BIG screen ghosts and ghouls are at their scariest when they spring from the mind and remain unseen. US-born Indian filmmaker Manoj Night Shyamalan, the toast of all Hollywood this month, has driven home the point yet again with the hugely successful The Sixth Sense, a chilling psychological thriller that has taken the biggest-ever August opening in the history of American cinema,$ 26.7 mn.
Shyamalan knew it was coming. While editing his previous film, Wide Awake, in '97, he had told his editor that he'd script and direct a film called The Sixth Sense with action star Bruce Willis in the lead. In response, the editor could only manage an incredulous, 'yeah, sure'. Two years on, not only is Shyamalan's dream a reality, it's also a roaring success.
The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan's third film, is the first release since Star Wars: Episode I to top the box office chart over back-to-back weekends, mopping up a hefty $70 mn in 10 days. If its hot streak continues for another week, it'll also emerge as the only film since last summer's Saving Private Ryan to reign supreme at the box-office for three successive weekends. And that,if not the fact that the film is set to cross the $100 mn mark in only 17 days,would certainly fill the 29-year-old son of a Philadelphia-based physician couple with immense pride: Steven Spielberg is his role model because 'there is a respect in his storytelling and a kind of child-like awe'.
Shyamalan, whose middle name is in recognition of his spiritual closeness to American-Indian culture, seems to have struck a Spielbergian chord. If The Sixth Sense keeps going, it could cross the $150 mn level, surpassing all the Die Hard films and, with a bit of luck, perhaps even the $ 201.6 mn that Willis' biggest hit, Armageddon, grossed. Shyamalan's film earned in four days what Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth did in 14 weeks: $ 30 mn.
The Sixth Sense, which also features Haley Joel Osment (the young Forrest Gump) and Australian actress Toni Collette (of Muriel's Wedding), isn't a run-of-the-mill horror flick. Its stylish, deliberately paced narrative is about a psychologist whose marriage is falling apart and who's hit a mid-career slump. As the doctor struggles to live down the memories of a patient he'd failed years ago, along comes an eight-year-old who faces problems of a similar nature,he sees ghosts everywhere. The psychologist plunges headlong into the job of unravelling the boy's dark secrets and, in the process, the two develop a bonding that goes far beyond any doctor-patient relationship. The film, Eric Harrison writes in the Los Angeles Times, 'is a ghost story, it is a love story, it has spiritual elements and it is a psychological drama that operates at several levels'.
It didn't come easy. It took Shyamalan 10 drafts and a year to get The Sixth Sense absolutely right. 'If you think having a statue come to life and turn its head is going to scare the audience, you're wrong,' the young filmmaker says. 'No one is ever going to see that happen in their lives. Why should they be frightened by that?' Shyamalan's script is liberally laced with mnemonic snatches of real-life experiences. It is the sheer believability of his drama that's giving American audiences the creeps. There is reason to believe that it will do much the same to viewers in other parts of the world as well. 'It comes from the fears of real people, real children and real adults,' explains Shyamalan. 'From fears of loss, of the unknown, of having a sixth sense about what lies beyond...'
The faith of the studio, the star and the producers was instinctive. 'There have been only three scripts that I've ever read that I immediately knew I wanted to do. The Sixth Sense was one of those,' Willis has been quoted as saying. 'Night's insight into the human imagination is awe-inspiring,' says producer Frank Marshall. 'Maybe it's a combination of his spiritual and mystical Indian roots and his purely American upbringing that gives him the ability to strike a delicate yet provocative balance between what's real and what isn't.'
Shyamalan, a film graduate from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, made his directorial debut with Praying with Anger (1992), which he wrote, directed and starred in. Shot in Chennai, it was a personal testament of a US-born Indian student who finds himself a stranger in his parents' homeland. The film cost less than $300,000. 'I love that movie,' Shyamalan says. 'I was just learning about filmmaking. It was like I did something without knowing what I was doing. It felt so pure.'
Besides writing two scripts,Labor of Love, bought by 20th Century Fox for $750,000, and Columbia Pictures' Stuart Little, a screen adaptation of the classic children's story about a mouse adopted by a human family,Shyamalan helmed a $7 mn Miramax film, Wide Awake, about a young Catholic boy obsessed with contacting his dead grandfather. It bombed at the box office last year.
But his reputation as a sensitive writer-director had already been made and Disney's Hollywood Pictures paid him $2.5 mn for The Sixth Sense script. Add the director's fees to that and his package exceeds $3 mn. Not a bad deal for a venture that began life essentially as a small, $40 mn crossover film. Today, it's ready to go places.
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