A couple journalists recently had the opportunity to sit in on a mini-conference call with M. Night Shyamalan. MovieWeb.com’s Brian Gallagher was one of those journalists.
Q: Is there anything you can tell us about The Last Airbender?
M. Night Shyamalan: It is gonna be really cool (Laughs). I’m at the stage where we have pre-vized the last act of the movie. Because my normal approach to filmmaking is almost like making an animated movie, you take out every shot and analyze everything, it kind of lays out really nicely for a big CGI movie. That is such a helpful thing in the process with all the pre-viz. I feel like I’m making the movie right now. I’m editing it and stuff because doing the pre-viz, if you were here, I could show you the last 30 minutes of The Last Airbender in animatic form. It’s an amazing and emotional experience, just to watch that.
I highly recommend checking out the full interview. They talk a lot about The Happening and the process of getting it made. They also touch a little bit more on The Last Airbender and an Unbreakable sequel.
[Via MovieWeb]
Please feel free to e-mail me if you think I’m wrong, but I would say M Night had better get his act together, and soon, if he wants to continue being a major player in the horror film genre. For someone who started out pretty well he’s fallen to the low levels of interest from his fans. The guy started out with the “hitchcokian” (SP) inspiration and the same attitude toward film making, with films like “The Sixth Sense” (the twist at the end was borrowed from “Jacob’s Ladder”) and “Signs” (which was very cool to watch for the first time). “The Village” even sat well with me even though I think I could have channeled the shocking revelation at the end into a more intense moment. Why I am writing is because of “Lady In the Water” and “The Happening” (M Night’s latest catastrophe. Imagination is the thing that makes a good horror film, and these have nothing in that department to speak of. The viewer is now immune to special effects, so that alone can’t pay the bills. Where is the artistry? There has to be something clever in a film to make someone want to see it twice.
While M Night eats, drinks, and !@#$’s the dollars from his first three films, us fans are waiting patiently for him to come out of his sucsess coma and give us some quality. I myself can think of scarier scenes to show the public…and I’m not a film-maker � just an engineer.
Shyamalan as I perceive him is not about horror, but he chose the thriller as a genre through which to tell his stories. I personally think all his movies are incredibly original and resonate with me on a much deeper level than most movies I see (yes even lady in the water, which I loved). I thought the happening was his weakest movie to date, but I did watch it 3 times on dvd so it´s definitely not the worst movie I have ever seen 🙂 You wait for him to give some quality? To some, he already has in each movie. I often find art is so subjective that an objective critique is almost impossible to make. It´s really about how you resonate with a story at the end of the day. When signs came out, everyone was disappointed cuz it was not scary enough or it was not a cool alien movie, but few people at the time understood this movie was about faith, not aliens. An example on how people don´t like his movies because they have certain expectations and they miss the actual message he wants the movie to get across.