Filmmaker and scriptwriter Manoj Night Shyamalan in an interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta about his connection to India, the influence of politics on his movie-making, the origin of his middle name.
You’re 1970 born, I think.
1970. So ET was in 1982, and Jaws was 1975. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was huge for me, in 1983. Spielberg was doing his thing right when I was a little kid. And when I saw those movies I said, ‘You know, that’s what I want to do!’
And how did your parents figure it? Because in an Indian household, for a kid who’s eight, it’s the parents who figure things.
(Laughs) When I was eight, they didn’t think anything of it. They just thought it was a kind of funny thing that I did. So they just let me do it and then they would watch the movies and then they would giggle with the family and I would take the cousins and the neighbours and we’d make these movies and they would be terrible. They would be just absolutely horrible and everyone would just sit and laugh at them and they thought it was just funny. And then I would go and do my school work, and I was fairly good at school work, so they thought, ‘OK, he’ll become a doctor, and it’ll be just fine.’ But when I became a teenager, I got more and more serious into the filmmaking of it, and they knew I really liked it as a hobby, and I went one summer when I was 16 to go to study film, just to see what it was like and I think my parents hoped that I would come back and say ‘Not for me’.
This sucks!
Well, it did suck (laughs) but still I came back and said, ‘It’s still for me.’ And they were like, ‘Ugh!’ And then I went to a film school and they’ve been worried ever since, and I think only until this week, when we came for the Padma Shri, that they are a little bit more relaxed about it all.
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