M. Night Shyamalan Quotes
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You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.
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You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.
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There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.
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Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.
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The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.
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I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.
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The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.
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I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.
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I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
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This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].
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My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.
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Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.
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I love 'The Killing', I love 'Homeland' and 'Mad Men', all those shows that lean into the tone of things.
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Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.
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My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.
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Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.
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There's no staying where you were. If you're not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.
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One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don't have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.
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A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.