Movies: Night Vision

Then came The Village, set in a hamlet that’s withdrawn from the outside world to protect itself. Night planned to give himself a critical role that would punctuate the twist ending. (The villagers aren’t living in the 19th century; they’re here now!) The studio thought his cameo was too jarring, asking too much of him as an actor, and managed to talk him out of it. More troubling for Night were Disney’s doubts about the conceit of the film. “I think that is where Night’s feeling of a lack of support from the studio, and a lack of trust, began,” says the insider. “Disney felt he needed to get out of the twist business.”

Night didn’t budge, making the movie as he imagined it. But even in the film’s marketing, he faltered, misjudging how the public would respond to The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, a fake documentary that claimed he’d briefly died as a child after falling into an icy lake and that the experience somehow connected him to the supernatural. His partner, the Sci Fi Channel, issued an apology, and a Disney executive calls the project a “miscalculation.” The network’s president declined to comment for this story, and though she acknowledged at the time that their ‘guerrilla marketing campaign” went too far, the record was never fully cleared. During the Lady shoot, one of the actresses revealed that she was certain Night really did die as a kid.

Backlash over the hoax presaged the response to The Village, as Night suffered the worst reviews of his career — “tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous,” declared the Los Angeles Times — plus box office totals that fell well below the $150 million that Disney spent to develop and promote the film. That moment — arguably his lowest since getting Weinsteined — is when the twist in Night’s own story arrived.

JUST AFTER VALENTINE’S DAY last year, Night met with a troika of Disney brass to discuss his new script over dinner — not in Los Angeles, but at Lacroix, in the heart of his city. They’d already expressed concerns over this mermaid story, and at that dinner, through a parade of courses Night didn’t touch, his relationship with the Mouse House crumbled.

As detailed in Bamberger’s new book, the Disney execs ran through their problems with the story in painstaking detail. Night defended himself passionately, going so far as to draw a parallel between Lady’s inspirational potential and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which he said moved Abraham Lincoln to end slavery. By the meal’s end, Disney made Night an offer: We’ll give you a $50 million budget (about $20 million less than usual). Make your movie. Prove us wrong, and you can say “Fuck you” to us at the premiere. That wasn’t the kind of relationship Night wanted. “I thought we were going to ride into the sunset together,” Night said. As the Disney gang left for their rooms at the Four Seasons, Night cried.