So this is really why I watched The Lady in the Water.  A friend had recommended The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, by Michael Bamberger.  The book was published in 2006 and I found a “very good” used copy on sale for six bucks.  It’d been on my to read list for a year or two.  The book arrived and I discovered it was about a Shyamalan movie I’d never heard of.  I have friends who refuse to even mention his The Last Airbender.  (I’ve seen the original animated version and it’d be difficult to think a movie would improve on it.)  Indeed, The Lady in the Water was a box office disappointment, and The Happening (which I kind of like) and The Last Airbender were critically castrated.  M. Night Shyamalan’s name does draw crowds, but I prefer his horror to his fantasy, but that’s just me.

In any case, reading Bamberger’s book was like cinematography 101.  It’s a nonfiction account of how this movie was made, written by a sports writer also from the Philadelphia area.  He begins by narrating how he met Shyamalan at a party.  How that meeting led to the idea of writing a book about his movie-making process.  Lady in the Water isn’t Shyamalan’s best work, but this book goes through how terribly personal the project was to the writer-director.  It’s a gripping account, especially for those who try to create any form of art.  It also gave me a renewed respect for what Shyamalan tries to do with his movies.  Early career success made him rich, and then he was in a place to follow his dreams.  Or bedtime stories.  Of course, a book written nearly a two decades ago couldn’t project where Shyamalan would be today.

His career surged again, beginning with The Visit—definitely creepy—and has continued to ride fairly high.  Although I haven’t seen all his films, I was interested enough to read about his creative process.  Although The Village wasn’t as highly regarded as The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, it’s still my favorite among his movies.  Part of that is because it was the first of his films I saw.  It was recommended to me by my brother, which also helped.  Mainly, that movie made me trust Shyamalan as a writer-director.  I’m not sad to have seen The Lady in the Water so that I could read a book about it.  The whole thing was a lesson in creativity.