A different take

"It was kind of tongue-and-cheeky," says the man now known as M. Night, sitting near the window of a Manhattan hotel room, the foliage of Central Park a tangled jungle below. He giggles at the memory. The March 1993 date on the mock cover alluded to Hollywood's award season. "It was so outlandish, you know, that it was like a dream you throw out there."

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Mr. Shyamalan has yet to win an Oscar, though his 1999 breakthrough film, "The Sixth Sense," was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. And he has yet to make the cover of Time (settling, so far, for Newsweek). But Shyamalan has indeed stormed the movie universe, becoming Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriter, one of few directors who can open a blockbuster on the strength of his name alone - and, effectively, sole owner of the suspense genre.

His new film, "The Village," opens Friday. Its cast includes two Oscar winners, Adrien Brody and William Hurt, not to mention Sigourney Weaver and Joaquin Phoenix. But on posters it is the writer/director/producer's name that looms above the title of a film that fits neatly into what has become the auteur's standard fare: paranormal tales with Twilight Zone twists.

"He's the star. M. Night Shyamalan has become a brand name," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a Los Angeles-based firm that tracks box-office trends. Mr. Dergarabedian points to the strong association between Shyamalan (SHAH-ma-lawn) and his major works: "Signs," "Unbreakable," and "The Sixth Sense." "In order to sell the movie, you really push the fact that it's his movie," he says. "That's enough to get people in."

That power has led some in the media to dub him "the new Spielberg" or "the new Hitchcock." But remarkably, this director, a first-generation American of Indian heritage, is no Hollywood insider. The 33-year-old millionaire has remained resolutely anchored - physically and artistically - to his hometown of Philadelphia. The city is the setting for all of his movies and the headquarters of Blinding Edge Pictures, his production company.

Cloistered there, away from the self-absorbed universe chronicled by People magazine, Shyamalan seeks inspiration for scripts with emotional themes - faith and family - that will resonate with ordinary moviegoers.

"I think he is genuinely interested in why and how people come to believe," says David Thomson, author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film."

Shy yet confident, mature yet childlike, precise yet open to ambiguity, Shymalan aims high.

"My biggest fear in life," Shyamalan once told The Philadelphia Inquirer, "is to be average."

On that score, say those who know him, he probably needn't fret. It became apparent early on that Manoj was no ordinary kid. He took in "Star Wars" at age seven, and that experience kicked him into creative overdrive.

His mother, an obstetrician at a Philadelphia hospital, once told an Indian newspaper that she came home one day soon after to find her son with a movie camera.

His explanation was simple: He had rented it with money he'd borrowed from a friend's mother.

Later that evening, Dr. Shyamalan drove Manoj to the store to return the equipment. When her son failed to emerge from the building, she got out of her car.

What she saw next caused her to burst out laughing. The store owner was picking coins out of a trash bag and counting them. The boy had cracked open his piggy-bank savings and lugged in $500 in quarters to put down as a deposit for the camera.

In moviemaking, Shyamalan found the perfect escape from lulls of a quiet life in a wealthy suburb. His parents, both immigrant doctors who had moved to the US when their son was eight months old, were often away because of the demands of their practices. The young Manoj didn't find his sister much of a companion, either. She was six years older than he was.

"There was a lot of alone time [in which] to imagine, which is good," he says now. "If I had a big brother who was a year older than me or something, I probably wouldn't have ended up being a filmmaker."

Shyamalan took to making short films with uncommon brio. Using Halloween masks and kitchen gloves, he transformed radio-controlled cars into ketchup-dripping monsters. Visiting cousins were roped in as extras. The family dog, a docile German shepherd, became a very unconvincing version of Stephen King's Cujo.

Shedding his shyness, Manoj soon befriended a neighbor, Brian Rosenstein, to star in his cinematic projects.

"You can see the genius in his filmmaking even back then," says Mr. Rosenstein, now a manager in his family's Philadelphia-based textile business. "I mean, he's doing special editing, he's doing parallel cutting, he's editing in music. To think this is before we're driving."

By the age of 16, Shyamalan had filmed 45 shorts. When he wasn't making movies, he was watching them. Intently. There wasn't a title in the action-adventure and horror sections of the video store that didn't pass through the home VCR.

Outings to see "Poltergeist," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and "E.T." left Shyamalan enraptured by Steven Spielberg.

Shyamalan's parents weren't worried about raising a film geek. They were actively supportive of the hobby, his mom happily acting as caterer on the backyard movie sets.

No shut-in, Manoj had other interests, too - basketball and tennis, in particular. As far as Nelliate and Jayalakshmi Shyamalan were concerned, their son would go to medical school, as had nine doctors throughout the extended family.

The Shyamalans had primed their son for success, sending him to a Catholic grade school "for the discipline" and then to The Episcopal Academy (motto: "Educating the whole child - Mind, Body, Spirit"), where the well-liked teen, renowned for his humor, graduated cum laude.

It was a major disappointment, Shyamalan says, when he told them he would study film at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

In a nod to his parents, the filmmaker did don a white coat for a cameo role as a doctor in "The Sixth Sense."He has, in fact, cast himself in small speaking roles in each of his past four movies.

The director leaves other fingerprints on every reel of celluloid he produces. Look carefully in each film and you'll spot a scene in which curtains flutter in the wind. Another Shyamalan signature: someone reflected in the surface of an object. And then there are, of course, the trademark twist endings.

"The Sixth Sense," about the relationship between an extraordinarily empathetic child (Haley Joel Osment) and a psychologist (Bruce Willis) floored moviegoers - many of whom went back for a second look - with its surprise revelation about Willis's character.

The late-summer movie proceeded to streak to $293 million. It became a cultural phenomenon. (Bart Simpson even scrawled the film's most memorable line, "I see dead people," on his detention-room chalkboard.)

Shyamalan followed up with "Unbreakable" and "Signs." The latter, a 2002 film about an alien invasion, grossed $228 million.

A handful of twisting, supernatural-themed imitators - "Gothika," "What Lies Beneath," "The Others" - were released by other studios. But it is Shyamalan, many observers say, who owns the genre today.

"If he had been a filmmaker whose natural instinct is to move from one genre to another, he may have achieved the same degree of box-office success, but I'm not sure that he would be as well known to the public," says Gregg Kilday, film editor of The Hollywood Reporter. "He's kind of doing what Hitchcock did years ago, associating his name with a certain type of film."

In Shyamalan's universe, men are estranged from their family or wives, and children struggle to make sense of the adult world.

"It's an area of storytelling that can easily be misinterpreted as horror," says Mr. Thomson. But Shyamalan's films, he adds, exhibit a certain warmth.

Not that the suspense doesn't chill.

"People talk about the influence of Alfred Hitchcock all the time," says Andrew O'Hehir, a writer and editor at Salon.com. "[But] most of the time that shows up as the very shallow sort of [comparison]. I think Shyamalan is unique in the sense that he understands that Hitchcock created a unique sort of film language, and was a master of building tension through the camera."

If Shyamalan draws snipes, it is often for being a little too formulaic. A nation absorbed in the novel "The Da Vinci Code" has grown increasingly savvy about plot twists. And as popular as the approach has become, it may be predictable in its own way.

"At this point, anybody who goes to see one of [Shyamalan's] movies, is waiting for 'OK, what's the big narrative twist here?' " says Mr. O'Hehir.

Shyamalan bristles slightly at the charge. His hands, with numerous rings on each finger, fly as he mounts his defense.

"The reality is, right now, if I made 'The Sixth Sense,' everyone would guess the ending," he says. "So [would] I not make 'The Sixth Sense' if I got that idea right now? I mean, that would be sad."

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For further information:
•	M. Night Shyamalan IMDb.com
•	'Signs' The official movie website
•	'The Village' The official movie website
•	'The Sixth Sense' The official movie website
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