Posted by Namita Bhandare, exclusively for AW
Going by press reports, it was hard to judge whether M Night Shyamalan (MNS) was in India — after a gap of nine-and-a-half years — to pick up his Padma Shri award or to promote his new movie, The Happening, which will be distributed by UTV in India and is scheduled for a Friday, 13 June release (read the details of that business report here).
The India-born, US-based Shyamalan has almost never shown an affinity for India but that didn’t stop a mostly adoring press from flocking to his press conference at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel. Here’s a sample of questions and answers:
1. His favourite Indian actor:
MNS: ”What’s that guy’s name, we were talking about him at lunch, Shah Rukh Khan, yeah.”
2. On his favourite Indian movies:
MNS: [He's seen a total of three] “What was the name of that movie, Kabhi something… [UTV CEO Ronnie Screwvala, co-producer of Night's upcoming film, helpfully supplied Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham]… right, that one; that was kind of cool. And I remember there was an old one, it was supposed to be very salacious at the time, wait, Shivam something? [Satyam Sivam Sundaram, supplied the ever helpful Screwvala]… right, that one, right there, that was smokin’, that one. I don’t remember the name of the third one — wait, Devdas, there you go.”
3. On what he thinks of Indian cinema, based on his three-film viewing experience:
MNS: “I think it is a very powerful art form. I am just starting to learn about it, I find it very powerful — the very heightened vocabulary, the close ups, the loud music, it all adds up to a very powerful form. At first you giggle when you watch it, but then you get acclimated to that vocabulary, and you begin to feel the same sort of heightened emotions.”
4. On winning the Padma Shri:
MNS: “Honestly at first I didn’t get what it was. I’ve been getting calls for awards, asking me to come to Sri Lanka, Singapore.. but I can’t go to all the events due to work, family. So when my office got the call about the Padma Shri, my staff was like, ‘Oh, you’ve won an award.’ But when there were too many congratulatory calls, I was like, ‘what happened?’ It was only after my family and friends from India told me about the Padma Shri that I looked it up to find more details about it.”
So, was Night Shyamalan savaged by the press? Doff your hat to the power of PR, the morning’s stories were full of such glowing descriptions as ‘consummate performer’ (Rediff.com), ‘the man behind gargantuan films’ (Times of India) and ‘India’s best known Hollywood director’ (Khabrein.info).
Read some complete Shyamalan interviews here, here and here.
There’s a certain sort of person who will take a flashlight and go into a field of corn in the dark, but they only exist in the movies. I always think of those characters when I think of movie people in general: even in what is called real life, where people tend to have opinions and heart conditions and mortgages, film directors are largely unreal people who behave in unnatural ways. Especially in the first years after a big success, film directors of a certain sort are given to acting like geniuses, partly because a lot of desperate people have called them geniuses, but the conditions of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent.
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