M. Night Shyamalan Quotations

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.

Anime is intended to have ambiguous features. That's part of the art form.

Always in life bad times will lead to great times.

Is it possible that there are no coincidences?

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

My secret to all casting, and specifically kids, is cast good human beings.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I don't want to pretend I'm any cooler or smarter than I am.

'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.

For instance, 'The Sixth Sense' had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.

Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.

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.

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.

I have a naive outlook on life. That's who I am.

When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.

The first two movies I directed failed, when I was 21 and 23, and that was the greatest thing that could have happened.

'The Exorcist' is the scariest movie ever made. It just felt dead-on real, like you were watching the existence of the devil.

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.

There's a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?

I don't like to chase an audience. You can smell when someone is chasing an audience and it's not good.

The thing that's protected me creatively is that the movies have made profits.

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!

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.

I grew up watching Steven Spielberg and scary movies.

I feel most akin as an artist, in my life and my career, to Agatha Christie.

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.

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.

My normal cycle for movies is eighteen months and each part is separate.

I've never had an issue with studios. I believe in them as true creative partners in the process.

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.

That's something we should be taught as kids: To be okay with ourselves.

I'm a big believer in our connection to nature.

If ever I was feeling down I would go and write something. It's a form of escape.

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.

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.

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.

I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.

I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died.

I love The Killing, I love Homeland and Mad Men, all those shows that lean into the tone of things.

I want to make a bunch of small movies. I'm really interested in that for me in the future.

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.

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.

A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.

I consider myself an independent filmmaker.

You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.

Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.

Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].

The whole world makes comic book movies now.

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.

I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.

There's no staying where you were. If you're not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.

I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.

You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.

The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.

This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].

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.

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.

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.

I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.

My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.

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.

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.

As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

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.

There is no one looking out for us. We are all alone.

If I'm hesitant at all about an idea, then that's not the right idea.

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.

Saw #‎ Birdman . Such singular, audacious filmmaking. Can't stop thinking about the ending.

Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.

For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.

When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.

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.

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.

Sometimes we do not do things that we wish to do, so others will not know that we wish to do them.

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.

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.

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 its genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because were not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.

My biggest fear in life is to be average.

I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.

Giving should be a part of your routine, just like working out, eating, and sleeping.

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.