Top 82 M. Night Shyamalan Quotes
#1. This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].
M. Night Shyamalan
#2. When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope.
M. Night Shyamalan
#3. Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.
M. Night Shyamalan
#4. Over the course of history, the people who are not scared go into the woods and are mauled by a bear, are not going to survive.
M. Night Shyamalan
#5. I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.
M. Night Shyamalan
#7. If I had a big brother who was a year older than me or something, I probably wouldn't have ended up being a filmmaker.
M. Night Shyamalan
#8. Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.
M. Night Shyamalan
#9. There's no staying where you were. If you're not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.
M. Night Shyamalan
#10. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#11. My secret to all casting, and specifically kids, is cast good human beings.
M. Night Shyamalan
#12. I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.
M. Night Shyamalan
#16. When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.
M. Night Shyamalan
#17. Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted ... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
M. Night Shyamalan
#19. I knew the moment it happened, it was a miracle. I could have been kissing her when she threw up. It would have scarred me for life. I may never have recovered.
M. Night Shyamalan
#20. Anime is intended to have ambiguous features. That's part of the art form.
M. Night Shyamalan
#21. You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.
M. Night Shyamalan
#22. When you say 'fear of the unknown', that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and it's genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because we're not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.
M. Night Shyamalan
#23. I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.
M. Night Shyamalan
#24. There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can't. What I can't take is when my older brother, who's everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don't ever want to see that look in your eyes again.
M. Night Shyamalan
#25. I feel most akin as an artist, in my life and my career, to Agatha Christie.
M. Night Shyamalan
#26. I love The Killing, I love Homeland and Mad Men, all those shows that lean into the tone of things.
M. Night Shyamalan
#28. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#29. I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.
M. Night Shyamalan
#30. That's something we should be taught as kids: To be okay with ourselves.
M. Night Shyamalan
#31. See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?
M. Night Shyamalan
#32. If ever I was feeling down I would go and write something. It's a form of escape.
M. Night Shyamalan
#33. People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.
M. Night Shyamalan
#34. The combination of the CGI, 3-D, and sound effects, it's just impossible to separate them. It gives you a more immersive experience, and I prefer that.
M. Night Shyamalan
#35. If I'm hesitant at all about an idea, then that's not the right idea.
M. Night Shyamalan
#36. I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.
M. Night Shyamalan
#37. I don't like to chase an audience. You can smell when someone is chasing an audience and it's not good.
M. Night Shyamalan
#39. The first two movies I directed failed, when I was 21 and 23, and that was the greatest thing that could have happened.
M. Night Shyamalan
#40. You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.
M. Night Shyamalan
#41. I've never had an issue with studios. I believe in them as true creative partners in the process.
M. Night Shyamalan
#42. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#43. Saw # Birdman . Such singular, audacious filmmaking. Can't stop thinking about the ending.
M. Night Shyamalan
#44. 'The Exorcist' is the scariest movie ever made. It just felt dead-on real, like you were watching the existence of the devil.
M. Night Shyamalan
#45. So 'The Last Airbender' 's philosophy and culture feels like a beautiful idea to me: That we inherently have connections to the elements and what they teach us, and to each other.
M. Night Shyamalan
#47. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#48. For instance, 'The Sixth Sense' had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.
M. Night Shyamalan
#49. I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.
M. Night Shyamalan
#51. I offer originality: you don't know what my films are like until you go to them. I think that's the reason I've been getting all this attention.
M. Night Shyamalan
#52. Sometimes we do not do things that we wish to do, so others will not know that we wish to do them.
M. Night Shyamalan
#54. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#55. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#57. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#58. My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.
M. Night Shyamalan
#59. You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.
M. Night Shyamalan
#60. You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.
M. Night Shyamalan
#61. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#62. My normal cycle for movies is eighteen months and each part is separate.
M. Night Shyamalan
#63. Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.
M. Night Shyamalan
#64. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#65. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#67. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#68. I have worked hard and learnt that I have to make a decision - whether I am going to conform and protect myself or not. I chose not to.
M. Night Shyamalan
#69. I want to make a bunch of small movies. I'm really interested in that for me in the future.
M. Night Shyamalan
#70. 'The Last Airbender' is genetically engineered for me. I love martial arts. I study it. The movie's based on a lot of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. I was raised Hindu.
M. Night Shyamalan
#73. I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.
M. Night Shyamalan
#75. The thing that's protected me creatively is that the movies have made profits.
M. Night Shyamalan
#76. 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.
M. Night Shyamalan
#77. Being insecure - I'm a master, a virtuoso - they can be handing me the keys to the kingdom and all I can think is, I hope I don't drop the key.
M. Night Shyamalan
#78. Giving should be a part of your routine, just like working out, eating, and sleeping.
M. Night Shyamalan
#79. I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them, anyway!
M. Night Shyamalan
#82. Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].
M. Night Shyamalan
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