M. Night Shyamalan cites Almodovar as key source of inspiration

Indianborn American filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan said Pedro Almodovar’s 1990 dark romantic comedy “Atame” (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) has played a key role in pointing his way forward as a director.

The 45yearold Shyamalan said in an interview with EFE that two of his main role models are the Spanish director and American David Lynch whose “Blue Velvet” has also been a key source of inspiration because of their success in forging their own identity as filmmakers, a task he acknowledged that he still has pending.

Copies of those films, which he described as “masterpieces for their specificity,” sit on the desk where he is currently writing his next screenplay.

“Atame” tells of a freshly released psychiatric patient who kidnaps a woman to try to make her fall in love with him, while “Blue Velvet” is about a college student who discovers a severed ear and then a side of his hometown in North Carolina that he never knew existed.

“Clearly those filmmakers were not trying to be like the others. They were being themselves, and they didn’t care what happened later. I’d love to be that type of filmmaker. (Striving to) get there inspires me,” he said.

Despite having forged a name for himself with largescale productions, he points to independent filmmakers as his main points of reference.

He calls Woody Allen one of his “superheroes,” hails brothers Joel and Ethan Coen as “gods” and describes his friend Spike Lee as a guru who instilled in him a desire to choose filmmaking as a career when he was still a teenager.

Shyamalan’s latest film, “The Visit,” a horrorcomedy that tells the story of two children who discover a terrible secret when they visit their grandparents for the first time, is due to premiere in the United States on Friday.

With this latest offering, the director of the highly successful 1999 supernatural, twistending thriller “The Sixth Sense” is looking to bounce back after two recent boxoffice flops: the 2013 film “After Earth” and the 2010 picture “The Last Airbender,” both of which cost more than $130 million to produce.

This time around Shyamalan has taken the risk of producing the film on a shoestring budget through his Blinding Edge Pictures production company, personally coming up with its $5 million cost and taking sole responsibility for the screenplay.

The property where the action unfolds is a house outside Philadelphia that a bank foreclosed on and the filmmaker subsequently rented for six months.

Shyamalan spent time alone in the home during the preproduction phase, imaging the scenes and preparing for a film shoot like none he had attempted before.

“I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain pace that’s needed to be creative, at least in my case. When you use your instincts, you don’t think too much. I wanted to put myself in that situation in which there’s no safety net. There’s only one way out, and that’s for the story and the characters to work,” he said.

Shyamalan, who finished shooting the film in half the time he normally requires, said its sense of humor, which particularly comes through in scenes in which the characters played by young Australian actors Olivia De Jonge and Ed Oxenbould cope with the eccentricities of their grandparents, make it a “rarity” in the horror genre.

He acknowledged, however, that he struggled to find the right balance between the movie’s elements of terror and comedy until he realized that the film’s plot needed to move along briskly as a thriller.