M. Night Shyamalan has a museum at his sprawling compound outside of Philadelphia.
It’s filled with ephemera from his movies, props and costumes galore from his three-decade-long career. “When I go in there, I go, Whoa, and I see other people’s faces when they go in there, and they’re surrounded by all these 17 movies,” said Shyamalan. “I am beyond lucky and I really believe every movie is my last movie.”
He said he felt this way at the end of “The Sixth Sense,” “because I don’t know if they’ll ever let me direct again once this movie comes out,” and that he’s driven, in what he describes as an “unhealthy way,” to focus on what comes next. (His 18th film, “Remain,” opens in February courtesy of Warner Bros.)
But in the museum, full of stuff, he’s allowed to take it all in. “It’s too much to reflect on it,” he said. He motions to a photo of his daughters, when they were younger, that’s sitting on his desk. Now they’re older and have boyfriends and are getting married.
“I was reading a book and it was saying how you surround yourself with beauty and people that are beautiful, acts that are beautiful, places that are beautiful to keep that energy in a certain place,” Shyamalan said. “And I’m so lucky that I’ve had to do this.”
For Shyamalan, Los Angeles “represents judgment and a yes/no thing, and it’s so culturally significant.” “I’m scared of it as a place,” he said matter-of-factly. In his mind, he’s “the nerdy Indian kid” and Los Angeles is full of lacrosse players.
But in a few hours he’ll be getting on a plane and flying to Los Angeles for a widespread retrospective of his work that will play as part of Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque. Over several nights and across two theaters (the Egyptian in Hollywood and the Los Feliz 3), the festival will be screening some of his most iconic films, packaged in thematic double features (End of the World has “Signs” and “Knock at the Cabin;” Power of Paranoia highlights “Trap” and “The Visit”) and, for one marathon session, the entirety of his Eastrail 177 trilogy (made up of “Unbreakable,” “Split” and “Glass”). It is an event.
“M. Night Shyamalan is one of the defining filmmakers of modern cinema—a fearless artist whose precision, conviction, and command of an audience are entirely his own,” said Evrim Ersoy, Head of Programming at Beyond Fest, in an official statement. “For nearly three decades, he has pursued a deeply personal vision on the grandest possible scale, creating films that provoke, terrify, move, and endure. To welcome Night and celebrate the extraordinary body of work he has built with this program is a profound honor.”
Or, as Shyamalan put it, “The lacrosse players want to celebrate you.”
While Shyamalan wasn’t directly involved in the programming, he will be on hand for many screenings to do Q&As or introductions and while he won’t be participating in the screenings at the Los Feliz 3, he does think that the three films playing there – “The Village,” “Old” and “Lady in the Water” – “are so deeply meaningful and so much represent who I am and fill in all the nuances of who I am in so many beautiful ways.” Later on in our interview, he writes a note to himself to bother Disney about putting out a 4K disc of “The Village.”
What is particularly powerful about the celebration being put on at Beyond Fest is that it celebrates a large swath of Shyamalan’s career, a career that has had its ebbs and flows over the course of the past few decades but whose work has endured far beyond initial critical appraisal and box office receipts.
“There’s my relationship to the art form, the craft of it, and that would be x, y, z movie I had to rush to hit the date. I wish I had three more months. Or I was trying to think about how to rewrite that moment, and I never figured it out, then I figured it out a year later” said Shyamalan. “And then there’s the complicated relationship to its ingestion into culture, which is a separate thing altogether. Which is not related to my feelings about my relationship to the movies and what I was trying to do and how well I achieved it or not. Its ingestion into the culture is a completely separate thing. And over the years, I’ve come to really diminish that part of it in my experience, which has allowed me to be free and do really anything in the loveliest ways.”
Since “The Visit” (part of Power of Paranoia night) more than a decade ago, Shyamalan has mostly self-financed his features, working with more limited budgets and smaller casts and crews, to create things free from executive interference or studio notes. They are more esoteric, based on French comic books or horror novels, and more personal. In some ways it’s been the most fascinating phase of his career. And it’s great that these movies are being celebrated alongside his bigger, more commercial work at Beyond Fest.
Shyamalan said that his break from the system has allowed him the liberation of not having to follow industry trends. “For example, no one had done comedy and horror together and said, ‘Well, that’s not going to work.’ Because it hadn’t been proven that I can go there with ‘The Visit,’ where it’s equal comedy, equal horror, which I love, which now is pretty normal in in the genre, but at that time it hadn’t been done,” said Shyamalan.
“Those are all instinctual things that I’m doing that I want to see that I believe 500 people in a movie theater would enjoy watching together. This self-financing has allowed me to follow those instincts so that I don’t have to fit into whatever mores of the time in the industry. I don’t have to. I can be the one that proves the thesis. That’s my hope.”
He admitted that on “After Earth,” his Will Smith sci-fi movie, he started to chafe against “projects that are much more systematized by nature in the way they’re built. I’m not the best in that. I’m better when I’m to the right of everyone a little bit. I love that freeform feeling that nobody’s expecting, especially if no one believes in it. I’m built for that.”
Still, Shyamalan says that he has “a great relationship with the studios” and that his current business model is unique. “There’s not many people that they would have this relationship with,” Shyamalan said.
His most recent film, a serial killer thriller set at a concert called “Trap,” was released by Warner Bros. in 2024 and didn’t do nearly as well as it should have, making $83 million on a budget of around $30 million. (It’s playing as part of the Power of Paranoia bill.) But Shyamalan, ever the pragmatist, said that neither he nor the studio could have predicted the power of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which eclipsed them at the box office, or “It Ends With Us,” a movie whose controversy and popularity created a potent must-see event.
“These are all wonderful things for them. But as you’re putting your movie out, if I had to do it again, I would have slid it away from all that noise. For original movies, it’s a delicate conversation we’re having,” said Shyamalan. “Hey, this is a new story with new colors and a new feeling, so I need you guys to live with it for a second before ‘Avengers’ comes in.”
We wondered if he missed, at all, the massive budgets and all the toys that go along with more traditional studio filmmaking. Even “The Happening,” made for 20th Century Fox, cost $60 million. (“The Happening” is not playing Beyond Fest, which is a shame.) “After Earth” cost more than $130 million.
“Not necessarily,” Shyamalan said. “I don’t feel a loss there. These movies require you to let go completely. It’s an interesting thing because they’re very independent movies, then released as a global movie because they have the muscles of a tentpole movie, meaning their universality, but their inception is very small.” These more recent projects don’t shoot for very long and are prepped “really carefully,” Shyamalan said. Not that you can tell.
With “Remain,” which he co-wrote with Nicholas Sparks and stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a man contending with a woman who may or may not be real in an isolated Cape Cod home, “you’re both getting the infrastructure of the ride but also the idiosyncratic beauty of an independent movie.”
He said that he’s not aware of the memes that usually accompany his movies or linger in the conversation long after they have left the mainstream (just search “the beach that makes you old” on X) but if there’s one movie that he’d like to see get a more proper reappraisal, it’s “Lady in the Water,” his gorgeous, formally adventurous modern-day fairy tale that was released after his painful split from Disney. (It will be playing at the Los Feliz 3. For the real Shyamalan heads.)
“It has such a wacky color and heart to it. There’s a family film side of me and then there’s the thriller side of me and that’s the closest to both of them that exists,” said Shyamalan.
Of course the other huge joy of this Beyond Fest retrospective is to take in the whole of Shyamalan’s Eastrail 177 trilogy, which began with 2000’s “Unbreakable,” released just a few months after the Zeitgeist-capturing “Sixth Sense,” and continued with the backdoor reintroduction of Bruce Willis’ character David Dunn in the closing moments of 2017’s “Split” (a surprise smash, making nearly $300 globally on a budget of just $9 million) and concluded with the odd, affecting “Glass” in 2019 that would bring all of the threads together.
The retrospective will give audiences, new and seasoned alike, the opportunity to take in Willis’ performance as a very human superhero and watch the arc of his character, delicately nuanced, over the course of the series. It’s some of his best work as an actor and takes on an additional poignancy with the 2023 announcement that the actor has dementia. It has since progressed to the point that he needs consistent, on-site attention offering full-time support.
“Everyone needs a guardian angel, and he was mine. He’s very important to me – always been, will always be. I was lucky that I got to make ‘Glass’ with him – in many ways, his last movie,” Shyamalan said. (Willis continued to appear, in direct-to-video fare and in small roles, but “Glass” does remain his last performance of substance before the diagnosis was publicly revealed.)
“It was complicated, but it was so beautiful. I can’t say enough about him. When I was a kid, he was like a superhero to me. To have our two fates together so inextricably bound is so lovely.”
It really is.
See the full Beyond Fest line-up and get your tickets here.
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