Out Of This World

Shyamalan's first feature was an independent movie called "Praying With Anger," which grossed $7,000 and change at the box office in 1992. He shot the movie in India to save money, and actually starred, turning in an endearingly creaky performance as an American finding his roots. (These days, Shyamalan limits himself to cameos.) Because "Praying With Anger" contains not one but two star-crossed romances, I ask Shyamalan if Bhavna's parents objected to their marriage. He does not giggle. "I don't know how I can talk about that without bringing in her business and her family's business," he says. "That's a shared history." He elaborates a bit, saying that Bhavna's family was from the north of India and that his was from the south, and he was slightly younger. Those things are deal-breakers in India, of course. "But everything's cool now," he says. I ask him if he'd ever thought about giving up. "No, I'm not that kind of guy." Did she? "Probably." How did he persuade her not to? "I'm kinda hard to get off your back when I want something."

In 1994, Shyamalan wrote a script called "Labor of Love." Fox, he says, offered him hundreds of thousands of dollars, assuring him he could also direct. Once he had sold it to them, it became clear that they'd just been yesing him to get the screenplay. "I cried. It killed me. It was a story about what I felt about first being married. It was pure. I said, 'You can't do this.' So they flew me out and I met with all the bigwigs in a room. I was wearing a pin-striped suit. My mom got me that suit so I wore it. Apparently, you don't wear suits in Hollywood. So I walked in looking like some high-school kid trying to get a job. Immediately, there were all these jokes about my suit. They're like, 'Yeah, we're gonna give you a $25 million movie'." The film was never made. "I cursed it."

When Shyamalan did get a second feature off the ground, in 1996, things actually went far, far worse. "Wide Awake" is about a Catholic schoolboy whose grandfather's death sets him on a search for God. After Shyamalan edited the film, Miramax's famed co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein, insisted that it be recut. Rosie O'Donnell, who plays a nun in the movie, intervened on Shyamalan's behalf. A meeting was set so that everybody could clarify his position. O'Donnell got the flu, and had to call in on the speakerphone. Weinstein was already put out with her because she'd just fired a friend of his from her TV show. "I said, 'Listen, Harvey, I don't want you to release it unless it's Night's version'," O'Donnell remembers. "'He's the artist. You're just the guy who frames it and sells it.' Well, you know what? That didn't go over big. He started saying, 'Who do you think you are? You're just a f---ing talk-show host!' He went off. I was stunned. I thought he knew that he acquired the films and that the other people were the artists. I didn't think this was news to him. He said, 'Like you would f---ing know. You b----! You c---!' "

O'Donnell cried, and told Weinstein to shove it somewhere very specific. "Night called me afterwards, like, 'Oh my God, are you all right?' " she says. "Thank God Harvey didn't crush him, because it takes a lot to stand up to that. I gotta tell you, it takes a lot to make me cry and he totally made me cry." O'Donnell says that to Weinstein's credit he later apologized, sending her jewelry and flowers. Asked to respond to all of the above, Weinstein sent NEWSWEEK a gentlemanly statement: "Night is an incredibly talented filmmaker, and it's unfortunate for us that we were unable to find a successful way to market 'Wide Awake.' It's one of my great disappointments, since I loved the film. Thank God for DVD."

Shyamalan himself regards the "Wide Awake" fracas as a pivotal moment in his career. "Harvey's just the way the world is," he says. "If the movie was great and was going to make a lot of money, it would have gone very smoothly." The episode taught him that making uncommercial movies makes you vulnerable and that, as he puts it, "I never want to be weakened and victimized again." (At one point while Shyamalan was in the mixing room finishing "Signs," he joked to his film editor, "Harvey called. He wants you to recut this." Somebody else piped up, "He's heading right over." Chuckling ensued.)

After "Wide Awake" grossed all of $300,000, Shyamalan reminded himself that it was blockbusters like "Raiders" that inspired him in the first place. "I think Night recognized that he has a very sensitive, sentimental streak in him," says Barry Mendel, who produced "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable," "and that he needs to juxtapose that with something darker, edgier and more commercial." Shyamalan began writing a supernatural thriller about a serial killer and a boy who sees dead people. It was lousy at first. A "Silence of the Lambs" rip-off. Then he started thinking about the kid. What if he was a really sensitive kid, a kid so empathetic that he even felt bad for ghosts? Shyamalan wrote some dialogue for a birthday party--a turning point, though it never made it to the screen--where the sensitive kid and a chubby kid are just sitting there, friendless and ostracized. The sensitive kid tells the chubby kid, "My mom said God made some of us different, knowing that it'd be hard. But he picked the people who would be different really carefully." Then the sensitive kid leans forward to the chubby kid: "God thinks we're strong."