shyamalan was raised Hindu but sent to a Roman Catholic grade school for the discipline. Yes, he was aware of being different and other, but his memories of growing up have more to do with basketball and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He began making his movies at 10 or so. He used an 8mm camera. He'd have to plug it into a VCR and lug the whole mess around with an extension cord.

Though Shyamalan tends to be quite frank in interviews, he hesitates when he's asked something that might affect his loved ones, might encroach on their "shared history." When I ask him if he drank or dated in high school, he grins nervously. "Uh, yeah. Are you gonna tell my parents? Are you gonna write that and tell my parents?" Surely they know. "I don't think they do! You're gonna shock them. They're gonna have a heart attack!" Shyamalan is laughing now. He is tall and broad-shouldered, but he has a laugh that is so childlike it is almost a giggle. While Shyamalan was at New York University studying film, he fell hard for a fellow student named Bhavna, who's now getting a Ph.D. in child psychology. He proposed to her not long afterward with a note in a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. "She was like, 'This is so weird. This says...' " He was already on his knees.