What is the secret to making a good thriller? We asked the master of the genre, M. Night Shyamalan.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00If I was doing this moment as a thriller,
00:02I could think of so many ways that things could happen
00:06and how to shoot them, and you would start
00:08with the kind of grounded, well, what is it like
00:11to be in an interview, and a junkhead,
00:13and the humor of that, and then somebody,
00:15you know, the cameraman hears something on his phone
00:18and he's getting upset, and then you getting distracted,
00:21but we keep trying to do the interview,
00:23but then we hear noises outside,
00:24and then we hear a scream from outside in the hallway,
00:26and you and I, at some point, we stop the interview
00:29because something's going wrong,
00:31and we're piecing it together that there's something,
00:34you know, dark happening to the hotel outside.
00:36So.
00:37♪♪
00:43You have to come inside right now.
00:44There were four of them.
00:46What did we say?
00:47You shouldn't make things up when we're talking about...
00:50Can you open the door, please?
00:51♪♪
00:54They're breaking in!
00:56♪♪
01:00Film is definitely structure, you know?
01:03The story is, it's two hours.
01:05You have to begin and end it.
01:07You have to create a language, and you have to finish it.
01:09So the structure's critical.
01:10Where are you in the movie?
01:12Like, when an audience member says the movie's slow,
01:15that's an audience member saying to you,
01:16I don't know where I am in the story structure.
01:19That's all they're saying.
01:20They don't actually mean the scene is slow.
01:22They mean, I'm lost.
01:23Where am I in the story?
01:24Is he gonna rob the bank?
01:25Is he not gonna rob the bank?
01:26You know, I don't know where I am.
01:28And so the critical thing in a thriller,
01:31which is a high-stakes drama, right,
01:33it has physicalization and stakes,
01:36is that you have momentum.
01:37So once you start raising the momentum,
01:39you have to keep raising the momentum.
01:42♪♪
01:45You're underlining this idea of adrenaline
01:49that I'm talking to you about,
01:51about stakes and adrenaline.
01:53So where is the character at scene 38?
01:56Where are they in scene 64?
01:58So you, and then you enhance that
02:00with the way you're shooting the piece
02:03and the shots that you're selecting
02:04should mimic the rise
02:07in the person's feeling of suffocation or threat.
02:12♪♪
02:16That is, it's such a magical part of making movies,
02:20the editorial process.
02:22I'm astonished by it.
02:23I'm continually astonished by it
02:25because what I intend from an image
02:29is seen and perceived.
02:31But when I put it next to another image,
02:34now I've lost slight control over that,
02:37that impact that it's having with the audience.
02:40And I have to kind of look at them and watch them
02:42to see what does this juxtaposition do to them?
02:45And so it's a magical art form.
02:48I mean, I've gotten stronger
02:51at being able to anticipate
02:53what the sequence of juxtaposition will do,
02:56but you can never be absolutely sure
02:58so until it's put together.
03:00And so the editing process is a wondrous thing
03:02of realizing, wow, if you take out that,
03:05it actually is scarier.
03:07Or if you cut it to this length,
03:11it causes, the audience is already there.
03:13Just let them taste it.
03:14Don't let them think it too much.
03:16You know, all of these thoughts in here,
03:18you're like an EKG of emotion as you're editing.
03:21And so hopefully you have enough time
03:24to really understand what the audience is feeling
03:27when you're showing them these images.
03:29And so you can react to tell the story
03:32that you want to tell.
03:33Because oftentimes you're telling this story,
03:35they're seeing this story.
03:36And what you want to have is they're both,
03:37everyone's seeing and telling the same story.
03:40The Sixth Sense is often in the list
03:47of the best thriller movie in history
03:49and has been voted film with best twist by a poll in 2010.
03:54How do you react to that?
03:56I mean, amazing.
04:00You know, it's funny, I don't think of that movie
04:02any differently than the other movies.
04:04It was such a wonderful thing to learn to make thrillers.
04:09And so that was kind of the first time
04:11I got to make a thriller.
04:12And that for me will always be this moment of,
04:17wow, this is what I was meant to do.
04:18I was meant to tell these type of stories.
04:21And that time period is so overlapped
04:25with Unbreakable for me
04:26because I made them so close together.
04:27In fact, I was writing Unbreakable
04:29while we were editing Sixth Sense.
04:30So that time period is a blurry
04:33between those two movies for me.
04:36It feels the same to me like Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.
04:40It's a blur.
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