YouSaid · the spoken record

M. Night Shyamalan

lines on the record: 52
first: 2021-02-04
most recent: 2021-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, so much of the worrying about the second column, every single bit of it is a waste of time. I wish I could have figured out that idea earlier and told him, I promise you, just figure out what happens to the guy after he hits his head. I promise you that's all you need to worry about and everything will happen. You know, there are moments to say, hey, who's going to distribute the movie and when is the best date and all of that stuff. There are practical things, but that's not where you should put your love and your energy. It's over here. Hey, you made this great piece of art. And he was figuring it out. There was no roadmaps of how to do this. But I certainly have spent way too much of my life worrying about things and angsting and being sad over the wrong things, just the wrong things.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I don't believe that at all. I think the second that we can all be back together again, we're just collective creatures. We want to go experience things together. Let's watch this together. Let's watch the game together. Let's go watch the movie together. And those movies that promise this is going to be something you want to share with your friends and others. I believe when you go to the movie theater and you commit to leave your house, park your car, get your babysitter, and come and turn off your phone. You cannot multitask. You're making the biggest commitment that you will ever make to an art form for two hours. And then we in turn hold your attention and have to earn that for two hours. That is the greatest commitment. And if you put more commitment into anything, you're going to get more back. So the experience will be stickier. It'll be more powerful and will stay with you longer. So it's just in that way, if you call that the product, that.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prioritizing their other business and willing to undermine the moviegoing experience. That's what it felt like their value system had switched, which is not great for those of us who moviegoing is the religion.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was more the how that they unilaterally did it without talking to the filmmakers who had every, they are just as passionate as I am about this moviegoing experience. They thought they were making one art form. And then they were told, hey, it's mostly not going to be that way or at all. And that's a very profound thing to change on somebody that, hey, we're not even doing the art form that you signed up for to do. Every decision you're making about how the sound moves through the theater and all, that's not going to be the case because it's going to be in a home theater on a TV or on a laptop. It should have been filmmaker by filmmaker's decision of how to handle this year. If they wanted to put it out that way, great. Everybody comes a decision. Or if they wanted to wait, and if the studio could handle that financial burden of waiting for a beat, you know, to put it out when it was safer, those conversations just needed to be had and it felt like they were price.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you'll see this movement of drama leaving the movie theater and coming to home. Like, you're okay feeling emotional, dramatic things at home, but going to a movie theater with a group of people, you want to be scared and laugh and thrilled and spectacle and all these things. You want to have a group experience. You don't want to have an internal one. Like, you know, almost we could call drama an internal thing. So that's been an interesting bifurcation that's happened, which wasn't there before streaming and all of these other things. And so I'm studying how people behave. Maybe that will change. Maybe that will change now.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole world would shut down. It's scary. It's humbling. I think in probably a healthy way for all of us, this isn't guaranteed. And there'll be that to grapple with. That might mean that people just want to escape more and be entertained. Maybe they're not ready for too heavy a stuff. I don't know how that's going to play out. We have found this movement. This is a whole other subject guy, probably another podcast, but this movement of what plays in the movie theater versus at home.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this world of what happened to us is a lot of what I live with and when I'm thinking about fictional stories, you know, about things that happen to the world and how do we all feel when we're isolated from each other. And there were so many things that we experienced that I never thought of that occurred to us. I do think that it'll create a certain paranoia. I think it'll take us a long while to feel safe, even past the pandemic. We never in a million years thought the whole world would shut down.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll know that, and you'll go, what was my hope for her? Well, my hope for her that she would be like my mom and she would have this sense of anger, but she's never been connected to her own anger. Like you'll write something and go, oh, someone who doesn't realize they're angry. Okay, great. And I can write that.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happens is when you get stuck, like essentially, you're betraying the story, but you don't know how you're betraying it. So you can feel the damage. You just don't understand it. This isn't working. So any ways that you can say it out loud or put it on a paper, this is not working. This feels so redundant because this, and you'll even, as you're saying the problem, there's the answer will be kind of in there embedded in there. You're going, this is redundant. Oh, redundant. Oh, wait a minute. What is the scene is about why are we doing this whole sequence? I already did it before, or this isn't the right time to do that. Or I don't really know her. And I keep putting her down. And that's why I hate writing her because I don't know her. It's just a blurry empty space that I'm calling her. And it's generic. And I don't like that. And so then you, so...”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks, man. It's a joy. The collective experience is such a wonderful thing. Making movies for me and showing them in a movie theater is a little bit of a sacred thing for me because I think it's when we're at our best, because the teenage girl is affecting the 60-year-old guy in the back of the theater, even if he doesn't know it. He's giggling in a certain place. Attuning him in a certain way, and then his kind of taking things in a kind of earnest or sincere way, it's affecting her as well and that we're all this quilt as it's coming together. So, I mean, for me, it's a very sacred thing to having the opportunity to tell stories to a group.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the first time I screen split, it was in Austin, Texas at a film festival, Fantastic Fest. And when it got to the last scene, there was music that comes in prior to the last scene and the music is from a previous movie. And soon as those first notes happen, there was a guy like, I snuck in and hit and I saw a guy in there and he was sitting back and he's watching and the music came in and he was like, and he just starts sitting up and he started looking at everybody and everybody, there was this murmur went through the whole crowd and then at the end when the reveal happened to who was sitting there at the counter at the end of split, I thought they were going to tear the seats out of the theater when there were people like putting their hands up in the air like a roller coaster like they were going down a roller coaster. So it was really, it was such a joy and that feeling you can imagine, right, that little kid that loves to have that feeling what that felt like.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the mischievous kid, I really enjoy the reactions. I was when we were, I have an audio recording of the visit in the movie theater. And there's a thing that happens for those of you that haven't watched the visit. I'm not going to ruin it to it, but there's a moment where something is revealed. And the audience's reaction is so vocal. It was like, I thought the theater was going to erupt. These are just more favorite moments of me being in the movie theaters with them, with the audiences when these things happen.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As they realize this thing that happens, I really enjoy that. I mean, look, I enjoy feeling emotions and intellectual thoughts that are unexpected that I didn't expect to feel that way about. And whenever I'm reading or learning, the painting can do that, a book can do that, make me feel this kind of epiphany.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it's funny, even as you asked it, there is a certain kind of derivative quality to that that is frustrating, I would guess, more than anything else because I would say in spirituality, the pervasive nature of kind of talking about spirituality is just as much there. I don't look at it as a kind of a fancy dance move or something like that. Like, okay, now I'm going to do the moonwalk, everybody. Here we go. That's not it. It's a points of view and how to talk about points of view and the structure of storytelling and not understanding why is she acting that way? Why is she acting that way? Oh my gosh, she's acting that way because of that, you know, that kind of thing. I love characters realizing things. And so if I'm doing my job right as storyteller, you are with that character.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they each do too. I'm not devoting anybody's point of view. It's just that. In society, most of the time it's been a certain point of view has been more, people have been more open to a certain point of view, right? And just understanding how much storytelling affects everything we do as a society, what stories we tell ourselves, what are the basic premises that we take for granted. We all get to decide that as storytellers help add a certain color to that, to the things that we take for granted.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not only bring your chair to the table, it's make the table longer. That's your response. Go add to the table, you know, and so I said once to a Mexican student who was, I did a speech and he's like, you know, there's not enough Mexican voices. And all this stuff, and I was saying to him, I need you. You're right. I need you. So start telling a story for me. Tell me a story, but don't round the corners. The more specific it is, the more power it is where I go. I could never do that. Or Quentin Tarantina could never do that. Or Wes Anderson or David Fincher can't do that. That's what you want. You want that specificity of that person who asked the question telling me exactly. Things that make them then. And that includes the negative stuff, the anger, the arrogance, all of that stuff needs to be in there in a truthful capacity.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm coming to terms with what it meant to me and how much it became a part of my identity, the things that this person is asking, look, I think this is really the best time it's ever been for that question to be asked because I believe in everybody's individuality is their power. So the fact that I am was born in Pondicherry, India and live outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I wear flannel shirts. I love cheeseburgers, but my mom has a puja at her house. All that mixed together is why I think people connect with my voice around the world. We'll call it the immigrant flavor that's coming from that, that's redefining American storytelling is each of our responsibilities to do, you know, to bring that to, it isn't like, hey, I'm angry, I don't have a seat at the table.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I've been doing a lot of soul searching myself about this particular subject because I think many of the things I experienced from 21 years old till today, I just accept it as my particular. That the headwinds and the resistance and the things of, wow, that was really harsh and wow, that wasn't very helpful. And wow, all these things that that feeling is.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, where we picked, and again, where the movie industry in general is a circus, right? It's a traveling circus. So I'm anticipating from the time I get the idea to the time you see it in the movie theaters is two years. You know, I'm already thinking, what will it be like? What will life be like? Even who will be president? These things all have a ramification on the feeling of the audience and all of that stuff. And for us, when we did, we said based on what we knew about the vaccines and what the protocols were looking like and how it was coming along, I felt that July 23rd was a place where the world would be ready to be back to normal and we could be part of bringing everyone safely back together. That was, again, if it didn't work out, we would just push it. But it felt like that was the right point.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's impensive. That one was in Philly, and they were very different in tenor because of the two countries' relationship to the pandemic at the time.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is old, yeah. And then the other project was servant for Apple. Which is we had to finish shooting the second season, which is out now.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While the movie was done in the Dominican Republic. So that was a great thing. The government helped us a lot and helped us, for them, they didn't quite have the scale of the pandemic that we had. So their anxieties and his outdoor a lot, the movie was outdoors primarily.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For three months. So it was like that. And we were very lucky because everybody did abide by this. We tested three times a week every single human being, thousands and thousands of tests and not a single positive. And everybody went home. We made this movie and we made the TV show under those parameters. And it was tough. Some people were scared to leave their families for that long, but understood the why. I was saying you just can't. And if you can do four weeks and then leave us, then I'll get another person to come do four weeks. Like I was very clean about what we were doing. You just can't come back and forth kind of thing.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're going to go make this movie, but that is the only way I will do these projects if every single person that we come in contact with is within our bubble. And we did it and it worked really well for me because my movie takes place only in two locations. So we were able to buy out that whole location. And so we literally, Guy, for I would say for two and a half months, I didn't meet a human being that wasn't. Tested and negative and in our bubble. Like, I didn't even meet him. I remember when I first came back, went to go to like, you know, pick up something. I'm like, oh my God, this is the first human beings that I didn't personally test and have in our bubble.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I do it in the tightest, smallest group of people, and I buy out everything, I buy out the hotel, I buy out everyone that's giving us food, we don't leave the hotel, the people that are cleaning the hotel rooms, every single human being for a very short amount of time, and everybody commits as much as possible to make a true, true bubble here, I am not going to be able to stop the customer from talking to the construction worker and them after I'm not going to be able to stop that. That's going to happen. But they're going to be within the bubble and give them really clean parameters. It's eight weeks I'm asking you for, eight weeks, and this is why we're doing it. You don't go to your daughter's birthday. You don't see your sister. None of that happens. If you can't, I totally understand it, but we'll go down the next movie. No problem. No problem whatsoever. No pejorative. Nothing. But if you can do this for weeks, I'm going to pay you.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time to audition and prep and write and storyboard. I storyboard out everything. So I took the time to do all of that. So there was a lot of work that could be done here and virtually to set us up. And then we had to figure out how to do it together in a safe way. And there was no guidelines, right? This was, so I just took the information, talked to as many doctors and did it by my understanding of human nature, which is this.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the answer is a surprising one. And the answer is it was my busiest year. Why it was is I'm a writer and I was able to write. I was able to work with writers on Zoom for the TV show. We ended up writing all the episodes for the next season and outlining the final season of the show while we were in the pen. So we got way ahead, way ahead. And that's an amazing thing. And I did, I was went ahead in my head and I said, you know, look, I'm going to go shoot this new movie. So let's start casting. So I was the first basically the first movie in the world that started casting during the pandemic. So everyone in the world was auditioning for me by Zoom. And at that moment it was still very odd that you would be in your bedroom or your living room. It was super odd, right? Everybody was like, hey, I've never done this before and actors from all over the world. Thousands and thousands and thousands of auditions. So I had...”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's all I'm going to do today. So I went and I was like, oh, yeah, I can tighten that and I can move that. And then I did that again the next day and the next day. And the next day, and then I suddenly forgot about the mortgage and I forgot about my career being over, forgot all about that. And I just was looking forward to finding the next puzzle piece with the movie. I was, ooh, you know if I did that line, oh my God, that takes so much funny the one we never put in. We should put that in. And then I change. Oh, I have a great idea. Instead of it being six days that that story is about, it's going to be five days. Let's take that third day right out of the movie and slide it together. It'll be much more the movement. Like over and over and a boom. And then it was off to the races. And then when we were done that movie, you know, we ended up showing it to one studio and they bought it and it became universal, became one of the biggest movies of the year. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at this puzzle of me and her, and we're like, we both looked at each other. I'm like, this is impossible. And we just did one piece, and we did, and we took search through the thousand pieces and found like eight pieces and then ten pieces and 12 pieces. And we finished the day with 12 pieces or something. And we did it again the next day. And suddenly I went, well, I don't need to know the whole picture. All I need to know is find the next puzzle piece. That's all you need to concentrate on. It's a version of stay in this column. And so, what I did was nobody wants to buy it. I'm just gonna go in the anti-room and make it just a little bit better”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's all I should be worried about. Nothing else. And so the world, as I kept putting more and more into the wrong column, nothing was working out in the way, and I wasn't happy. So then everything went away. And then I went, I just suddenly felt clear. And it was one of those things. I was having doing a puzzle with my little one. And I just came back from showing the movie that I mortgaged my house for, right? And I showed an early, early cut like three weeks, four weeks out of shooting, which is you should never do this to all the buyers because I was so scared that I was going to go bankrupt or whatever, right? And nobody wanted to buy it and sat down and was doing the puzzle. We started this thousand-piece puzzle. Was like, this is impossible.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And do I ever have any power at all? Or is it all ephemeral? Did I make it all up? I'm sensing the lie that I have control over this column and I'm blurring it now and saying I don't think I have control in either column. And so I was getting really scared. This is existentially what's happening. So I keep trying to control the outcome. So I'm like, if I work with this person, if I do this kind of movie, if I do this, rather than I wonder what happens to the guy when he hits his head.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now that I'm safely away from that moment a little bit, I can talk about it in the terms that it should be talked about. It's like a great teacher teaching you what's important. And that Drexel commencement speech that I gave, I was talking about two columns of everything in your life. And the one column is the things that you have control over, and the other column is the things you don't have control over. And a lot of times in life, you think you have control over this other column. And you shouldn't put any energy into that column at all. So what ended up happening is I was in many ways, if I'm being honest with myself, was confused about this. Where is my power?”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I can't guarantee that I can make a zillion mistakes and figure it out on my own. And so we're heavily protecting the process. And so if you look at the things that I'm making and the partners that I'm making it with, they're super healthy. They allow me to have this process. What is the goal? The goal? Like what is success? So it's not a monetary thing. I believe that the monetary will come if you do this other thing. And if it doesn't, it's still fine. But the monetary will come if you build as strongest connection with the audience.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is trial and error where we've gotten to what I'm about to say. There's certain principles that now are absolutely essential, like no dysfunctional geniuses. So your dysfunctional genius, thanks. I'm going to go to somebody else to help me do the composition or do this or that or editing or put the production design together or whatever it is. protecting your process the single greatest thing that we have come to understand in this so you never say yes to anything that would compromise the process so if they said hey do you want to do this incredible XYZ project with this superstar who has developed this screenplay right and it's going to shoot in this place you know and you're going well I don't have the ability to iterate in the way that that is safe for me that that would be an almost guaranteed no”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you try not to stare at the wall, but I'm allowed to. That would be a version of safely failing. You're creating a space to safely fail every day, but it won't because you're inspired. You're going, oh yeah, just write it down and suddenly you become unlocked. Yeah, I hate when she says this. And then you go, oh yeah, that's right. I hate that because of that. Sometimes I'll read when I'm writing. Now we're just talking about writing for a second. We constantly, so I'll read something not necessarily nonfiction like these books that are in front of me, but something fiction like a classic, you know, that gives me rhythm, like things you couldn't possibly connect, why they make any sense, like reading Slaughterhouse 5 helped me write the visit. I don't know why. It evokes something in me.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's your two hours to write, okay? So you'll feel great shame, or I do, right? You go and you burnt those two hours staring at the wall, but you cannot be productive in other ways. So that's the thing for me because there's so many other ways I can fill it right now. Oh, I need to look at that edit. All these things. No, don't kid yourself. Spend those two hours. And even if I sat there for two hours wondering what happens to him after he hits his head, five different iterations of things came and went that were incorrect, right? It feels like I didn't do anything, but I did. And then the next day builds and builds and builds.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where I just had to stay at home and just sit there. There was no press tourism. I'm not going on the tonight show. I'm not going to Europe to open up the film there. I'm not doing this screening and that screening. Right. Hey, what interests you? What's your writing? All these ideas started coming, and it reminded me of an earlier time. I do feel space is such a critical thing. And I saw the documentary on Bill Gates and he takes that week every year, the think week, to just think. We don't give ourselves enough of that to let us connect to the universe, however you want to say this thing of coming up with new ideas. So that part for me is critical that you take the space. And even if it's in the morning, like right now I'm supposed to take two hours, you can blow the two hours. That's fine. Blow it. Sit there and stare at the wall.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? The space is such a great thing that you said. I wonder if when you see this sinus curve of success, failure, success, failure, and a lot of people go, success, failure, and never return, right? There's inherent pulls that happen because when you have nothing, you become really clear about what's important and what are your values. You're very clear about them. And then you get up and you start to have success and there's this accretion of good decision making that gets you here. And then you have all this distractions that are starting to bend you and distract you from what you knew before. And it starts to make bad decisions and you start to come like that. And the space that anonymity gave you gives you at the beginning, the space that I then again saw during the pandemic.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of morphed from my grandma saying, you know, this house is haunted or she puts nails a chicken head outside the house because of some bad thing that she thinks a curse has been put on her house. It's just normal in the culture to believe in those things. That kind of moved over and became aliens and comic books and comic book characters and stuff.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hung out, we were having beers or whatever. I'm a little bit mischievous. So that mischievous side of making you laugh and playing tricks on you, that would be how our relationship would be. And that just kind of transfers into playing with the audience and making them laugh or playing tricks on them. Or I love when they oo and r when they can't believe what they just saw. That was unexpected. It makes me happy. And so it's a playfulness about it. I think the spirituality is me, a part of me that's always, I'm constantly reading books and trying to understand things. But I do think the inherent spirituality of the Indian culture”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lucky to have been directed a movie. This is maybe an immigrant mentality too because my parents are never stop thinking like this. I mean, they have in their house literally pictures of me embossed on covers of like magazines everywhere. And I'm like, mom, you can't just have this stuff up on the wall. You know, like they still are waiting for me to have my big break. That's like that's an immigrant mentality. The first time I told her that I was like, hey, you know, this amazing thing, you know, Bill Clinton asked for me to come to the White House to have a dinner. This is amazing. And mom and dad was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Maybe something good will come of this. I'm like, mom, that's the good thing. That was the good thing. He's not going to give me part of the country or in an island. Immigrant end here. This is it. And it was like, they never get out of that thing every day when I come over. I see them every day. Now they're 80 now. And they...”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get out of this healthy or not, but every single time I go, this is the last movie that they'll ever let me make. This is the one. And is that okay? So make it so that it's okay, that if this was the last one, you put it all there. Wow, I'm ready to burn the house down for this value system that I showed artistically in this movie. And if that means that's the end, then no problem. And so each movie is like that, that anxiety. Like, I remember when I was a kid writing Unbreakable while I was editing Sixth Sense, because I'm like, they're never going to let me direct after this movie comes out. So let me try to as fast as I can make this movie about comic books, which no one wants to see a movie about comic books. I was like, I'm the only person that would ever want to see a movie about comic books. So I was like, writing that as fast as I could, like on the train rides and all the mentality was, you know, you're an Indian kid from Philly. This is not, you're already.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It turns out the thing that I do to ground and be centered is my job. So it's like that beautiful thing that you, the thing that you love to do is your job. So all this other stuff, to be honest, I've learned is irrelevant. How many people did come on the weekend and what did the New York Times think and what did that fan think? And oh, that other guy made that much or did that? Or the cover, they offered you the cover of this or that, none of that matters, honestly, to me inside it's after we're done the interview and I sit down and I can figure out what happens after he falls down. I'm talking about a character in this new movie on the hits the ground and hits his head and what they are all about to do. If I can figure that out today, I'll be so happy, so happy.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gosh. I definitely have helped the, by healthy, I mean unhealthy anxiety about what could go wrong and what's going to happen. And that's the opposite of where you need to be emotionally when you create. So the only relief I've ever had in my life, this is what I was telling to my head of my company yesterday, I said, you know, I've been anxious a lot. And I said, you know what? The amazing thing is the only thing that makes me not anxious is creating.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't. That you don't. I have it right now in front of you. I mean, I just came from an editing room and I have all these issues with this reel and I'm trying to figure it out. And the voice inside you says you're not going to figure it out. You're not going to figure out. When I'm done with you, I'm going to write my next movie. I'm supposed to spend a few hours today writing the next movie I'm going to shoot. I'm trying to balance everything. And I'm scared to write it because maybe today I won't be able to think of that thing. And you just both my older daughters are artists and I said that is your plight. You're going to wrestle with your demons every single day of your life.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In your career, at least for me, because I try to do original films. And so there's this pull to go into the system. But for whatever reason, I feel like every time I want to stay outside the system a bit and try something a little bit different. And so almost every single time it feels like that. I mean, when I did the visit, which was many, many, many years later, I put a mortgage on the house and did the whole thing all over again.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that first one was friends and bartering, and can we borrow this equipment? And my uncle giving $5,000 and my aunt giving $2,000, and it was like, you know, putting it together when it was all said, we sell it to cable and HBO and things for just the same amount of money that we spent on it and we give it back. And it was like, you know, basically like a wash alone over those years, but it was terrifying, right? And you're not making any money. It gave me a chance to go to film festivals. I mean, that story that you're asking me about, the first film keeps on happening over and over and over.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, it should be known that at that time, and maybe it's similar now, I'd have to talk to 20 year old Indian child.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're touching on one of my rules of life, which is iterate as much as you can, create environments where you can safely iterate. Some people call it failure. I don't, you know, it's so stigmatize that word that just call it iterating. Where can you iterate safely? So as we're just talking, this just occurred to me by me couching filmmaking as a hobby, as fun, it was safe to fail because it has no merit in like whether I was going to be going to become a doctor or, you know, anything that my Indian parents valued. It was like, oh, it has no bearing on that. So I could, wow, that was terrible. Let me do another one of those. Wow, that was a little less terrible. And you could just go and it never said anything about me. And so as opposed to, hey, I'm going to be a filmmaker. Wow, I'm terrible at it. I'm not going to do this anymore because I don't like this feeling.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I need to convey the level of lack of talent that was shown in these pieces staggering, like that if you're looking for a morsel of creative instinct or originality, it's void of all of those things. It's just absolutely me copying, copying anything that I've seen in the worst possible way, you know, in an ineffectual way and finding that ineffective and finding that not satisfying, kind of pretending I'm making a horror movie, pretending I'm making Raiders a lost dark, pretending I'm making a James Bond movie, it's farcical when you see them, but it was funny. I skipped the wonderful part of it, which is the creating. I was mimicking rather than creating. And so it had none of the joy. And I think once I started to make up things that were original, it felt so different than that.”
2021-02-04 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: M. Night Shyamalan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT