One thing I’d heard about M. Night Shyamalan is that he is a control freak, such a master of his own creative vision that Frank Marshall, his producer on The Sixth Sense, rarely ever felt the need to go to set. Another thing I’d heard, from Shyamalan’s critics, is that he is pretentious and arrogant. What I’d never heard was that Night is charming, self-deprecating, and has a nice sense of humor, all of which was my strong impression after talking with him for a good long time. Indeed, I was quite surprised by how open Night was about his process, about the challenges of helming a huge action fantasy film loaded with visual effects, and how he even felt he lost control of the film for a few weeks in the middle of production.

Fans of the Last Airbender TV series are extremely passionate about their beloved show, and I can see why. It’s a well written, extremely creative, fully realized fantasy world. I haven’t seen Night’s screen adaptation, so I don’t know exactly how faithful it will be to the original, but he did tell me that his first draft of the movie was so many pages that it probably would have required about four hours of screen time. Obviously, they had to cut that back, so there are going to be things left out, and that may well leave some fans disappointed. But however anxious those fans may be, it seems clear to me that Night cared deeply about every detail in every shot in every second of the film, and that while the scale of this movie may have been initially a challenge to him, he adapted. Personally, I think there’s a chance that Night’s letting go a little bit of his process, as he did, might be the best thing for this film, as it may have allowed a creative catharsis to take place. Shyamalan’s always been able to maintain complete control of his thrillers because those films were smaller and more manageable, providing a comfort zone for a director who even calls himself a control freak. But it’s possible that that tight grip on the reins has, over time, constrained his growth as an artist and filmmaker. Now that Night has left his comfort zone to take on a larger, more epic film, we just might see Night’s brilliance on screen once again.

Were You Concerned About Leaving Realism Behind?

JULINA TATLOCK: You know, one of the things that I love about your work is your ability to show the otherworldly within the everyday. And in Airbender, it’s almost the exact opposite.

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: Right, right (laughs).

JULINA: It’s the human relationships and the characters that you can identify with — that humanity in them is the everyday, but they’re within the otherworldly. This is common in fantasy and anime, but did you have concerns about the believability? Or was that a difficult leap for you in any way?

NIGHT: Yeah, I mean, it’s always tricky with a pure fantasy. You’re gonna have an advantage in a movie like Transformers where the baseline is still the contemporary world. The baseline [in Airbender] is not anything that we’re used to, so it’s very, very tricky. It’s all about the tone. And it took a long time to get the tone right; editing, re-editing, looking at it — and then just getting the CGI, because we’d been editing without [the] CGI [shots] for so long. It was a balancing act that took a long time because we also had the tonality issues that the cartoon played very young and very “slapsticky,” and slowly extricating the balance that was necessary to make it an appropriate representation of the source material, which was beloved, but my version of it and edging it up. The [TV] show is three seasons, and each of the three seasons gets darker and older. Substantially so, actually, and even the first season got older as it went on. I wrote the screenplay for the second movie already, and it’s so much darker and older and kind of in the sweet spot for these kinds of movies. So the balancing act has kind of grown, in trying to get the balance just right. It’s a very unusual movie. It has philosophical overtones, there’s a genocide, there’s a Shakespearean storyline, and there’s obviously lots of martial arts and CGI. It has a very one-of-a-kind tone, and it took a long time to find its personality.

JULINA: I’ve heard you say that before: the Shakespearean storyline. Can you elaborate on that?

NIGHT: I’m talking about how the labeled villain of the movie is a young man who’s been vanquished, basically, by his father. His name’s Zuko, and so it’s his whole family [that I’m referring to] and the Fire Nations. The royal family of the Fire Nation is just a very Shakespearean plotline over the three movies, with betrayals, usurping the crown, whisperings of evil people manipulating each other, relatives manipulating each other, unrequited love and the love of a father who’s evil, and all kinds of wonderful stuff like that. And that stuff really only starts coming out in the first movie, and you can see when the credits roll by the end of this movie, you’ll go, “Oh man! That’s gonna be a lot of the next movie.” Which it is.

Night: “I Just Lost Control of The Movie a Little Bit”

JULINA: Can you give me any specific moments where you had to — because of the sprawlingness and the epicness of it all and the technical challenges of achieving your vision of this film — how you needed to change your vision as you went along?

NIGHT: Well, I had an answer to this, but not really an answer to your question, but it just popped in my head when you were talking, which is, I forget how many weeks the shoot was (sighs), maybe a 75-day shoot or something like that. There was about a three-week period at the three-quarter point of the movie where I just was overwhelmed. And I was just kind of on fumes, and for me, I just lost control of the movie a little bit. Nobody would have known this except me. It’s not like you’d watch and say, “Oh, he’s lost control of the movie.” It’s not like we were behind, or anything like that. Nothing empirical, nothing you could put down on paper. I just felt lost. And I had lost that kind of internal drive that was telling me exactly how to frame it and exactly, “Put the cam — put the lens 36 inches above the ground at this angle, with a 27-millimeter lens,” for example. That precision normally kind of speaks to me, and it’s painful when it’s not right and I tell the production designer to do this or the cinematographer, “Pan this way” and “The action goes here, you come in here,” and all that stuff. It started to — I got lost a little bit and I think that was — I was just — it was just too much.

JULINA: Mhm.

NIGHT: Too many things to keep track of with that kind of precision. To keep track of the 50 extras fighting on the wall … I was like, “I’m losing it.” So … (laughs) luckily, it came back after that period, and I remember when I first put the movie together that area of the movie bothered me because it wasn’t familiar, or it didn’t live in the parameters of my usual aesthetics — that is failing. For instance, if I’m driving by a house that’s not designed properly, one of these cookie-cutter houses or something like that. It’s painful, like I can’t even look at it. [I just think,] “Why would they put the window there?” and “This whole side of the house they totally ignored aesthetically,” and “This is definitely cookie-cutter out of some development program.” And I just feel like there’s no human being that was behind this and that there’s no expression of life there. If that’s your mentality — to get the shots better — that kind of stuff that doesn’t represent that aesthetic, it’s tricky.

JULINA: What was it about that part of production? Was there something about that particular material, do you think?.

NIGHT: Nah, it was just where it landed. (laughs) The way it landed in production and how everything was escalating. You know, the epic nature of it. And it was just — I was just tired.

JULINA: Did you end up having a different relationship, then, with your crew because you had to depend on them possibly more than in other films?

NIGHT: You know, I always, always depend on my crew — for sure. I had an amazing crew. To do one of these movies properly takes an enormous amount of endurance.

JULINA: And you were going all around the world, right?

NIGHT: Yeah, we started in Greenland. The scale, to try to know everything, which is what makes me able to lie down and sleep and feel like I think I know how to do it, to get to that place of comfort and of knowledge, is very difficult with that many factors.

The Previz Leap of Faith

JULINA: Jumping back to the visual effects for a minute, Joe Johnston has said in his director’s blog [on 30ninjas] that he may use previz for determining budget, but that as an actual filmmaking tool, he does not really condone it as anything that represents his vision, and he distrusts it because of that.

NIGHT: Right, right.

JULINA: It sounds like you actually only used previz in the budgeting process as well, and didn’t actually use it [in shooting the film].

NIGHT: Yeah, yeah. Well, look, I would say it fell in the middle there for me, because I was resistant to it, but it was just impossible to get the proper [budgeting] from drawings.

JULINA: It sounds like in the bidding, it’s extremely useful.

NIGHT: It’s critical, when you’re saying whether your film is gonna get greenlit or not based on, “If you could make it for this number we’ll greenlight it.” I mean, that means I have to work on the previz, right?

JULINA: Right, right.

NIGHT: Because it can’t be some guy in a cubicle making a shot which I didn’t mean, which costs an extra 40 grand, and 30 of those means I don’t get the greenlight. So I have to do what I mean, and then I have to work with the CGI company, ILM, to hear their bids on that and then go, “Well, why is that so expensive?” And they’ll say, “Because you did this 180 over a plant,” or whatever it is, and I’ll say, “All right, what if the shot ended here?,” and they say, “Well, that would be mean this.” And we did that kind of process till I got it honed down to the appropriate figure. Because the spread of what something can cost can be tens and tens of millions of dollars very easily without you blinking. And so, it’s just something I’ve come to accept as part of the process when you make a gigantic fantasy movie like this. Now, it is worrisome because people get really tied to [the previsualization], and it’s very hard to get exactly what I meant in previz, whereas in storyboards I feel more comfortable. I’m like, “No, move the character a little bit here,” and then they go — it’s the insinuation that I feel it’s correct. Whereas sometimes I see some of the previz and it’s not what I meant — although our particular previz company had a particular guy named Dan Gregoire who’s really a genius. I literally got the right guy and the right company and the right time, and [he] really made it incredibly beautiful. I may put [the previz] on the DVD, it’s so beautiful.

JULINA: You should!

NIGHT: Yeah, it’s a love-hate thing [with previsualization], for sure. I mean, it’s a lot of effort, you know? You’re in the middle of trying to make your movie, and you gotta make this other thing, and you’re like, “No, no, no, no, it needs to come this. No, I don’t see stairs there.” You end up doing all these things that you wouldn’t necessarily do at that moment [in production]. So it’s really tedious, but — or not but — and the added thing is that I’m a complete kind of detailed control freak. I pride myself on coming in on budget. I pride myself on having complete understanding of every factor of everything, and that was another layer of that for me. You know, when I’m doing one of the thrillers, I can walk you through the movie like an animated movie. I can walk you through the whole movie. And I do that for the executives sometimes. Right before we shoot, I’ll do a table reading of the entire storyboard for the crew and everybody, maybe 50 people, and literally I’m there for about three hours, walking through, “and then the camera does this, and then our character does that.” And then when we’re finished and everybody applauds — probably out of the tedium of it being over –

JULINA: (laughs)

NIGHT: – but they applaud and — (laughs) and you really know the movie. And I could walk you through the sketch version of Signs or Unbreakable, whatever, and you can see the movie — before we shot it. Look, I’m a hunter when it comes to being a director, and I’m 70 percent right, and that’s a pretty good percentage (laughs), and the rest I figure out.
I just have to figure it out, and I don’t have a lot of latitude because I don’t shoot a lot of coverage, or any, and you need to be creative.

JULINA: One of the things that’s so difficult about visual effects is how long it takes to actually see what what your vision is. Was that difficult for you?

NIGHT: That was the trickiest part of this movie, because remember how I was saying how I had to do the balancing act with the movie? Well, I’m just guessing, because for the first half of your postproduction, you have nothing, right? I’m just cutting with 500 or 400 greenscreen shots in there. There are no creatures; there’s no nothing; there’s no background. [So] you can’t tell whether the thing’s not working because there’s nothing there, or because it’s not working. “Should I tighten it up?” And so, what ended up happening was, we cut one version of the movie, which was the greenscreen version of the movie, [then] started putting in special effects. And it became a kind of awkward adolescent at that stage, where it was neither here nor there, and I was completely like, “Oh my god, this scene is taking forever,” or “This is so redundant,” or “This is ridiculous,” and the balancing act got really wacky at that moment. Right when it was about half and half. And then when our [CGI] shots came in, I said, “All right, everybody out, I’m gonna edit the movie.” And then we sat there, me and the editor, and we edited the movie, and it worked. It was weird because it was like editing two movies. And I guess it’s kinda part of the process, because you can’t just wait six months. You can’t do nothing for six months. (laughs) You gotta edit, you gotta get to know it, but you’re really working blind. At least, that’s what I found. I had a tough time with it, and that adolescent period is so frustrating because you’re going, “Um … God, this is really slow. I think I should probably cut out of this.” And you end up overcutting things, and then when you see the effects, you’re like, “Wow! OK, all right. Now I know what to do. This shot should go over here, this should be this long, we can cut out right here.” I basically didn’t have my shots till three weeks ago. Four weeks ago.

JULINA: All of them in.

NIGHT: All of them in, yeah. A version of all of them in. I didn’t have that till three, four weeks ago. So, the last four weeks of this process was, instead of it being one-sixth of postproduction or one-eighth — it was really, like, 30 percent of post. Because that’s when I had my movie. But the good news was that I was so fluent in the language of the movie by that time that I could see it like a chess game at that point. But that adolescent period was really difficult. Because you’re previewing then, in the adolescent period, and you’re just going “God!” I’m literally seeing shots and sequences I’ve never even seen before [along] with the audience, and I’m like, “Oh, this is just not what I wanted.”

JULINA: Oh my god, the stress of that must be –

NIGHT: It’s so stressful, and you lose your mind for a second. And you go, “Do I know how to do this?” And then once it was all in, I go, “I see it now, I got it.”

JULINA: What are you working on next?

NIGHT: Next I’m going to do a thriller. I’m writing it. It’ll be fun to do after this.

JULINA: Can you tell me anything about it?

NIGHT: I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. (laughs) No, I can’t tell you. I’d do a poor job selling it and then you’d be like, “That sucks!”

Check out the first part of our exclusive interview with M. Night Shyamalan below!

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