M. Night Shyamalan
Founder and Filmmaker, Blinding Edge Pictures. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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He is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker known for psychological thrillers including The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Split. Beyond directing and self-financing projects through his production company, Blinding Edge Pictures, he authored the education reform book I Got Schooled.
1shows
1appearances
21statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything M. Night Shyamalan said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Shyamalan: A filmmaker's blind spots and quirks are their greatest commercial strengths
“Don't copy me or anybody else, or even try to round off the things that are not great about you. Your blind spots are your strengths. That is why you're not doing this, and you're looking at that, that's part of what makes you so beautiful. To concentrate on t…”
Shyamalan criticizes Warner Bros for unilaterally moving 2021 film releases to streaming
“It should have been filmmaker by filmmaker's decision of how to handle this here. If they wanted to put it out that way, great, everybody comes to decision, or if they wanted to wait, and if the studio could handle that financial burden of waiting for a beat, …”
Shyamalan: Artists Must Wrestle with Internal Demons Every Single Day
“My, both my older daughters are artists, and I said, that is your plight. You're going to wrestle with your demons every single day of your life.”
Shyamalan: Box Office, Critics, and External Validation Are Irrelevant
“So all this other stuff, to be honest, I've learned is irrelevant. How many people did come on the weekend, and what did the New York Times think, and what did that fan think, and oh, that other guy made that much, or did that, or oh, the cover, they offered y…”
Shyamalan: Early success introduces distractions that lead to poor decision-making
“When you have nothing, you become really clear about what's important and what are your values. You're very clear about them, and then you get up and you start to have success, and there's this accretion of good decision making that gets you here, and then you…”
Shyamalan: Daily writing time without output still drives creative compounding
“Spend those two hours. And even if I sat there for two hours wondering what happens to him after he hits his head, five different iterations of things came and went that were incorrect. Right. It feels like I didn't do anything, but I did. And then the next da…”
Shyamalan maintains a strict policy of never working with dysfunctional geniuses
“There's certain principles that now are absolutely essential, like no dysfunctional geniuses.”
Shyamalan: Old was the first movie in the world to cast during COVID-19
“So I was the first, basically the first movie in the world that started casting during the pandemic, so everyone in the world was auditioning for me by Zoom, and at that moment, it was still very odd that you would be in your bedroom or your living room.”
Shyamalan: Specific personal narrative gives storytellers irreplicable creative power
“The more specific it is,
The more power it is.
Where I go, I could never do that, or Quentin Tarantino could never do that, or Wes Anderson or David Fincher can't do that.
That's what you want.”
Shyamalan: Effective Storytelling Aligns Audience With a Character's Realization
“It's a points of view and how to talk about points of view in the structure of storytelling and not understanding why, why is she acting that way? Why is she acting that way? Oh my gosh, she's acting that way because of that. You know, that kind of thing. I lo…”
Shyamalan: Theatrical Cinema Generates Cross-Demographic Emotional Attunement
“The collective experience is such a wonderful thing. Making movies for me is, and throwing, showing them in a movie theater is a little bit of a sacred thing for me because I think it's, When we're at our best, because the teenage girl is affecting the sixty-y…”
Shyamalan: Creative blocks are a sign you are unconsciously betraying your story
“What happens is when you get stuck, like you're doing, you're essentially, you're betraying the story, but you don't know how you're betraying it. So you can feel the damage. You just don't understand it. This isn't working. So any ways that you can say it out…”
Shyamalan: Dramas are shifting to streaming while movie theaters rely on spectacle
“And you'll see this movement of drama leaving the movie theater and coming to home. Like, you're okay feeling emotional, dramatic things in, at home, but going to a movie theater with a group of people, you want to be scared, and laugh, and thrilled, and spect…”
Shyamalan: Undivided theatrical attention makes cinema far stickier than at-home viewing
“When you go to the movie theater and you commit to leave your house, park your car, get your babysitter, and come and turn off your phone, you cannot multitask. You are making the biggest commitment that you will ever make to an art form for two hours. And the…”
Shyamalan: Maximize iteration in environments where failure is safe
“One of my rules of life, which is iterate as much as you can, create environments where you can safely iterate. Some people call it failure. I don't, you know, it's so stigmatized that word that just call it iterating.”
Shyamalan took out a mortgage on his house to self-fund The Visit
“When I did the visit, which was many, many, many years later, I put a mortgage on the house and did the whole thing all over again.”
Shyamalan wrote Unbreakable during Sixth Sense editing because he feared getting fired
“I remember when I was a kid writing Unbreakable while I was editing Sixth Sense, because I'm like, they're never going to let me direct after this movie comes out, so let me try to, as fast as I can, make this movie about comic books, which no one wants to see…”
Shyamalan approaches every film as if studios will never hire him again
“Every single time I go, this is the last movie that they'll ever let me make. This is the one, and is that ok? So, make it so that it's ok. That if this was the last one, you put it all there, wow, I, I'm ready to burn the house down for this value system that…”
Shyamalan: Thriller Storytelling and Twists Stem from Personal Playfulness and Mischief
“If we hung out, we were having beers or whatever, you, I'm a little bit mischievous. So that, that mischievous side of like making you laugh and you know, playing tricks on you, that would be how our relationship would be. And that just kind of transfers into …”
Shyamalan: Indian Cultural Spirituality and Superstition Shaped His Supernatural Storytelling
“I do think the inherent spirituality of the Indian culture Kind of morphed from my grandma saying, you know, this house is haunted, or she puts like a, nails a chicken head outside the house because of some bad thing that was, she thinks a curse has been put o…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens M.'s full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder and Filmmaker, Blinding Edge Pictures | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on How I Built This → |