A big opening weekend seems all but assured for "The Village," which might be described as the "Blair Witch Project" set in the 19th century. But the film's long-term success may well hinge on whether its serpentine twists manage to outfox the audience.

Shyamalan's first brushes with failure would not occur until after he had blazed through film school, completing the four-year course in three years.

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"There was never any self-doubt or procrastination," recalls Lamar Sanders, a Tisch professor who says the prolific screenwriter had an uncanny flair for narrative.

Within months of graduating, Shyamalan - who had just adopted "Night" because people had struggled to pronounce Manoj - went to India to make a movie.

Shyamalan's father loaned him $500,000 to make "Praying With Anger," a full-length feature in which Night played an American Indian rediscovering his roots.

The 21-year-old mailed an unsolicited print to the 1992 Toronto film festival. It wowed the programmers. Though the film went on to win the American Film Institute's award for best feature debut, it grossed only $7,000.

What followed was a series of bad deals and false promises from studios. And by this time, the stakes were higher for Shyamalan. He had met an Indian student, Bhavna Vaswani, at NYU and had slipped a note into her fortune cookie asking her to marry him.

The couple immediately began a family. Shyamalan soon had two daughters to feed. He was devastated when his first studio film, Miramax's "Wide Awake," earned just $300,000.

"I've seen many students in that situation," says Mr. Sanders. "They frequently go off and lick their wounds for years and sometimes never reemerge, because their confidence has been destroyed. I can't imagine that happening to Night.... He was clearly not going to be stopped."

Shyamalan's ego, however, was bruised. He hints that it hurt when his family read the reviews. They still weren't fully convinced he'd made the best career choice.

Shyamalan quickly decided to make the setback work for him.

"I was lucky enough to fail multiple times in the very beginning. Fail dramatically," says Shyamalan. "That's the greatest thing that could ever happen to you, because ... [failure] no longer holds any power over you. And now you can assess cleanly what you need to improve and what needs to be fixed."

"The Sixth Sense" took 10 drafts to perfect. The discarded versions now hang framed in Shyamalan's office as reminders of the value of perseverence.

The script fetched $3 million. Disney later paid him a staggering $5 million for "Signs" - with a bonus $7.5 million to direct it.

His position in Hollywood secure, Shyamalan passed up an opportunity to direct "Harry Potter." He even turned down an offer from his enduring idol, Spielberg, to write "Indiana Jones IV," so that he could concentrate on creating his own stories.

Remaining self-directed has also allowed Shyamalan to carve out time for his children and his parents, who still live nearby. This spring, when the cast and crew of "The Village" retired to trailers in a remote part of rural Pennsylvania each night, Shyamalan would drive home to see his children.

One of his goals, he says, is to "make it like a job, like a regular job, so they feel like it's a normal dad, having a normal life."

Shyamalan, whose sophisticated GQ couture masks a child-like persona, enjoys the uncomplicated company of kids - and not only his own.

"Some of that comes from his wife. She has a heart for children," says Pastor Steven Avinger, whose work to clean up his poor neighborhood for children inspired Shyamalan to quietly donate $1.5 million to the effort.

"The first shot of 'The Sixth Sense' was done in that neighborhood," says Shyamalan, who calls his gift "a little nudge." "And so then this kind of four-, five-, six-block radius - this is our hope - will become a beacon, an example of other things we can do in other parts of the city."

Another beneficiary of the Shyamalan Foundation, set up to help children, is the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank. When Shyamalan visited one of the program's summer camps last year, Joan Mintz Ulmer was struck by how well he connected with the 35 children crammed into a hot church.

"What the children were most impressed with was that he had written the screenplay for 'Stuart Little,' " says Ms. Ulmer, the food bank's director of resource development. "He spent hours there, sat with every single child, and they put on little performances for him. He looked like he was having the best time."

Others say his joy is also evident whenever Shyamalan is on the set. "He comes down and horses around with us on the set," says Sigourney Weaver. "You wouldn't think he was a director and in charge of hundreds of people."

It's that puckish side of him that occasionally prompts him to appear on the "Howard Stern" radio show - a format many stars find intimidating - for a rambling chat. Shyamalan also participated in a hoax documentary this month on the Sci Fi channel. Called "The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan," it included a segment in which he appeared to storm off the set when an interviewer probed him about his fictional supernatural connection to a fictional deceased boy.

Shyamalan's own inner 10-year-old still shoots hoops and opts for hamburgers over foie gras. The "E.T." poster that used to hang on his bedroom wall now adorns his office, along with a picture of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and a statue of Superman.

"There's definitely a side of me that's still that shy kid," says Shyamalan. "If I let myself get into a certain uncomfortable situation, I can become like that."

There is also a part of Shyamalan, though, that has always seemed preternaturally mature. Several colleagues and friends independently come up with the same description: an "old soul" in a young person's body.

In part, it's his innate sense of order. His childhood room was so neat, says a friend, that even the tennis balls were piled in pyramids. In his hotel room, wearing a wrinkle-free cotton shirt, he gestures to the coffee table. He explains that he feels distracted because he still hasn't finished autographing a pile of "Signs" DVDs.

That organized approach also means that he storyboards every scene in minute detail months before filming. The result: He knows exactly what he wants. That startling self-confidence could be mistaken for hubris.

But colleagues insist otherwise. He is often called a very sensitive and active listener, someone who allows co-workers time to work through creative mental processes he has already picked his way through.

"It's not a Donald Trump situation, which is just a surface bravado," maintains James Newton Howard, the composer who scored Shyamalan's last four films. "It's not a shallow kind of confidence," he says. "There's just so much passion about it.... It just comes out as, 'I know this is going to be great.' He's just excited, it's almost like a little kid." A little kid with big thoughts.

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."

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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