A different take
Self-directed filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan forges his own sub-genre: suspenseful movies with revealing twists. How a confident Hollywood outsider keeps his focus on family and faith.
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Shyamalan's spiritual beliefs are largely a mystery. In high school he was put off by the dogmatism he encountered. He told Time magazine in a 2000 interview that he recalled teachers saying that those who weren't baptized were condemned.
He was soon drawn to the beliefs of native Americans. During the past few years he has been practicing Kempo, a martial art with roots in Zen Buddhism. But he has also been profoundly influenced by his schooling in Christian theology, and by his family's devotion to Hinduism.
The filmmaker's father once gave him a tiny scroll of Sanskrit proverbs to remind him to stay grounded. It never leaves Shyamalan's neck.
"One of the things with him that I was impressed about is that he has a great comfort in different cultural settings, because he's worshiped with us before," says Philadelphia's Pastor Avinger, a Baptist.
Shyamalan may not be the modern-day successor to Cecil B. DeMille, his epics laced with crowds, chariots, and Charlton Heston. But his characters grapple mightily with questions about the existence of God - especially after a tragedy. And, in most cases, they are rewarded with a sign that renews their faith.
Still, some film critics are less than satisfied with the conclusions that Shyamalan's films draw. Mr. O'Hehir applauds the filmmaker for doing something Hollywood doesn't do very often: tackling religious themes. But, he says, Shyamalan's ideas on deep issues are too vague.
"It feels very much like supermarket spirituality to me," says O'Hehir.
Shyamalan, naturally, has his own take.
"It's something somewhat blurred in the line between believing in magic and believing in something spiritual," he says. "That idea of faith is really cool.... And it's a nice thing to keep saying, 'OK, I'm going to tell you another parable about faith.' "
Consider one of Shyamalan's future projects, an adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel "Life of Pi," by Yann Martel. The book tells the story of an Indian boy who finds himself stuck in a lifeboat with a ravenous tiger after a freighter carrying zoo animals sinks.
"[Shyamalan] read it and, for fairly obvious reasons now, he was interested in doing it," says Mr. Martel. "The novel starts in Pondicherry, where he was born. The character is [simultaneously] a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Christian. So there's obviously a religious content to the novel."
Like Shyamalan's own serpentine plots, the novel unreels a series of revelations. "I argue that stories have a theology," says Martel. "You must make a leap in faith and believe in stories and the truth of it will be decided later." Shyamalan says he will make "Life of Pi" after his next movie, about which he remains secretive.
He's not chasing Oscars, he says. In that sense, at least, he's not a grown-up version of the high school boy in that yearbook spoof. Success to Shyamalan now means building a body of work that is defined by its originality, singularity of accent, and voice. He wants to be more courageous, he says, just like the figure in the Blinding Edge film logo.
"It's a man kind of leaping off a precipice into the light and having faith that there's something in that light," he says. "You're not sure what's going to happen to you and it seems almost dangerous but he takes the leap. There's something drawing him, so he goes for it."
