Labor of Love with M. Night Shyamalan | Development Hell

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I've had such an exceptionally curated career.

Every movie I've ever written since 18 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.

There's always a twist.

Welcome back to Development Hell, our mini-series 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 whose 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 a 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.

was 22 and I'd just been married, 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 almost can remember everywhere I wrote it because it was such a special experience of writing.

By that time, that was my

third feature that I had written.

I had made

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, I, 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 100% sure.

And that's not a great feeling, you know and um he's baffled right as all guys are just baffled at this and and and uh what do you mean what do you mean

what do you mean what do you want me 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 i get it

um she i don't want to say too much of it because i'm i i i tend to think of these things as magic and

just a taste yeah and and uh she she passes away unexpectedly

and very tragically.

And before she died, she said, he said, you know, what do you want me to do to prove my love to you?

You want me to, you know, 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, you know, something small like that.

Anyway, she passes away.

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 if this isn't, I wrote this in 1994, right?

So

no cell phones, no nothing, no internet.

And he just begins this track.

And it's, it's a kind of a.

like a vision quest a little bit.

He starts to think about his life and his time with his wife and from when they were kids.

And he's physically in threat as he's doing this.

And slowly the the the country starts to get a hear about this guy and they're trying to urge him to 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 going to 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 know her for four years at that point.

So the, and

in this period of love-struck youth,

when you are, you know, in love with your young wife, you write a story about an older couple.

Yes.

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 to Roman Love.

It's about this young couple who embark and a burrow.

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 in 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 is it, what is it?

What do I want this to be at the end of the journey, you know, 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 her 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 realize they're being loved.

You put your finger on something that's like

that's a deeply resonant anxiety.

It is.

Probably from 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, what about the real life we're living, you know?

And, and so the struggle has been, you know, I've heard all of those stories of, you know, from, you know, F.

Scott Fitzgerald to you name it, you know, 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 be feed each other and it feeds the movies,

the feeling of love for your wife or for your kids or, you know, 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 i'm putting words into your mouth but i'm 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

and in our imagination and

feel

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.

You know, so finding love and then building a career from there

felt the right sort of the right building blocks.

And

so 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.

It 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 I was lacking in craft.

And

at 22, but the inspiration was at a 10.

you know, that feeling when I was writing it, this feels beautiful.

This feels lovely.

I love this feeling, how it's coming out and how I can see the characters and in retrospect now, 30 years later, 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 feeling.

And, and this script went out and there was a bidding warrant.

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, this amount of money.

It's crazy.

And,

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, 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 English 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.

And so it was devastating, just absolutely devastating.

What did you do wrong in

your pitch to be a director?

that's really interesting a question i would say i wasn't a director yet i had more practice at writing than directing and of course sitting in a room telling a chairman of a studio how you make a film and they're asking certain questions and you know i i don't know if i had a chance at all uh you know before i walked in there in retrospect night you're now how old 53

you you look

At 53, you look 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, oh, did you wear 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 believe what I'm saying.

And I'm guessing, I was like, basically, I was like, I don't know.

I'm going to learn, you know, as I do this, because

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 of mojo curse I put on it.

And

it could never get, it never, it could never bloom into fruition.

So there was lots of directors that tried, two or three directors that tried.

So what was really weird about this movie, it represented some kind of, you know, 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.

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Wait, so what's the next stage in the saga of Labor of Love?

So Six 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 screen light 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 making comic book movies.

And I thought no one would ever see this movie, but it was something that interests 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.

Cause like I start at a nine, like at emotion.

If you and I are talking over drinks about something, I'll be, I'll be like, I'll be already emotionally to be, you know,

there.

And I think genre helped me balance that.

You know.

You have to meet the audience where they are.

This is something I learned in my mid-20s.

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, you know, it's a tough world and we have a little, we have cynicism.

That's how we get through our lives.

You know, we balance that to protect our softer parts and

genre does that.

it comes in and and it balances i've 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, you know, 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, you know,

because of that, I can can go very dark.

I mean, I've killed off more protagonists than anybody.

This is like dark stuff.

And, but that's because underneath I do feel the universe is a benevolent place and feel that from that.

So genres helped me balance things.

Is this fair to say that genre, particularly horror or the supernatural, it lowers the stakes in a certain way?

What does it allow you to,

what's the best way to describe the way it, it's, it's protective when you get really down to it i'm just this sentimental dude that's overly earnest when i speak to people they think it's gamesmanship it's not there's no game at all i i'm i love it i hate it i i'm terrified i'm i'll tell you openly you know everything and and

when we do things like comedy and all this stuff those are ways to protect ourselves which i understand and i 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.

You know, I've earned it.

by by 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.

That 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 it?

Pretty much.

The reason I say pretty much is there's a tiny bit of spirituality and love.

And so that I do represent that in there, that things are bound a bit, that there's some

inspirational, magical things that happen sometimes, you know, 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, you know, 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 I 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

you'd be 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 of 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, you know, 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 and that's the 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 you know in in other forms or needing money or whatever it is and so you know the i i i 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 missed each other you know we missed our moment you know a little bit

but the movie wasn't done with m night shy malan yet not at all back with more after the break

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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 mores, 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 the stroll.

Let's lie down.

It's like, you know, when we see a a period piece, we're like, wow, that really wore you out to go walk around the garden,

you know.

And that's how we feel about like 1994.

Oh, we were thought we were really being really bad when we did this.

You were just talking with your boys in the basement.

How sweet.

And you were just, all of you just talking about girls because you love, you know, how sweet, you know, like it feels that way.

And I, 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, 994, we didn't know where anybody was, right?

And

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, you know, as 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.

What are the odds you'll 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 as a ritual almost to honor that part of you and 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 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, you know, 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.

Well, 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.

And 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 we still, 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 should, I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm almost shutting down when you're asking me that question.

And

I've actually shut down in that process too.

So, you know, this is.

So 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 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 like 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 it's it's so I don't know what this this screenplay is to me and what this movie is to me.

Um, maybe it's the softest part of me.

And and I'm so scared to show you guys that.

My you said that your great fear at the time when you wrote it was

that you would never have anything 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 unrealized allows you to keep going and

right?

If it's think about the 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 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 keeps driving me.

You know, the movie I'm 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 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 if i at 22 i wouldn't have made a particularly great movie that at that moment i i think been uh

you know, 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 is your, what does your wife say?

She was present at the creation.

That's a great question.

I would, I think she's seen me torture myself for 30 years about this.

In her mind, you know, for a while, she kept asking me, why do you keep killing off the wife?

You know, like in science.

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.

And so it's kind of already in our lives because 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, and 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.

Night, 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 Glabo.

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