Revisionist History - Labor of Love with M. Night Shyamalan | Development Hell

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Before M. Night Shyamalan became a household name for his mind bending thrillers like “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs”, he was just a young screenwriter in love. And during those blissful early years of marriage he wrote a love story. The screenplay for “Labor of Love” sold right away, and over the next 30 years or so there would be numerous attempts to make it into a movie. There was a major studio, there were A-list directors, Shyamalan even found his perfect star. In this episode, M. Night Shyamalan tells Malcolm about the script that haunts him. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. 2018 has been greenlit to be made into a movie. You've seen everything I've written, you know, except for this one that we're going to talk about. So it's an interesting... It's always a twist. Yeah. Welcome back to Development Hell, our miniseries about the lost scripts of Hollywood. Today I'm talking with M. Night Shyamalan, one of the best-known filmmakers of the past generation.

Suspense, thrillers, the supernatural, psychodrama. You know his movies, I'm sure. Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, Split, Glass. Something like 15 films in the last 30 years, which collectively have grossed billions of dollars. M. Night Shyamalan's stories have haunted a lot of people over the years. This episode is about the story that haunted M. Night Shyamalan. We've talked a lot so far in this series about movies that never got made because there was something wrong with the story, or because someone on the outside had a problem with the script.

This episode is about none of those things. There is nothing at all wrong with the story Shyamalan has never told. And maybe that's why he never told it. There was the first real script that I felt kind of lightning bolt inspiration that came to me. I was 22 and I just got married and I wrote a kind of a love story. And it's called Labor of Love. And I was writing it and I wrote it. I must remember everywhere I wrote it because it was such a special experience of Love. And I was writing it and I wrote it. I must remember everywhere I wrote it because it was such a special experience of writing. By that time, that was my third feature that I'd

written. I had made a movie already in India. Tell me a little bit about the story. What was Labor of Love about? You know, Labor of Love is essentially a story about an older couple and the wife saying, hey, it's an anniversary and he forgets and all of this stuff. And they've been together a long time. And she's just like, you know, essentially expresses, I do all these little things for you our whole life and you don't. And I'm not sure what you want from, you know, I'm not sure you love me, you know, I'm not a hundred percent sure.

And that's not a great feeling, you know? And he's baffled, right? As all guys are just baffled at this. And, and, and. What do you mean? What do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean? What do you want?

I love you. Who goes to work every morning? Who goes to work? What do you think what do you want i love you um who goes to work every morning who goes to what do you think i'm doing that for yeah yeah okay i get it i get it um see i don't want to say too much of it because i i i tend to think of these things as magic and and yeah and and uh she she passes away unexpectedly and very tragically. And before she died, he said, what do you want me to do to prove my love to you? You want me to swim across an ocean or climb a mountain

or walk across the United States? What do you want me to do? She's like, just walk to the store and get me something on your own because you were thinking, something small like that. Anyway, she passes away. And he's an older man. He's in a, you know, late 60s, 70s kind of thing, out of shape.

And he's so devastated. He makes a crazy decision to start walking across the United States for nothing else but just to show his wife who's passed away in case she can see. And this is in, I wrote this in 1994, right? So no cell phones, no nothing, no internet. And he just begins this track

and it's a kind of like a vision quest a little bit. He starts to think about his life and his time with his wife and when they were kids and he's physically in threat as he's doing this. And slowly the country starts to get to hear about this guy and they're trying to urge him to get there. And it's so crazy. Why are you doing this?

Why are you doing this? And then the country kind of gets on board with the feeling of doing something irrational to show your love for the person that you care about. And I'm not gonna tell you the ending, but it's really poignant, the idea of just doing something so the other person can hear you.

So you're 22, you're very much in love. You've just married your wife, who you've known for how long at that point? I met when I was 18. So I've known her for four years at that point. So the, and in this period of love-struck youth, when you are in love with your young wife, you write a story about an older

couple where the question of the man's devotion to his wife is in doubt. Yes. In other words, I thought you were going to say, I wrote this at 22, I was just married, it's about this young couple who embarked on a... You jump forward 40 years and you start looking back. Yes. So in the period where you are of greatest infatuation,

your impulse is to go to the end of the relationship and work backwards. Yeah. I mean, I think I've always been driven by familial nightmares. You know, the sanctity of the family being jeopardized. You know, later it changed into aliens and ghosts and you name it, but ultimately it's still about families

and whether they can survive. What is it about you at a period of young love when you're already thinking about the kind of, not the dissolution of love, but the final stage of it? Why would you jump ahead? I guess you're thinking about your life and what you want it to be

and where it could go wrong. And maybe I was thinking about what do I want this to be at the end of the journey, 40 years from now, 50 years from now. I hope I've lived the life the right way. And of course, there's going to be a lot of mistakes along the way, but I don't have fears like the other people have fears in the sense of like, I knew I was going to marry the second I met her. You know, like those things, I fear getting a call that something bad happened, you know, and that's very prevalent and still 30 years later. Yeah. But you're asking yourself the question of what is the most tragic outcome of young love is that one is what you've described is that one, one party loves and the other party doesn't,

doesn't realize they're being loved. You put your finger on something that's like, that's a deeply resonant anxiety. It is. I probably found the dynamic of me and my wife that, you know, she married a dreamer, someone who's completely content to stare out in an empty room and just do that all day long and think about an imaginary world with imaginary people and feel fulfilled. And she's like, well, I'm right here. You know, what about the real life we're living? You know, and so the struggle has been, you know, I've heard all of those stories of, you know,

from F. Scott Fitzgerald to you name it, you it, all our heroes and how they struggled with their personal life versus their artistry. Is it a one or the other equation? Sometimes it feels that way and for a lot of people, it feels that way. I've tried to see if they can feed each other and it feeds the movies, the feeling of love for your wife or for your kids. And what does that mean? How can you imbue it and you guys feel it when you see the movies and really the stories that I make? And the hardest thing to explain to your spouse in that instance is that to them, you seem inaccessible in that dreaming. But from your perspective, I'm putting words into your mouth, but there's a certain amount of commonality between the way I approach this and the way that you do. What's hard to explain is that we're not being inaccessible.

And in fact, the relationship we have with our loved one is what makes our dreaming possible, right? They're the engine of it. They're not outside of it. It's their presence and support and structure and love and whatever that permits us to wander off in our imagination and find comfort and joy in all of that. I don't know. It's a very hard thing to explain to someone that our inner lives are contingent on someone on the outside. Yes.

So finding love and then building a career from there felt the right building blocks. That movie was the beginning of that. You know, when writing this movie, Labor of Love, it was coming from such an interesting place and I was writing ahead of my abilities at that point. I was just kind of going by this inspiration of love, I think. What do you mean by writing ahead of your abilities? You know, I didn't have as much craft at that time.

This is oftentimes your career is an equation of craft and inspiration. And so lacking in craft at 22, but the inspiration was at a 10. You know, that feeling when I was writing it, this feels beautiful. This feels lovely. You know, I love this feeling, how it's coming out and how I can see the characters. And in retrospect now, 30 years later, I can see that I was really listening to the characters,

almost like a novelist and following it. And so the end result is I wrote this screenplay that ended up becoming a bidding war from my parents' guest bedroom where me and my wife were living in the guest bedroom. The best bedroom was pink. It was for my sister. It was just a, you know, we had to get out of here kind of feel. And this script went out and there was a bidding war and someone offered this amount of money and then that amount of money. And it was crazy. And I was a kid and I'd run down and I'd be like, mom, they offered this amount of money.

It's crazy. But I'd only directed this little movie in India and they saw it as a big, big movie. And this was back in an era of Hollywood where the entire system was geared at original movies. The system was built to nurture original movies and the spec screenplay markets, screenplays done on speculation was the kind of gold rush. And so if there was an incredible screenplay that came out, everyone would read it immediately and it would go in this bidding war

because that was the food that was feeding the engine at that time to the movie theaters. And so I was luckily kind of grew up in an era where what I love to do, which is original movies was really celebrated and promoted. And so everyone bid on it and we sold it to Fox. I was attached to direct and then I flew out and I put on my graduation suit, which I didn't because I didn't have many suits. I wore my old suit. And then they listened to me about how I would direct the movie. And then they subsequently fired me off the movie. So it was devastating.

Just absolutely devastating. What did you do wrong in your pitch to be a director? That's really interesting question. I would say I wasn't a director yet. I had more practice at writing than directing. Of course, sitting in a room telling the chairman of a studio how you'd make a film and they're asking certain questions. And, you know, I don't know if I had a chance at all,

you know, before I walked in there in retrospect. Knight, you're now, how old, 53? Yeah. You look at 53, you're now, how old, 53? Yeah. You look at 53, you look at 30. At 22, you must have looked 12. You're absolutely correct. You're absolutely correct. No one's going to give you $50 million to direct a movie when you look like a 12-year-old.

Yeah, and I'm in this ill-fitting suit, which makes me even look younger because you're like did you wear your your big brother's suit or whatever it was i remember the feeling i can remember the feeling pitching it to the chairman and the heads of the studio and and going i'm not i don't i don't believe what i'm saying and i'm guessing i was basically i was like i'm i don't know I'm gonna learn you know as I do this because I'm I can see it in my head you know so I'll learn and they took me I was very painful then I ended up you know they talked me into kind of pay rewrite it for some other A-list directors of that time so I had a chance to be in the room with some, you know, at that time, the top directors and they would say, do this, do that. And I just couldn't, I would rewrite it and it would get worse. In retrospect, some kind of mojo curse I put on it and it could never get, it never, two or three directors that tried. So what was really weird about this movie, it represented some kind of connection with the universe. And I think for a little bit, I thought that was a one-off and that it's never going to happen again.

And that was the fear. That screenplay just became something of a mythic thing for me, like, oh, I'll never get that back again. M. Night Shyamalan writes his masterpiece, and then he's haunted by it. More after the break. Wait, so what's the next stage in the saga of Labor of Love? So Sixth Sense happens, right? I wrote it a few years later and wonderful outcome. Everyone wanted to make movies with me.

And I said to Fox, I would love to have that screenplay back. They said, oh, do you want to make Labor of Love? And I said, well, no, I'm thinking about making another movie, which was Unbreakable, that I was writing at that time about comic books, even though no one had been making comic book movies. And I thought no one would ever see this movie. But it was something that interested me. And I said, you know, I was really into genre now.

I was like okay genre is my way Labor of Love is a very it's a very emotional movie I think I have that as my base tendency to be emotional and I think until I found genre to

balance it I was too much for people because I start at a 9 at like at emotion. If you and I are talking over drinks about something, I'll be already emotionally to be there. And I think genre helped me balance that. You have to meet the audience where they are. This is something I learned in my mid twenties. When you're telling a story, meet them where they are and don't lecture them and demand that they come to you. You come to them. So you start tonally where they are. So it was a tough world. And we have cynicism. That's how we get through our lives.

We balance that to protect our softer parts. And genre does that. It comes in and it balances. I have this feeling about movie making or art that it has to have the right balance of light and dark. And that's when it rings true. The love of a mother to a child has a selfish component. You have to have a controlling component. Then it rings true. There's also the beauty, the pure love of a parent to a child. But if I can get both things in there, then it rings true and you start to see yourself in it. I think genre allows me to show you the light side.

Because of that, I can go very dark. I mean, I've killed off more protagonists than anybody. This is like dark stuff. But that's because underneath, I do feel the universe is a benevolent place. And I feel that from that. So genre has helped me balance things. Is it fair to say that genre, particularly horror or supernatural, it lowers the stakes in a certain way? What does it allow you to, what's the speak to people, they think it's gamesmanship.

It's not. There's no game at all. I love it. I hate it. I'm terrified. I'll tell you openly, you know, everything. And when we do things like comedy and all this stuff, those are ways to protect ourselves, which I understand and I can use as well. And genre is if I can show you edgy, dark things and show you, because I do have an edgy, dark side as well. I just deploy it at the right times. That allows me in the balance of things, in the audience's eyes, in their emotional journey. It's earned then when I do the car scene in Sixth Sense with the mom and the child. I've earned it by titillating them and scaring them in a certain way. There's a

balancing act that goes on, which I think is important for me to acknowledge that this is a conversation with the audience. It's not just a lecture. Yeah. Labor of love is, are you saying there's no supernatural, it is a straight? Pretty much, yeah. Just a straight.

You say pretty much. What is that? Pretty much. The reason I say pretty much is there's a tiny bit of spirituality and love. And so I do represent that in there, that things are bound a bit, that there's some inspirational, magical things that happen sometimes that's related to love.

So that's all. But there is no genre in it, as we would say. This opportunity came, I would say, 15 years later, where I could make that movie with literally the best actor in the world. And the person that I would want to make a movie with more than anybody. It was being squeezed between another movie that I was making for a big studio. And made the wrong decision and I didn't make it. And when I think back on it, now knowing me. Who is the actor?

Well, I don't want to say just because, just because. But because it's more about the emotional stuff that we're talking about rather than the kind of the titillation of it, of the names and things like that, if we can. Because just because, you know, it meant so much to me and him and I didn't do it. And it was literally because I just wasn't in the right place. And I was making destructive decisions at that time. In retrospect, now having gone through, you know, iteration after iteration of who I am in front of the public eye,

I with absolute certainty can tell you I should have made it at that time. Dig into a little bit more why you didn't. Is it on some level terrifying to actually make real something that you think of as being so perfect or something like, if something comes in a lightning bolt, is it scary to? It was a lot. No, I wish I could say it was something that defendable. It was literally, I think I wanted so much to be accepted. I was in a phase in my life where I was willing to, I think, give away the things that were precious to me to be accepted. And I was so tired of fighting the fight all the time, these original movies and doing things.

And then I didn't have the protection of genre with that movie. It would just be me and this incredible actor. And at that time, I felt like that's a very vulnerable thing. And that it's just an emotional movie and the world's going to just shit trash me and trash us. And that was the fears, but I was perhaps scared of giving up what I had had, not very admirable reasons. They were coming from wanting to be accepted, from wanting money in other forms

or needing money, whatever it is. And so I failed it because I was impure. That's how I feel about it. And should have 100% done it. This particular actor was, you know, sad by the decision. I would say maybe another eight years later, it came up again. And then this time I was the one that said, hey, let's go make this.

And the same actor wanted to do it and then went off and did another piece, a big kind of thing that they were a part of. And it was successful, the thing they did. But a little bit of it was we missed each other. You know, we missed our moment, you know, a little bit. But the movie wasn't done with M. Night Shyamalan yet. Not at all.

Back with more after the break. How does the way you relate to the movie, how has it changed over the years? You're now, 30 years have gone by. Yeah. Do you look at it and think about it and see it differently now than you did when you were 22? Right now, I wouldn't change anything about it,

and we'd make it as a period piece in 1994. The music, the Moors, the time, you know, which sadly feels incredibly innocent. It almost feels like, you know, let's take a stroll around the garden, you know, oh, I'm so tired from this role. Let's lie down. It's like, you know, when we see a period piece, we're like, wow, that really wore you out to go walk around the garden? That's how we feel about 1994. We thought we were being really bad when we did this. You were just talking

with your boys in the basement. How sweet. All of you just talking about girls because you love girls. How sweet. It feels that way. When I think about it, it's very nostalgic of a time gone by now and a way people might have reacted. Because the way as the hero goes on his journey, as he's walking across the country, the country is responding to him in a way they wouldn't respond today.

Is that your point that in a kind of internet age, it would be different? Yeah, it's so hard now to unwind it and think of a moment when you didn't have access to every piece of information in the history of man. You don't know where your cousin is and where your uncle is and where your sister is right now. No, you don't, right? You know, 1994, we didn't know where anybody was. Right. And, and you, you get a letter or you would, if something happened, it would take a while for you to find out all of those ideas of being present primarily is gone. Our understanding of what it is to be a human being is almost gone because we're never just here anymore. And this phone that's sitting near me as I'm doing this podcast is pulling me right now. I can feel it. It's pulling me. So I'm partly here with you,

but it's stolen my soul a little bit, you know, and that was just a different era. And that's all part of that time period when I, you know. When I try to rewrite it, when I'm trying to make it better, I'm scarring it. It came out in one thing like that. This kid was just feeling something. When was the last time you read it? I probably read it,

it came out a third time with this particular actor. A third time. It was four years ago. So I read it four years ago. Four years ago when we talked about it again. Where do you guys actually do it? I'm just a strange creature, bro. So if I say to you, absolutely never,

as soon as we click off here, I'll probably go make it, right? I've thought about it a lot. Do you do it more as a ritual almost to honor that part of you in all of us that came from a pure place, regardless of its success, regardless of what would happen?

There is a kind of a wise warning regardless of its success, regardless of what would happen, there is a kind of a wise warning about labor of love, that there's something where you're blind about the labor. Oh, I always wanted to make that movie about blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. Or I always wanted to write that thing. It's a labor of love for me.

That automatically means you're blind a little bit. Some massive blind spot exists there. There is that wisdom, acumen, to be careful of your labor of loves that meant that you were kind of obsessed in a way about something. I don't know if that's the case here. I feel, even as we talk about it,

like, you know, I could go do this in another year and do exactly the way I said it. It's funny. I had this conversation with someone in my office about it. I said, I don't know if the world even wants to remember feeling this way anymore. It's painful to remember that we used to feel this way. And it was okay and wonderful and celebrated and calm. When you say feel this way, you mean get swept up in what that man was doing? Yeah, this amount of the expression of love, you know, whereas today it's our relationship to our emotions is so being attacked. We're not supposed to have our own feeling anymore. We're being manipulated by algorithms constantly and distraction.

And so the AI world is already deciding how we live and experience our lives. And maybe that's the absolute reason to make it. I don't know. As I'm talking to you, this is probably the deepest conversation I've had about it because it is a kind of like, are you still torturing yourself about this movie, bro, after 30 years? this odyssey is that there's been opportunities and there is one now of a wonderful filmmaker that wants to make it themselves. The same story.

And whether I'm okay with that. Are you? Bro, I don't know. I don't know. That feels like... I don't know. I don't know. That feels like... I don't know. I don't know. I'm almost shutting down when you're asking me that question. And I haven't...

I've actually shut down in that process too. So, you know... Someone just called you up and said... Someone famous calls you up and says, Knight, I've read the secret screenplay. Yes. How did this person get a hold of it? They just heard through the grapevine?

Yeah, and it's happened before. It's happened before. Somebody wants to make it. Every few years, somebody wants to make it. And I could just let it go. Just let it go. Just let go and let someone put their point of view on love. So it's this screenplay that represents the purest version of me that's on a page and it has been chasing me like a ghost or haunting me.

It started my career and I got to do all these amazing things and continue to have these incredible opportunities. And really, it's like a part of me that I betrayed at one point. And now I can make it now. I mean, today, I can make it right now. And I think probably with this same actor. And even as you and I are sitting here,

I have all these reasons that are holding me back. So I don't know what this screenplay is to me and what this movie is to me. Maybe it's the softest part of me. And I'm so scared to show you guys that. You said that your great fear at the time when you wrote it was that you would never write anything so pure again. But listening to you, my fear about it is that had you made it, then what followed may not have happened. In other words, having as one of your very first screenplays something so perfect, like fueled all of this extraordinary productivity that came afterwards.

And that had you made it and had it been a big success, maybe you would have been kind of paralyzed by that. Like the fact that it's unreal, it's unrealized allows you to keep going and, right? If it's, think about, what is the curse of the one hit wonder? The curse of the one hit wonder is someone who is unlucky enough to have written their greatest song first. It's just bad luck. And everyone looks at the second and the third ones

and says, it's over for you. Well, it's not over for you. It's just out of order, right? Whereas the same thing only put the One Hit Wonders breakthrough hit 10 years into their career. And we think, oh, what a progression, right? Towards... Yeah, I mean, you know for me i keep you know maybe you're right the unfinished nature of that is keeps driving me you know the movie i've just editing now and finishing when i think of it i have a little

bit of magic feeling about it and i'm like oh this is reminding me of Labor of Love. When it's feeling effortless and right, you're going, well, where did that come from? How do you do that? And you're like, oh yeah, that's how it felt at 22. But then here's the other fear I have, that what if you made it and it wasn't magical? Then you wouldn't have, you would also have destroyed this thing that you've been able to look at throughout your entire career. Well, I can tell you at 22, I wouldn't have made a particularly great movie at that moment. I think we've been up and down, flawed, and this and that.

And then when we jumped forward to the first time with that, the most incredible actor, I wasn't in the right emotional space to have made it properly. Now that we're really getting serious about it, yeah. So that wouldn't have worked out either because I just was not where I am right now. One last question. What does your wife say? She was present at the creation.

That's a great question. I think she's seen me torture myself for 30 years about this. In her mind, for a while, she kept asking me, why do you keep killing off the wife? She's like, why do you keep killing off the wives? And I'm like, no, no, no. It's because I'm so scared to lose you. You know, she knows I wrote it for her. So it's kind of already in our lives. It already happened. It already existed and was made and was so lovely.

You know, I have this check from back when we used to get checks from 20th Century Fox. And it was my first check that I got. And I have it framed. It's in my office. So if you come to my office, which you will, it's there. And then if you go into the cafeteria, there's a poster of a mock-up of a poster that 20th Century Fox made for Labor of Love. And that's hanging on my wall. So on my wall is all the movies I made and a movie that wasn't made. It's your own ghost. You've created your own ghost. True.

Nate, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much. I really, really, really enjoyed this. You're so lovely. Thank you for having me. I was learning something about myself too, as we were talking. You're a good therapist, man. I was trying to get there. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence and Tali Emlin with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

I'm Malcolm Glavo.