After Hollywood gave up on him, Shyamalan paid for The Visit himself
By 2014 most studios would not touch an M. Night Shyamalan picture. So he funded a small horror-comedy out of his own pocket, shot it quietly, and sold it to Universal. The Visit cost $5 million and took $98 million, and the director of The Sixth Sense was back.
He came into the world as Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan in Mahé, Puducherry, on August 6, 1970, the son of a neurologist father and an obstetrician mother. He was just six weeks old when the family left for America, and he grew up Hindu in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, attending a Catholic grammar school where he felt like an outsider. His father hoped he would practise medicine; his mother backed his filmmaking, and by seventeen he had shot forty-five home movies on a Super 8 camera. While reading about the Lakota he found a name meaning night and adopted it in place of Nelliyattu.
He graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 1992. His second feature, Wide Awake, earned only $305,704 against a $6 million budget, and he quietly rewrote the teen comedy She's All That without credit, admitting it only in 2013. Then came The Sixth Sense in 1999, starring Bruce Willis. It collected six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and became the second-biggest horror film ever. For a while his name alone could sell a movie, much as Spielberg's did.
The slide was steep. Lady in the Water took $72 million on a $70 million budget. The Last Airbender, attacked for casting white actors in Asian-inspired roles, is ranked among the worst films ever made, even though it grossed $319 million. After Earth drew poor reviews too, and he later described himself in 2013 as consumed by doubt.
The Visit, released by Universal on September 11, 2015, opened a second act. Split followed, grossing $279 million from a $9 million budget, and Glass in 2019 closed a trilogy begun nineteen years earlier with Unbreakable. His films have now earned more than $3.3 billion worldwide, and he also served as showrunner on the Apple TV+ horror series Servant.
Source: M. Night Shyamalan
