M. Night Shyamalan’s advice to young filmmakers: “There will be a moment in life where everyone gives up on you, and that is the most beautiful thing”

For a filmmaker whose work is preoccupied with the strange, the supernatural and the savage, it’s surprising that the unifying factor of M. Night Shyamalan’s work might just be love. A large part of his critical rediscovery over the past couple of years could be down to the fact that it’s become more and more evident that the director of high-concept genre films including The Sixth Sense (1999), Split (2016) and Old (2021) truly loves what he does. There’s very little that’s pretentious about Shyamalan’s films: he is overwhelmingly interested in fun above anything else.

His newest release, Trap, is a romp. It stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper Adams, a middle-aged father who discovers that a pop concert he’s brought his teenage daughter to is in fact a trap set for a violent serial killer. As well as offering some Shyamalanian surprises, the film is also, obliquely, about parenthood. It’s about balancing your life as an adult with your life as a parent – a fact that may be particularly relevant given it stars Shyamalan’s daughter, pop star Saleka, as fictional pop star Lady Raven.

A number of alumni of the BFI Film Academy (including myself) were generously invited to spend an hour with the filmmaker following Trap’s UK premiere, when we asked him about his influences, techniques and advice for young filmmakers. Shyamalan was gracious, welcoming and kind. His team was keen to get him moving at the end (he had a flight to catch), but he asked if he could stay for more questions.

It was a fantastic experience, and only possible thanks to the wonderful team at the BFI Film Academy. The BFI Film Academy offers unparalleled opportunities in the screen industries for young creatives: they run a yearly festival, filmmaking courses across the UK, online masterclasses, mentoring opportunities, weekly interviews with established filmmakers, and that’s just scratching the surface. If you’re at all interested in work in film, TV or XR, please do check it out.

Below is a selection of our questions and Shyamalan’s responses.

Through your career you’ve compassionately portrayed young people and the fears we have regarding the world we’re going to inherit. What problems do you think young filmmakers face?

M. Night Shyamalan: If, in the old days, you wanted to make movies for the movie theatres, you could make your movie, take an ad out in the New York Times, and then the movie would sit in the theatre for a year. And it would make money – you and your friends would tell each other to go, and word would spread, and it would just sit there and grow. And that was the market.

But it now costs a lot of money to sell a movie. In my case, it’s often more costly to sell the movie than to make the movies I’m making. So, when you’re asking a studio to release your movie in the theatres, you’re asking for both the budget of the movie and then the enormous budget to sell a movie to the entire world. And so what does that require? That requires a great movie, clearly, but it also requires an awareness of the fact that the story of your film will start being told to the world by a marketing agency. So you have to have that in mind as you’re making your film.

What would your advice be for a director making their first feature in today’s filmmaking climate?

I think one thing that’s often overlooked is the fact that there’s great honour in being an entertainer. In my head, there’s not this distinct split between entertainment and art. I think a filmmaker should be someone with a very specific point of view, trying to entertain people. That’s not beneath us – it’s not beneath anyone. And I really think that the audience can tell if you’re making a film just to make yourself feel like you’re an artist. That’s the thing about entertainment. You have to subjugate yourself to a story, and when you subjugate yourself to something that you believe in, beauty comes out.

And the audience can feel it. So, for example, when an audience says “that was slow, that scene was slow”. What slow means is, I don’t know where I am in the story. That’s what that means. They’re getting frustrated with the story structure. At that point, as a filmmaker, you have two choices. Either you go, well, the audience is stupid, you create an adversarial relationship with the audience, or you work with them. The film you’re making and the film they’re seeing is the same thing, and you need to listen to each other, like any relationship.

You talked a little about pressures and expectations, and that feeling of feeling like a failure before you’ve even started. How do you keep belief in the work you’re making?

I always talk about the two columns. The column of what you have control over and then the other column: the results and the reactions and everything else. Naturally, you want to start thinking about that second column. Even now I can feel you guys thinking about the second column. The thing is: you have no business in the second column. None of us do. If you spend your time asking “how will I succeed, what can I do, what if I fail” you’re already in the wrong column. You don’t have any control over that. It may look like you do: “I did XYZ and this happened. Oh, I have control over it.” That’s a lie – don’t fall for it. It keeps whispering to you. Don’t listen to it.

The one thing you have control over, the only thing you have control over, is going to the piano and writing a melody, or sitting down and writing, and thinking about why that particular shot in that particular movie worked.

There will be a moment in life where everyone gives up on you, and that is the most beautiful thing. When that happens, and you sit down to write, you will produce the most magical thing, because you’re writing it for the right reasons. And that’s a gift. So, luckily for me, a lot of people didn’t believe in me. So I just had to sit down and write. I was completely free to live in the first column, the good column, because I had failed. I’d failed completely and I had no option… and then everything started blooming again.

We don’t really realise it, but the world, in general, makes us feel completely helpless. And that’s what this column will do. If you put your mind into the right column, there’s a version of you, writing a movie about a woman in a kitchen, that’s going to be an absolute blockbuster. So I guess I don’t want to have belief in the work I’m making – I just want to make it.

Trap is in cinemas from 9 August.