M Night Shyamalan: The great dictator

When M Night Shyamalan hit the big time with his first film, 'The Sixth Sense', Disney reckoned the 29-year-old a genius. The studio gave him lots of money and anything else he wanted - three films later, its patience was wearing thin. And then it read the script for 'Lady in the Water'... David Thomson tells a tale of Hollywood, creativity and monstrous egos

There's a wisdom in the film studio system that if you have an arrogant, impossible director, give him as much freedom as possible and he'll turn in a horror show; I mean a film so bad no one will take the young monster seriously again. And so the studio system retains some part of its authority by making very bad films.

Take M Night Shyamalan and Lady in the Water. Or - as the cinema-goers in the US have determined - don't take them. Shyamalan, or Night as he has come to be called (it carries a clearer note of doom), is still only 36. He is Indian, very smart, the son of two doctors and something of a prodigy. The most striking evidence of this is The Sixth Sense, which opened when he was only 29. This is the film with Haley Joel Osment, Bruce Willis and Toni Collette. It is, ostensibly, a horror film, yet it takes a very unexpected and humane turn. It surprised everyone and captivated the business. The film came out of nowhere and made a fortune, and the business responded in its usual way by telling Night he was a genius and throwing contracts and money at him. What do you want to do next? they asked. Sometimes in the history of the movie business that question has a ready answer: Steven Spielberg has always seemed to know what he wanted to do next - and usually it has worked out. But a lot of men of 29 go silly and vague, because they'd rather like to have and spend the immense amount of money that is coming their way. They are open to being famous, and behaving badly (in America it's hard to have one without the other), and they don't always know what to do next.

Night, I think it is now clear, doesn't know. He made Unbreakable in 2000, a film so obscure that many people gave it the benefit of the doubt. They said it was genius working things out. Then came Signs in 2002, about a family (led by Mel Gibson) unsure about corn circles made near their home. They were not the only uncertain ones. Again, the film possessed an aura of horror and evidence of a fumbled attempt to make something more of it. Yet, plainly, the film had not worked. A fair observer, I think, could and should have said that Night's breakthrough on The Sixth Sense only indicated how difficult it was to get such stories right repeatedly. And, as you may have guessed, Night does his own stories and scripts. The Village (2004) was ridiculous, pathetic.

Once upon a time, after films like Signs and The Village, a young man would have been retired, one way or the other. But Night was allowed to keep making films.

Up to and including The Village, his works had all been made for Disney, where he had an effective, if argumentative, relationship with executive Nina Jacobson. But Jacobson had been harbouring doubts. Night presented her with the script for the next film - in which an apartment building superintendent (Paul Giamatti) finds a sea nymph (Dallas Bryce Howard) in the building swimming pool. The story becomes very strange and spiritual, so Nina Jacobson took a deep breath and said she honestly didn't get it. Did the emperor have any more clothes than the sea nymph? Night could not stand to be challenged. Rather than listen, consider and improve his work, he quit Disney and went over to Warner Brothers - so they are the studio behind his new film Lady in the Water. But at the same time, Night decided to help Michael Bamberger, who was writing a book about him. The help turned into a full-scale attack on Disney and Ms Jacobson for daring to question a genius or come between him and his art. That book appeared just as the new film opened in the US a couple of weeks ago. Night may be a genius, but he does spin very well, too.

And so M Night Shyamalan joins that motley and honorable crew of directors that the film business has first built up and then torn down. As you will see, it is no discredit to be there, for the list includes D W Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Preston Sturges, Nicholas Ray, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. The pattern for that group is immense early success; the excessive personal vanity and arrogance of the person; the subsequent faltering of their career; the wilderness years, sometimes accompanied by widespread humiliation and mockery.

The stories vary, of course. But it's clear that sometime egomania does get out of control. And that is unfair. For the system says to every newcomer: don't arrive at this job modest, shy, deferential and humble - for you will be eaten up. If you wish to succeed, insult the crude studio bosses, order the crews to stay late for naughtiness, trample on the bodies and souls of your great and beautiful actresses. Act like a genius so accustomed to talking to God that ordinary discourse is not easy.

I exaggerate, but only a little. It's also plain that some amazing talents lose their magic. Preston Sturges made gems for seven or eight years and then lost it. He admitted as much himself, for Sturges was a decent, wise, witty and self-effacing fellow. No one ever accused von Sternberg or von Stroheim of those tendencies, and they both worked their way towards films that no system could tolerate - von Sternberg did just close-ups of enigmatic women (Dietrich preferably) veiled in smoke and lace; von Stroheim tried to make films that went on forever in which heroes sniffed girls' underpants. As I say, genius comes in different forms. Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter and then Heaven's Gate, lost so much money for United Artists he destroyed the studio. The former is a shattering experience still. The latter is a pretty good film with a disastrous 20-minute opening. If Cimino had taken just a little more advice on Heaven's Gate, if he had made one more drastic cut of the picture I think he'd still be in work. As it is he is alive and only 63, but he's gone away. And I doubt he's coming back.

Out in Wyoming, shooting Heaven's Gate, Cimino thought the studio was out to get him. In fact, they were desperate for him to succeed, which was why they gave him so much liberty. And in that liberty he was constantly having to make up his own mind, which can be exhausting. There is a wise breed of film-maker that knows the sense in letting decisions be shared, in having a writer who can do re-do a scene if it doesn't play, in listening to the actors who ask, "Could we cut that speech?" or the director of photography who sees that this nightmarish sequence could be handled a lot more simply if we did it at night. In other words, recognise that film is a collaborative venture and delegate. And never forget that there are people in the audience - you and me - who still go to see films because of the people acting in them, and because of the hope that there will be a story.

So, in opposition to that band of directors who rose and fell let me introduce another tradition from Hollywood: the old pro, the fellow who sticks around over the years, takes a lot of different assignments and manages to make three-quarters of his pictures successes and about 10 per cent as good as the best things done by the geniuses. These are the sane directors, the ones who seldom boast too much or behave like spoiled children. It's a group that includes Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor and Steven Spielberg.

Perhaps those guys have a monster of an ego, but they keep it hidden. They chat to the crew, they dine with the actors, they crack jokes with the studio people, and they'll give young journalists an interview. It's the difference between a love affair and a marriage. If you're out for perfect love, prepare yourself for a life of tragedy. But if your ambition is a long and quiet marriage then you come equipped with the sense of compromise. Whereas genius believes it should never ever compromise. But genius is usually impossible to live with and a bit of an idiot. If I were Night Shyamalan I'd beg to have a chance to make the next Adam Sandler film and do exactly what Sandler wants. Sandler is the kind of jerk who lasts. m

'Lady in the Water' is released on 11 August