“Wayward Pines” must have been M. Night Shyamalan’s first ever Comic-Con. I don’t recall any Last Airbender or After Earth panels in Hall H, although they were fools not to bring Unbreakable in 2000.
Shyamalan directed the pilot of the upcoming Fox limited series about Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon), a man who is looking for missing agents before finding himself trapped in a mysterious town. I joined a Comic-Con roundtable with Shyamalan to get the first scoop on “Wayward Pines.”
CraveOnline: I’ve been a fan of your movies and still defend a lot of them, but you’ve taken a few knocks. Do you feel like TV might be a world where you can get a little more love?
M. Night Shyamalan: You know, I think it just comes with fame. They have these weird quotients now. They’re like, “You’re doing really well. Your positive to negative on the social network is 70 to 30. You’re doing fantastic.” It’s just the way it is. Now I describe being famous as being in high school forever. It’s all transient.
People that love you might have an issue, people that hate you will love you the next thing you do. If you come from the right place, which is “Hey, I just want to tell as many stories as possible,” if they can hear that as the repetition and you know that there’s an aesthetic standard and there’s an intentionality, it’ll be great. The end result will be all good. That’s something that we’ve talked a lot about. My wife’s a psychologist.
Is this a story you could have told in a movie?
Absolutely, yeah. I could have, and we’ve talked about it. It’s kind of a 10 episode “Twilight Zone.” It definitely could’ve been told in a two hour. It would’ve been hard, because you’d be like at the 40 minute mark, we have to do this. It’d be very, very difficult, but to go into depth into their characters, you wouldn’t get that opportunity. It would be something I would tell them and that we would never see on screen.
Now you can see all of that played out. It’s just really rewarding. Sometimes I enjoy writing backstories more than the movie. I’d say, “Hey, there’s Pam’s backstory.” And give it to the actor in a movie, and it’s never in the movie. It’s just something we talk about so when they walk in the room on camera, they know where they came from.
Pam is the nurse taking care of Ethan in the hospital. Is there something inherently scary about someone with control over your medical condition?
That’s the joy of working with world class actors is, if I say, “This is where you stab the neighbor,” they will come up with a legitimate defending rationale about why this is justified in their morality. That’s what I do as a writer. Hannibal Lecter is a beautiful villain because he has his morality. It’s not our morality, but his is lock solid and you can respect that he has his morality. He won’t eat Jodie Foster, but he’ll eat everybody else.
Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world and completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law down to the real reason, the reason the patient deserve this is this. Every person, whether a husband is arguing with the wife, 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. Everybody needs to come in it with the kind of understanding that they bring to the table.
That’s what I think separates them from other actors is their ability to empathize with their characters. Whether you’re playing a stay at home mom or a serial killer, it doesn’t matter. You’re approaching it with empathy. How did I get here?
What was the hardest role to cast?
We got our first choice for everybody so that’s a hard one. Hard means practical. If someone said no and then someone said no and then someone said no, that’s a sense of difficulty versus who’s the right person for it. I think before this answer [Melissa Leo] came to me, I didn’t know how to cast that part. Because it so easily can go broad and unrelatable. That was the first thing I was like huh, I don’t know how to cast this part.
But again, the easiest because as soon as it was like Melissa Leo, I was like oh my God, we’re not doing it without her. I literally said that. “We’re not doing it without her. Someone get her.” And I kept asking, “Did they ask her? Did they ask her? Did they ask her? Did they ask her?” And then they said yes. I gotta give Fox their props. They allowed me to cast it. I said I’m going to cast it like a quality independent movie, are you guys cool with that? They were like, “Go for it.” And I did that. This is a movie cast.
Your movies tend to feel timeless. Now that there are so many pop culture references on shows, all the technology and social media being incorporated, what sensibility did you bring to “Wayward Pines” to keep it from being dated?
I guess unconsciously I’m always trying to avoid that. I guess I didn’t realize I do that, but as you mention it, I remember in The Happening, they gave us this phone. They’re like, “It’s called an iPhone.” This is way before it came out. They’re like, “Do you think you’d want to use it in the piece?” I was so nervous because I was like, what if nobody buys this thing? So in the movie, The Happening is the first time you see an iPhone. They had given it to us really early, a prototype, and it’s scary that kind of stuff. As it turned out, it was a good decision but I do avoid all technology. Even TV sets on my sets, I try to make it very generic.
