Shyamalan And Spielberg On Our Film

Recently, a friend of mine sent me links to two good, in-depth articles on the visual style of M. Night Shyamalan; one concerning the use of the long take, and the other dealing with mise en scène and reflections. Like his movies or not, Shyamalan is an excellent craftsman when it comes to designing his shots and both those essays go into detail why.

Naturally reading those made me want to watch the three movies talked about, namely The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. I hated all three movies when I first saw them but have come to appreciate them immensely since. Strangely, I now find many similarities between my narrative approach and Shyamalan's; mixing up on-the-fringe cheese and hokiness to perhaps say something more profound.

However on rewatching The Sixth Sense with my director's stetson on (I'm in the midst of designing the shots for A Headline Romance) I've learnt quite a few tricks and plan on taking a page or two out of Mr. Shyamalan's book. My previous approach to designing shots was to say one thing with it. Needless to say, they were quite static and provides for jumpier cutting. I guess this is what Mamet refers to as "saying things with a cut". You set up your paradigm with the shot and when you cut to another the audience is left to fill in the in-betweens.

Perhaps not opposite to that, but definitely a different approach, is unveiling your narrative within the shot. Shyamalan does it excellently and another director which comes to mind, whom people love to hate these days, is Spielberg. Munich (despite whether it is good or not) simply blew me away with Spielberg's masterful unpacking of shots that unfold with time to hit multiple narrative milestones. Amazingly, the audience rarely notices these dramatic choices and their effect works very much under the hood. Spielberg seldom uses flagrant stylistic shots like, say, Scorsese and prefers to work incognito, leaving himself as a director out of the movie and focusing on shots that tell the story with maximum impact.

But back to Shyamalan. The narrative structure of those three movies rely on the "twist endings" which reverse engineer the entire movie in your head as you walk out of the cinema. In a loose sense, that is one of the traits of A Headline Romance that I'm finding difficulty in conveying. It's quite hard to engineer elements in a clear way that channel the audience towards the conclusion without err. The trick it seems is to set it up almost like a Sherlock Holmes novel; give the audience all the loose ends and as a finale: show them how to make a bowtie out of it all. It's nothing new but it's definitely something to keep in mind when you're structuring your script. Let the conclusion echo backwards into the script and the ending will ring true with an audience.