March 28, 2024 • 35 mins
Before M. Night Shyamalan became a household name for his mind bending thrillers like “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs”, he was just a young screenwriter in love. And during those blissful early years of marriage he wrote a love story. The screenplay for “Labor of Love” sold right away, and over the next 30 years or so there would be numerous attempts to make it into a movie. There was a major studio, there were A-list directors, Shyamalan even found his perfect star. In this episode, M. Night Shyamalan tells Malcolm about the script that haunts him.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I've had such a exceptionally curated career. Every movie I've
ever written since eighteen has been greenlit to be made
into a movie. You've seen everything I've written, you know,
except for this one that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So it's interesting, always a twist. Yeah, Welcome back to
Development Hell, our mini series about the lost scripts of Hollywood. Today,
I'm talking with m Night Shyamalan, one of the best
known filmmakers of the past generation suspense fillers and supernatural psychodrama.
(01:03):
You know whose movies I'm sure, Unbreakable, the Sixth Sense,
Split Glass, something like fifteen films in the last thirty years,
which collectively have grossed billions of dollars. M Night Shamalan's
stories have haunted a lot of people over the years.
This episode is about the story that haunted m Night Shauma.
(01:29):
We've talked a lot so far in a series about
movies that never got made because there was something wrong
with the story, or because someone on the outside had
a problem with the script. This episode is about none
of those things. There is nothing at all wrong with
the story Shyamalan has never told, and maybe that's why
he never told.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
There was the first real script that I felt kind
of lightning bolt inspiration that came to me.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I was twenty two and i'd just.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Been married, just got married, and I wrote a kind
of a love story, Labor of Love, and I was
writing it, and I wrote it because I almost remember
everywhere I wrote it, because it was such a special
experience of writing. By that time, that was my third
third feature that i'd written. I had made made a
(02:27):
movie already in India.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Tell me, tell me this a little bit about the story.
What was Labor of Love about?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
You know?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Labor of Love is essentially a story about an older
couple and the wife saying, hey, it's an anniversary and
he forgets and all of this stuff and they've been
together a long time, and she's just like, you know,
essentially expresses I do all these little things for you
our whole life, and you don't. And I'm not sure
(02:56):
what you want from you know, I'm not sure you
love me. You know, I'm not one hundred percent sure.
And that's not a great feeling, you know. And he's baffled,
right as all guys are just baffled at this, And.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I mean, what do you mean? I mean, I mean
what do you want me? I love you goes.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
To work every morning? Who goes to What are you
doing that for? Okay? Good, good, I get it.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
She I don't want to say too much of it
because I tend to think of these things as magic.
And yeah, and she she passes away unexpectedly and very tragically,
and before she died she said, he said, uh, you know,
what do you want me to do to prove my
love to you? You want me to, you know, swim
(03:42):
across an ocean, or climb a mountain or walk across
the United States?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
What do you want me to do?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
She's like, just walk to the store and get me
something on your own, because you were thinking, you know,
something small like that. Anyway, she passes away. He's an
older man. He's in a you know, late sixties seventies
kind of thing, out of shape, and he's so devastated
he makes a crazy decision to start walking across the
United States for nothing else but just to show his
(04:06):
wife who's passed away, in case she can see. And
this isn't I wrote this in nineteen ninety four, right,
so no cell phones, no nothing, no internet, And he
just begins this track and it's a kind of like
a vision quest a little bit. He starts to think
about his life and his time with his wife and
(04:27):
from when they were kids, and he's physically in threat
as he's doing this, and slowly the country starts to
get to hear about this guy, and they're trying to
urge him do it to get there and it's so crazy,
Why are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Why are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And then the country kind of gets on board with
the feeling of doing something irrational to show your love
for the person that.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You care about.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And I'm not going to tell you the ending, but
it's really poignant, the idea of just doing something so
the other person can hear you.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So you're twenty two, you're very much in love. You've
just married your wife, who you've known for how long
at that point.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I met when I was eighteen, so owner for four
years at that point.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
So the and in this period of love struck youth.
When you are, you know, in love with your young wife,
you write a story about an older couple, Yes, where
the question of the man's devotion to the to his
wife is in doubt. Yes, and he had In other words,
(05:35):
I thought you were going to say I wrote this
at twenty two. I was just married a mention love.
It's about this young couple who embark you. You jump back,
you jump forward forty years when you start looking back.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yes, so yeah, in the period.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Where you are of greatest infatuation, your impulse is to
go to the end of the relationship and work backwards.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I mean, I think I've always been driven by familial nightmares,
you know, the sanctity of the family being jeopardized. You know,
later it changed into aliens and ghosts and you name it,
But ultimately it's still about families and whether whether they
(06:21):
can survive.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What is it about you at a period of young love,
when you're already thinking about the kind of not the
dissolution of love, but the final stage of it. You
why would you jump ahead? What's it? No?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I guess I guess you're thinking about your life and
what you wanted to be and where it could go wrong.
And maybe I was thinking about what is it?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
What is it? What do I want this to be at.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
The end of the journey, you know, forty years from now,
fifty years from now. I hope, I hope I've lived
the life the right way and of course there's going
to be a lot of mistakes along the way. But
I don't have fears like the other people have fears
in the sense of, like I knew I was going
to marry the second I matter, you know, like those things.
I fear getting a call that's something bad happened, you know,
(07:10):
And that's very prevalent and still thirty years later.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, but you're asking yourself the question of what is
the most tragic outcome of young love? Is that what
is what you've described is that one one party loves
and the other party doesn't realize they're being loved. You
put your finger on something that's like it does a
(07:35):
deeply resonant anxiety.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
It is I probably fund the dynamic of me and
my wife that you know, she married a dreamer, someone
who's completely content to stare out in an empty room
and just do that all day long and think about
an imaginary world with imaginary people and feel fulfilled. And
(08:01):
she's like, well, I'm right here, you know, what about
what about the real life where you're.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
We're living, you know, And.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And so the struggle has been you know, I've heard
all of those stories of you know, from you know,
f Scott Fitzgerald to you name it. You know all
our heroes and how they struggled with their personal life
versus their artistry. Is it a one or the other equation?
We sometimes it feels that way, and for a lot
(08:29):
of people it feels that way. I've tried to see
if they can be feed each other and it feeds
the movies, the feeling of love for your wife or
for your kids or you know, and what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
How can you imbue it?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And you guys feel it when you see the movies
and really the stories that I mean.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
And the hardest thing to explain to your spouse in
that instance is that to them you seem inaccessible in
that dreaming. But from your perspective, I'm putting words in
your mouth, but there's a certain amount of commonality between
the way I approachest the way that you do. What's
hard to explain is that not being inaccessible and in fact,
(09:11):
the relationship we have with our loved one is what
makes our dreaming possible.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Right there. They're the engine of it. They're not outside
of it. It's their presence and support and structure and
love and whatever that permits us to wander off and
in our imagination and feel find comfort and joy and
all of that. I don't know, it's like that. It's
(09:37):
a very hard thing to to explain to someone that
they're that our inner lives are contingent on someone from
the out on the outside.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, you know, So finding love and then building a
career from there felt felt the right, the right building blocks,
and so that movie was the beginning of that. You know,
when writing this movie, Labor of Love, it was it
was coming from such an interesting place, and I was
writing ahead of my abilities at that point.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
It was just kind of going by this inspiration of love.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I think, what do you mean by writing ahead of
your abilities?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You know, I didn't have as much craft at that time.
This is oftentimes your career is an equation of craft
and inspiration, and so lacking in craft and at twenty two,
but the inspiration was out of ten. You know that
feeling when I was writing it, what this feels beautiful,
This feels this feels lovely. You know, I love this
(10:33):
feeling how it's coming out and how I can see
the characters and in retrospect now thirty years later, can
see that. You know, I was really listening to the
characters almost like a novelist, and following it. And so
the end result is I wrote the screenplay that ended
up becoming a bidding War from my parents' guest bedroom
(10:55):
where me and my wife were living in the guest bedroom.
The best bedroom was pink. It was for my sister.
Was It was just a you know, we had to
get out of here kind of feeling. And this script
went out and there was the bidding war and someone
offered this amount of money and then that amount of money,
and it was crazy.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
And I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I'd run down and I'd be like, mom, they offered
this amount of money.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But I only directed this little movie in India, and
they saw it as a big, big movie. And this
was back in an era of Hollywood where the entire
system was geared at original movies. The system was built
to nurture original movies, and the spec screenplay markets, screenplay
is done on speculation was the kind of gold rush,
(11:43):
and so if there was an incredible screenplay that came out,
everyone would read it immediately and it would go in
this bidding war because that was the food that was
feeding the engine at that time to the movie theaters,
and so I was luckily kind of grew up in
an era where what I love to do, which is
original movies, was really celebrated and promoted, and so everyone
(12:04):
bit on it and we sold the tunch of Fox.
You know, I was attached to direct, and then I
flew out and I put on my graduation suit, which
I didn't because I didn't have many suits, so I
wore my old suit and then they they listened to
me about how I would direct a movie, and then
they subsequently fired me off the movie. So it was devastated.
(12:26):
Just absolutely What did.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
You do wrong in your pitch to be a directly?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's really interesting a question I would say. I wasn't
a director yet. I had more practice at writing than directing.
And of course, sitting in a room telling a chairman
of a studio how you'd make a film, and they're
asking certain questions, and you know, I don't know if
I had a chance at all, you know, before I
walked in there.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
In retrospect night, you're now hold fifty three. Yeah, you
look at fifty three, you look at thirty, at twenty two,
you must have looked twelve.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
You're absolutely correct, you're absolutely correct.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You know what's going to give you fifty million dollars
to direct a movie when you it's like a twelve year.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Old Yeah, and I'm in this ill fitting suit which
makes me even look younger because you're liked you wear
your big brother's suit or whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I remember the feeling.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I can remember the feeling pitching it to the chairman
and then the heads of the studio and going, I'm
not I don't I don't believe what I'm saying, and
I'm guessing. I was like basically, I was like, I
don't know. I'm gonna learn, you know as I do this,
because I can see it in my head, you know,
so I'll I'll learn.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
And they took me. I was very painful.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Then I ended up, you know, they talked me into
kind of pay rewrite it for some other a list
directors of that time. So I had a chance to
be in the room at some you know at that time,
the top directors, and they would say do this, do that,
and I just couldn't. I would rewrite it and it
would get worse in retrospect, some kind of mojo curse
(14:03):
I put on it, and it could never get it never,
It could never bloom into So there was lots of
directors that try, two or three directors that tried. So
what was really weird about this movie represented some kind
of you know, connection with the universe. And I think
for a little bit I thought that was a one
(14:24):
off and that that's never going to happen again.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And that was the fear.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
That screenplay just became something of a mythic thing for me, like, oh,
I'll never get that back again.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
M night. Shyamalan writes his masterpiece and then he's haunted
by it more after the break. Wait, so what's the
(14:58):
next stage in the saga of Labor of Love?
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So sixth sense happens, right? I wrote it, you know
a few years later and wonderful outcome. Everyone wanted to
make movies with me, and I said to Fox, I
would love to have that screen light back.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They said, oh, do you want to make Labor of Love?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And I said, well, no, I'm thinking about making another movie,
which was Unbreakable that I was writing at that time
about comic books, even though no one had making comic
book movies, and I thought no one would ever see
this movie. But it was something that interest me and
I said, you know, I was really into genre.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
I was like, okay, genre is my way. Labor of
Love is very it's a very emotional movie. I think
I have that as my base tendency to be emotional,
and I think until I found genre to balance it,
I was too much for people because like I start
at a nine, like at emotion. If you and I
(15:55):
are talking over drinks about time, I'll be I'll be like,
I'll be already emotionally to be you know there. And
I think genre helped me balance that. You know, you
have to meet the audience where they are. This is
something I learned in my mid twenties. When you're telling
a story, meet them where they are and don't lecture
(16:16):
them and demand that they come to you. You come
to them, so you start tonally where they are. So
it's a tough world and we have a little we
have cynicism. That's how we get through our lives, you know.
We balance that to protect our software parts. And genre
does that. It comes in and it balances. I have
(16:39):
this feeling about movie making, our art that it has
to have the right balance of light and dark, and
that's when it rings true. The love of a mother
to a child has a selfish component. You have to have,
you know, a controlling component, then it rings true. There's
also the beauty, the pure love you know, of a
(17:01):
parent to a child. But if I can get both
things in there, then it rings true and you start
to see yourself in it. I think genre allows me
to show you that the light side, you know. Because
of that, I can go very dark. I mean I've
killed off more protagonist than anybody. This is like dark stuff,
(17:21):
but that's because underneath, I do feel the universe is
a benevolent place, and I feel that from that.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
So genre has helped me balance things.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Is it fair to say that genre, particularly horror or supernatural,
it lowers the stakes in a certain way. What does
it allow you to? What's what's the best way to
describe the way it It's it's.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Protective when you get really down to it.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I'm just this sentimental dude that's overly earnest. When I
speak to people, they think it's gamesmanship.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
There's no game at all. I'm I love it, I
hate it. I I'm terrified. I'll tell you openly, you
know everything, and when we do things like comedy and
all this stuff. Those are ways to protect ourselves which
I understand and I can use as well. And genre
is if I can show you edgy dark things and
(18:18):
show you because I do have an agi dark side
as well. I just deploy it at the right times
that allows me in the in the balance of things
in the audience's eyes and their emotional journey.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
It's earned.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Then when I do the car scene in sixth sense
with the mom and the child, you know I've earned
it by by by titillating them and scaring them in
a certain way. There's a balancing act that goes on
which I think is important for me to acknowledge that
this is a conversation with the audience, that it's not
(18:53):
just a lecture.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, labor of love is are you saying there's there's
no supernatural It is a straight.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Pretty much? Yeah, just a straight you say pretty much,
pretty much? Pretty much.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The reason I say pretty much is there's a tiny
bit of spirituality and love, and so that I do
represent that in there, that things are bound a bit,
that there's some inspirational, magical things that happen sometimes you
know that's related to love. So that's all. But there
is no genre in it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
That's we were.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
This opportunity came, I would say, you know, fifteen years
later where I could make that movie with literally the
best actor in the world and the person that I
would want to make a movie with more than anybody.
It was being squeezed between another movie that I was
making for a big studio, and I made the wrong
(19:54):
decision and I didn't make it. And when I think
back on it now, knowing me and who is the actor, well,
I don't want to say just because just because, because
it's more about the emotional stuff that we're talking about
rather than the kind of the titillation of it, of
(20:16):
the names and things like that, if we can, because
just because you know, it meant so much to me
and him, and I didn't do it, And it was
literally because I just wasn't in the right place and
I was making destructive decisions at that time. In retrospect
and now having gone through, you know, iteration after iteration
(20:40):
of who I am in front of the public eye,
I with absolute certainty can tell you, I tell you
I should have made it at that time.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Dig into a little bit more why you didn't. Is
it on some level terrifying to actually make make real
something that you think of as being so perfect or
something that if something comes in a lightning bolt, is
it scary.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It was a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I wish I could say it was something that defendable.
It was literally I think I wanted so much to
be accepted. I was in a phase of my life
where I was willing to, I think, give away the
things that were prescious to me to be accepted. And
I was so tired of fighting the fight all the time,
(21:30):
these original movies and you know.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Doing things.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
And then I didn't have the protection of genre with
that movie. It would just be me and this incredible actor.
And at that time, I felt like that's a very
vulnerable thing, and that it's just an emotional movie and
the world's going to just shit trash me and trash us,
and and that's the That was the fears. But I
was perhaps scared of giving up what I had had
(21:56):
not very admirable reasons. They were coming from wanting to
be accepted, from wanting money, you know, you know, in
other forms, or needing money or whatever it is. And
so you know, I I failed it because I was impure.
That's how I feel about it and should have one
(22:17):
hundred percent done it. This particular actor was, you know,
sad by the decision. I would say maybe another eight
years later it came up again, and then this time
I was the one that said, hey, let's go make this,
and the same actor wanted to do it, and then
went off and did another piece, a big kind of
(22:38):
thing that they were a part of.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
And it was successful the thing they did.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
But a little bit of it was we missed each other,
you know, we missed our moment, you know, a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
But the movie wasn't done with m Night Shyamalan yet
not at all. Back with more after the break? How
(23:13):
does the way you relate to the movie? How has
it changed over the years you're now if thirty years
have gone by, Yeah, do you look at it and
think about it and see it differently now than you
did when you were twenty two?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Right now, I wouldn't change anything about it, and we'd
make it as a period piece in nineteen ninety four.
The music the more is the time, you know, which
sadly feels incredibly innocent. It almost feels like, you know,
let's take a stroll around the garden, you know, think Oh,
I'm so tired from the stroll. Let's lie dout. It's like,
(23:46):
you know, when we will see a period piece, we're like, wow,
that really were you out to go walk around the garden? Yeah,
And that's how we feel about like nineteen ninety four. Oh,
we were thought we were really being really bad when
we did this. You were just talking with your boys
in the basement. How sweet, and you were just all
of you just talking about girls because you love God.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
You know how sweet?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You know, like it feels that way, and I when
I think about it, it's very nostalgic of a time
gone by now and a way people might have reacted.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Oh that because the way as the hero goes on
his journey, as he's walking across the country, the country
is responding to him in a way they wouldn't respond today.
Is that your point that in a kind of internet
age it would be different.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, it's so hard now to unwind it and think
of a moment when you didn't have access to every
piece of information in the history of man.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
You don't know where your your.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Cousin is, and where your uncle is and where your
sister is right now. No, you don't write you know,
ninety four, we didn't know where anybody was right, and
you get a letter or you would if something happened,
it would take a while for you to find out
all of those ideas of being present. Primarily, it's gone.
Our understanding of what it is to be a human
(25:07):
being is on us gone because we're never just here anymore.
And this phone that's sitting near me as I'm doing
this podcast is pulling.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Me right now. I can feel it. It's pulling me.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
So I'm partly here with you, but it's stolen my
soul a little bit, you know. And that was just
a different era, and that's all part of them, that
time period. When I you know, when I try to
rewrite it, when I'm trying to make it better, I'm
scarring it. It came out in one thing like that,
(25:42):
you know, as this kid was just feeling something.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
When was the last time you read it?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I probably read it.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It came out a third time with this with this
particular actor.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
A third time. It was four years ago.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So I read it four years ago, four years ago
when we talked about.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
It again, what do the eyes you'll actually do it?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
I'm just a strange creature.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Bro so if I say to you absolutely never, as
soon as a week click off here, I'll probably go
make it right.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
I've thought about it a lot.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Do you do it more as a as a ritual
almost to honor that part of you in all of
us that came from a pure place, regardless of its success,
regardless of what would happen.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
There is a kind of a.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Wise warning about labor of love, that there's something where
you're blind about the labor. Oh, I always wanted to
make that movie about blah blah blah whatever it is,
or I always wanted to write that thing.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
It's a labor of love for me.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
That automatically means you're blind a little bit. Some massive
you know, blind spot exists there. There is that wisdom
acumen to be careful of.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Your labor of loves.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That meant that you were you were kind of obsessed
in a way about something. I don't know if that's
the case here. I feel even as we talk about it, like,
you know, I could go do this in another year
and do exactly the way I said it.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I had this conversation with someone in my office about it.
I said, I don't know if the world even wants
to remember feeling this way anymore.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
It's painful to remember that we used to feel this way,
and it.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Was was It was okay and wonderful and celebrated and calm.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
When you say feel this way, you mean get swept
up in what that man was doing.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, yeah, this amount of the expression of love, you know,
whereas today it's our relationship to our emotions is so
being attacked. We're not supposed to have our own feeling anymore.
We're being manipulated by algorithms constantly and distraction, and so
(28:08):
the AI world is already deciding how we live and
experience our lives. And maybe that's the absolute reason to
make it.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
As I'm talking to you, this is probably the deepest
conversation I've had about it, because it is it is
a kind of like are we still Are you still
torching yourself about this movie?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Bro?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
After thirty years?
Speaker 2 (28:30):
This odyssey is that there's been opportunities and there is
one now of a wonderful filmmaker that wants to make
it themselves the same story.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And whether I'm okay with.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That, are you?
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Bro? I don't know. I don't know that feels like
I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I'm almost shutting down when you're asking me that question,
and I haven't. Actually I've actually shut down in that
process too.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
So you know this.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
So someone just called you up and said someone famous
calls you up and says, night, I've read I've read
the secret screenplay. Yes, how did this person get a
hold of it? They just heard through the great thing.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah, And it's happened before. It's happened before. Somebody wants
to make it. Every few years, somebody wants to make it.
And I could just let it go, just let it
go and and and let someone put their point of
view on love. So it's this screenplay that represents the
(29:43):
purest version of me that's on a page, and it
has been chasing me like a ghost or haunting me.
It started my career and I've got to do all
these amazing things. I continue to just have these incredible opportunities.
And really it's like a part of me that I
betrayed at one point, and now I can make it now.
(30:07):
I mean today, I can make it right now out
and I think probably with the same actor. And even
as you and I are sitting here I have all
these reasons that are holding me back. So I don't
know what this screenplay is to me and what this
movie is to me. Maybe it's the softest part of
(30:27):
me and so scared to show you guys that.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
You said that your great fear at the time when
you wrote it was that you would never have anything
write anything so pure again. But listening to you, my
fear about it is that had you made it, then
what followed may not have happened. In other words, having
(30:57):
as one of your very first screenplay is something so perfect,
like fueled all of this extraordinary productivity that came afterwards,
And that had you made it and had it been
a big success, maybe you would have been kind of
paralyzed by that. Like the fact that it's it's unrealized
(31:18):
allows you to keep going and right if it's think
about the what is the curse of the one hit wonder?
The curse of the one hit wonder is someone who
is unlucky enough to have written their greatest song. First,
it's just bad luck, and everyone looks at the second
and the third ones and says it's over for you. Well,
(31:39):
it's not over for you. It's just out of order. Right,
whereas the same the same thing only put the one
hit Wonders breakthrough hit ten years into their career, and
we think, oh, what a progression right towards.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, I keep you know,
maybe you're right, the unfinished nature of that is keep
driving me. You know, the movie I've just editing now
and finishing. When I think of it, I have a
little bit of magic feeling about it, and I'm like, oh,
this is reminding me of labor of love. When it's
feeling effortless and right, You're going, well, where did that
(32:16):
come from?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
How do you do that? And you're like, oh, yeah,
that's how it felt to twenty two.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
But then here's the other fear I have that what
if you made it and it wasn't magical, then you
wouldn't have You would also have destroyed this thing that
you've been able to look at throughout your entire career.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Well, I can tell you if I at twenty two,
I wouldn't have made it a particularly great movie that
at that moment, I think we've been you know, up
and down, flawed and this and that, And then when
we jumped forward to the first time with that, the
most incredible actor. I wasn't in the right emotional space
to have made it properly. Now that we're really getting
(32:58):
serious about it, Yeah, so that wouldn't have worked out either,
because I just was not where I am right now.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
One last question, what is your What does your wife
say this president the creation?
Speaker 3 (33:11):
That's a great question, I would.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I think she's seen me torture myself for thirty years about.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
This in her mind.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
You know, for a while she kept asking me why
do you keep killing off the wife?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
You know, like in signs.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And He's like, why do you keep killing off the wives?
And I'm like, no, no, no, it's because I'm so
scared to lose you. You know, she knows I wrote
it for her, and so it's kind of already in
our lives.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Is it already happened? It already existed, and what was
made and was so lovely?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
You know. I have this check from back when we
used to get checks and from twenty century Fox, and
it was my first check that I got, and I
have it framed. It's in my office, so it's if
you come to my office, which you will, and it's there,
and then if you go into the cafeteria. There's a
poster of a mock up of a poster the twenty
(34:03):
century Fox made for Labor of Love, and that's hanging
on my wall, so on my walls all the movies.
I'm mad in a movie that wasn't me.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
It's your own ghost. You've you've created your own ghost.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Night.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
This has been so much fun. Thank you so much.
I really really really enjoyed this.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
You're so lovely. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I was learning something about myself too as we were talking.
You're a good therapist, man. I was starting to get there.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
This episode was produced by Nina Bird, Lawrence, and Tali Emen,
with ben at Alphaffrey, editing by Sarah Nix, original scoring
by Luis Gara, Engineering by Eco Mountain. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Glamo.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I've had such a exceptionally curated career. Every movie I've
ever written since eighteen has been greenlit to be made
into a movie. You've seen everything I've written, you know,
except for this one that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So it's interesting, always a twist. Yeah, Welcome back to
Development Hell, our mini series about the lost scripts of Hollywood. Today,
I'm talking with m Night Shyamalan, one of the best
known filmmakers of the past generation suspense fillers and supernatural psychodrama.
(01:03):
You know whose movies I'm sure, Unbreakable, the Sixth Sense,
Split Glass, something like fifteen films in the last thirty years,
which collectively have grossed billions of dollars. M Night Shamalan's
stories have haunted a lot of people over the years.
This episode is about the story that haunted m Night Shauma.
(01:29):
We've talked a lot so far in a series about
movies that never got made because there was something wrong
with the story, or because someone on the outside had
a problem with the script. This episode is about none
of those things. There is nothing at all wrong with
the story Shyamalan has never told, and maybe that's why
he never told.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
There was the first real script that I felt kind
of lightning bolt inspiration that came to me.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I was twenty two and i'd just.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Been married, just got married, and I wrote a kind
of a love story, Labor of Love, and I was
writing it, and I wrote it because I almost remember
everywhere I wrote it, because it was such a special
experience of writing. By that time, that was my third
third feature that i'd written. I had made made a
(02:27):
movie already in India.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Tell me, tell me this a little bit about the story.
What was Labor of Love about?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
You know?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Labor of Love is essentially a story about an older
couple and the wife saying, hey, it's an anniversary and
he forgets and all of this stuff and they've been
together a long time, and she's just like, you know,
essentially expresses I do all these little things for you
our whole life, and you don't. And I'm not sure
(02:56):
what you want from you know, I'm not sure you
love me. You know, I'm not one hundred percent sure.
And that's not a great feeling, you know. And he's baffled,
right as all guys are just baffled at this, And.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
I mean, what do you mean? I mean, I mean
what do you want me? I love you goes.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
To work every morning? Who goes to What are you
doing that for? Okay? Good, good, I get it.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
She I don't want to say too much of it
because I tend to think of these things as magic.
And yeah, and she she passes away unexpectedly and very tragically,
and before she died she said, he said, uh, you know,
what do you want me to do to prove my
love to you? You want me to, you know, swim
(03:42):
across an ocean, or climb a mountain or walk across
the United States?
Speaker 3 (03:45):
What do you want me to do?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
She's like, just walk to the store and get me
something on your own, because you were thinking, you know,
something small like that. Anyway, she passes away. He's an
older man. He's in a you know, late sixties seventies
kind of thing, out of shape, and he's so devastated
he makes a crazy decision to start walking across the
United States for nothing else but just to show his
(04:06):
wife who's passed away, in case she can see. And
this isn't I wrote this in nineteen ninety four, right,
so no cell phones, no nothing, no internet, And he
just begins this track and it's a kind of like
a vision quest a little bit. He starts to think
about his life and his time with his wife and
(04:27):
from when they were kids, and he's physically in threat
as he's doing this, and slowly the country starts to
get to hear about this guy, and they're trying to
urge him do it to get there and it's so crazy,
Why are you doing this?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Why are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
And then the country kind of gets on board with
the feeling of doing something irrational to show your love
for the person that.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You care about.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And I'm not going to tell you the ending, but
it's really poignant, the idea of just doing something so
the other person can hear you.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
So you're twenty two, you're very much in love. You've
just married your wife, who you've known for how long
at that point.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
I met when I was eighteen, so owner for four
years at that point.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
So the and in this period of love struck youth.
When you are, you know, in love with your young wife,
you write a story about an older couple, Yes, where
the question of the man's devotion to the to his
wife is in doubt. Yes, and he had In other words,
(05:35):
I thought you were going to say I wrote this
at twenty two. I was just married a mention love.
It's about this young couple who embark you. You jump back,
you jump forward forty years when you start looking back.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Yes, so yeah, in the period.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Where you are of greatest infatuation, your impulse is to
go to the end of the relationship and work backwards.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
I mean, I think I've always been driven by familial nightmares,
you know, the sanctity of the family being jeopardized. You know,
later it changed into aliens and ghosts and you name it,
But ultimately it's still about families and whether whether they
(06:21):
can survive.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
What is it about you at a period of young love,
when you're already thinking about the kind of not the
dissolution of love, but the final stage of it. You
why would you jump ahead? What's it? No?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I guess I guess you're thinking about your life and
what you wanted to be and where it could go wrong.
And maybe I was thinking about what is it?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
What is it? What do I want this to be at.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
The end of the journey, you know, forty years from now,
fifty years from now. I hope, I hope I've lived
the life the right way and of course there's going
to be a lot of mistakes along the way. But
I don't have fears like the other people have fears
in the sense of, like I knew I was going
to marry the second I matter, you know, like those things.
I fear getting a call that's something bad happened, you know,
(07:10):
And that's very prevalent and still thirty years later.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, but you're asking yourself the question of what is
the most tragic outcome of young love? Is that what
is what you've described is that one one party loves
and the other party doesn't realize they're being loved. You
put your finger on something that's like it does a
(07:35):
deeply resonant anxiety.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
It is I probably fund the dynamic of me and
my wife that you know, she married a dreamer, someone
who's completely content to stare out in an empty room
and just do that all day long and think about
an imaginary world with imaginary people and feel fulfilled. And
(08:01):
she's like, well, I'm right here, you know, what about
what about the real life where you're.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
We're living, you know, And.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And so the struggle has been you know, I've heard
all of those stories of you know, from you know,
f Scott Fitzgerald to you name it. You know all
our heroes and how they struggled with their personal life
versus their artistry. Is it a one or the other equation?
We sometimes it feels that way, and for a lot
(08:29):
of people it feels that way. I've tried to see
if they can be feed each other and it feeds
the movies, the feeling of love for your wife or
for your kids or you know, and what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
How can you imbue it?
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And you guys feel it when you see the movies
and really the stories that I mean.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
And the hardest thing to explain to your spouse in
that instance is that to them you seem inaccessible in
that dreaming. But from your perspective, I'm putting words in
your mouth, but there's a certain amount of commonality between
the way I approachest the way that you do. What's
hard to explain is that not being inaccessible and in fact,
(09:11):
the relationship we have with our loved one is what
makes our dreaming possible.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
M hm.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Right there. They're the engine of it. They're not outside
of it. It's their presence and support and structure and
love and whatever that permits us to wander off and
in our imagination and feel find comfort and joy and
all of that. I don't know, it's like that. It's
(09:37):
a very hard thing to to explain to someone that
they're that our inner lives are contingent on someone from
the out on the outside.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, you know, So finding love and then building a
career from there felt felt the right, the right building blocks,
and so that movie was the beginning of that. You know,
when writing this movie, Labor of Love, it was it
was coming from such an interesting place, and I was
writing ahead of my abilities at that point.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
It was just kind of going by this inspiration of love.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I think, what do you mean by writing ahead of
your abilities?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You know, I didn't have as much craft at that time.
This is oftentimes your career is an equation of craft
and inspiration, and so lacking in craft and at twenty two,
but the inspiration was out of ten. You know that
feeling when I was writing it, what this feels beautiful,
This feels this feels lovely. You know, I love this
(10:33):
feeling how it's coming out and how I can see
the characters and in retrospect now thirty years later, can
see that. You know, I was really listening to the
characters almost like a novelist, and following it. And so
the end result is I wrote the screenplay that ended
up becoming a bidding War from my parents' guest bedroom
(10:55):
where me and my wife were living in the guest bedroom.
The best bedroom was pink. It was for my sister.
Was It was just a you know, we had to
get out of here kind of feeling. And this script
went out and there was the bidding war and someone
offered this amount of money and then that amount of money,
and it was crazy.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
And I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I'd run down and I'd be like, mom, they offered
this amount of money.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
It's crazy.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
But I only directed this little movie in India, and
they saw it as a big, big movie. And this
was back in an era of Hollywood where the entire
system was geared at original movies. The system was built
to nurture original movies, and the spec screenplay markets, screenplay
is done on speculation was the kind of gold rush,
(11:43):
and so if there was an incredible screenplay that came out,
everyone would read it immediately and it would go in
this bidding war because that was the food that was
feeding the engine at that time to the movie theaters,
and so I was luckily kind of grew up in
an era where what I love to do, which is
original movies, was really celebrated and promoted, and so everyone
(12:04):
bit on it and we sold the tunch of Fox.
You know, I was attached to direct, and then I
flew out and I put on my graduation suit, which
I didn't because I didn't have many suits, so I
wore my old suit and then they they listened to
me about how I would direct a movie, and then
they subsequently fired me off the movie. So it was devastated.
(12:26):
Just absolutely What did.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
You do wrong in your pitch to be a directly?
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's really interesting a question I would say. I wasn't
a director yet. I had more practice at writing than directing.
And of course, sitting in a room telling a chairman
of a studio how you'd make a film, and they're
asking certain questions, and you know, I don't know if
I had a chance at all, you know, before I
walked in there.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
In retrospect night, you're now hold fifty three. Yeah, you
look at fifty three, you look at thirty, at twenty two,
you must have looked twelve.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
You're absolutely correct, you're absolutely correct.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
You know what's going to give you fifty million dollars
to direct a movie when you it's like a twelve year.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Old Yeah, and I'm in this ill fitting suit which
makes me even look younger because you're liked you wear
your big brother's suit or whatever it was.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I remember the feeling.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I can remember the feeling pitching it to the chairman
and then the heads of the studio and going, I'm
not I don't I don't believe what I'm saying, and
I'm guessing. I was like basically, I was like, I
don't know. I'm gonna learn, you know as I do this,
because I can see it in my head, you know,
so I'll I'll learn.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
And they took me. I was very painful.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Then I ended up, you know, they talked me into
kind of pay rewrite it for some other a list
directors of that time. So I had a chance to
be in the room at some you know at that time,
the top directors, and they would say do this, do that,
and I just couldn't. I would rewrite it and it
would get worse in retrospect, some kind of mojo curse
(14:03):
I put on it, and it could never get it never,
It could never bloom into So there was lots of
directors that try, two or three directors that tried. So
what was really weird about this movie represented some kind
of you know, connection with the universe. And I think
for a little bit I thought that was a one
(14:24):
off and that that's never going to happen again.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And that was the fear.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
That screenplay just became something of a mythic thing for me, like, oh,
I'll never get that back again.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
M night. Shyamalan writes his masterpiece and then he's haunted
by it more after the break. Wait, so what's the
(14:58):
next stage in the saga of Labor of Love?
Speaker 2 (15:01):
So sixth sense happens, right? I wrote it, you know
a few years later and wonderful outcome. Everyone wanted to
make movies with me, and I said to Fox, I
would love to have that screen light back.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
They said, oh, do you want to make Labor of Love?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And I said, well, no, I'm thinking about making another movie,
which was Unbreakable that I was writing at that time
about comic books, even though no one had making comic
book movies, and I thought no one would ever see
this movie. But it was something that interest me and
I said, you know, I was really into genre.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Now.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
I was like, okay, genre is my way. Labor of
Love is very it's a very emotional movie. I think
I have that as my base tendency to be emotional,
and I think until I found genre to balance it,
I was too much for people because like I start
at a nine, like at emotion. If you and I
(15:55):
are talking over drinks about time, I'll be I'll be like,
I'll be already emotionally to be you know there. And
I think genre helped me balance that. You know, you
have to meet the audience where they are. This is
something I learned in my mid twenties. When you're telling
a story, meet them where they are and don't lecture
(16:16):
them and demand that they come to you. You come
to them, so you start tonally where they are. So
it's a tough world and we have a little we
have cynicism. That's how we get through our lives, you know.
We balance that to protect our software parts. And genre
does that. It comes in and it balances. I have
(16:39):
this feeling about movie making, our art that it has
to have the right balance of light and dark, and
that's when it rings true. The love of a mother
to a child has a selfish component. You have to have,
you know, a controlling component, then it rings true. There's
also the beauty, the pure love you know, of a
(17:01):
parent to a child. But if I can get both
things in there, then it rings true and you start
to see yourself in it. I think genre allows me
to show you that the light side, you know. Because
of that, I can go very dark. I mean I've
killed off more protagonist than anybody. This is like dark stuff,
(17:21):
but that's because underneath, I do feel the universe is
a benevolent place, and I feel that from that.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
So genre has helped me balance things.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Is it fair to say that genre, particularly horror or supernatural,
it lowers the stakes in a certain way. What does
it allow you to? What's what's the best way to
describe the way it It's it's.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Protective when you get really down to it.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
I'm just this sentimental dude that's overly earnest. When I
speak to people, they think it's gamesmanship.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
It's not.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
There's no game at all. I'm I love it, I
hate it. I I'm terrified. I'll tell you openly, you
know everything, and when we do things like comedy and
all this stuff. Those are ways to protect ourselves which
I understand and I can use as well. And genre
is if I can show you edgy dark things and
(18:18):
show you because I do have an agi dark side
as well. I just deploy it at the right times
that allows me in the in the balance of things
in the audience's eyes and their emotional journey.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
It's earned.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Then when I do the car scene in sixth sense
with the mom and the child, you know I've earned
it by by by titillating them and scaring them in
a certain way. There's a balancing act that goes on
which I think is important for me to acknowledge that
this is a conversation with the audience, that it's not
(18:53):
just a lecture.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Yeah, labor of love is are you saying there's there's
no supernatural It is a straight.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
Pretty much? Yeah, just a straight you say pretty much,
pretty much? Pretty much.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
The reason I say pretty much is there's a tiny
bit of spirituality and love, and so that I do
represent that in there, that things are bound a bit,
that there's some inspirational, magical things that happen sometimes you
know that's related to love. So that's all. But there
is no genre in it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
That's we were.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
This opportunity came, I would say, you know, fifteen years
later where I could make that movie with literally the
best actor in the world and the person that I
would want to make a movie with more than anybody.
It was being squeezed between another movie that I was
making for a big studio, and I made the wrong
(19:54):
decision and I didn't make it. And when I think
back on it now, knowing me and who is the actor, well,
I don't want to say just because just because, because
it's more about the emotional stuff that we're talking about
rather than the kind of the titillation of it, of
(20:16):
the names and things like that, if we can, because
just because you know, it meant so much to me
and him, and I didn't do it, And it was
literally because I just wasn't in the right place and
I was making destructive decisions at that time. In retrospect
and now having gone through, you know, iteration after iteration
(20:40):
of who I am in front of the public eye,
I with absolute certainty can tell you, I tell you
I should have made it at that time.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Dig into a little bit more why you didn't. Is
it on some level terrifying to actually make make real
something that you think of as being so perfect or
something that if something comes in a lightning bolt, is
it scary.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It was a lot.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
No.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I wish I could say it was something that defendable.
It was literally I think I wanted so much to
be accepted. I was in a phase of my life
where I was willing to, I think, give away the
things that were prescious to me to be accepted. And
I was so tired of fighting the fight all the time,
(21:30):
these original movies and you know.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Doing things.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
And then I didn't have the protection of genre with
that movie. It would just be me and this incredible actor.
And at that time, I felt like that's a very
vulnerable thing, and that it's just an emotional movie and
the world's going to just shit trash me and trash us,
and and that's the That was the fears. But I
was perhaps scared of giving up what I had had
(21:56):
not very admirable reasons. They were coming from wanting to
be accepted, from wanting money, you know, you know, in
other forms, or needing money or whatever it is. And
so you know, I I failed it because I was impure.
That's how I feel about it and should have one
(22:17):
hundred percent done it. This particular actor was, you know,
sad by the decision. I would say maybe another eight
years later it came up again, and then this time
I was the one that said, hey, let's go make this,
and the same actor wanted to do it, and then
went off and did another piece, a big kind of
(22:38):
thing that they were a part of.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
And it was successful the thing they did.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
But a little bit of it was we missed each other,
you know, we missed our moment, you know, a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
But the movie wasn't done with m Night Shyamalan yet
not at all. Back with more after the break? How
(23:13):
does the way you relate to the movie? How has
it changed over the years you're now if thirty years
have gone by, Yeah, do you look at it and
think about it and see it differently now than you
did when you were twenty two?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
Right now, I wouldn't change anything about it, and we'd
make it as a period piece in nineteen ninety four.
The music the more is the time, you know, which
sadly feels incredibly innocent. It almost feels like, you know,
let's take a stroll around the garden, you know, think Oh,
I'm so tired from the stroll. Let's lie dout. It's like,
(23:46):
you know, when we will see a period piece, we're like, wow,
that really were you out to go walk around the garden? Yeah,
And that's how we feel about like nineteen ninety four. Oh,
we were thought we were really being really bad when
we did this. You were just talking with your boys
in the basement. How sweet, and you were just all
of you just talking about girls because you love God.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
You know how sweet?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You know, like it feels that way, and I when
I think about it, it's very nostalgic of a time
gone by now and a way people might have reacted.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Oh that because the way as the hero goes on
his journey, as he's walking across the country, the country
is responding to him in a way they wouldn't respond today.
Is that your point that in a kind of internet
age it would be different.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, it's so hard now to unwind it and think
of a moment when you didn't have access to every
piece of information in the history of man.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
You don't know where your your.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
Cousin is, and where your uncle is and where your
sister is right now. No, you don't write you know,
ninety four, we didn't know where anybody was right, and
you get a letter or you would if something happened,
it would take a while for you to find out
all of those ideas of being present. Primarily, it's gone.
Our understanding of what it is to be a human
(25:07):
being is on us gone because we're never just here anymore.
And this phone that's sitting near me as I'm doing
this podcast is pulling.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Me right now. I can feel it. It's pulling me.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
So I'm partly here with you, but it's stolen my
soul a little bit, you know. And that was just
a different era, and that's all part of them, that
time period. When I you know, when I try to
rewrite it, when I'm trying to make it better, I'm
scarring it. It came out in one thing like that,
(25:42):
you know, as this kid was just feeling something.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
When was the last time you read it?
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I probably read it.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
It came out a third time with this with this
particular actor.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
A third time. It was four years ago.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
So I read it four years ago, four years ago
when we talked about.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
It again, what do the eyes you'll actually do it?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
I'm just a strange creature.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Bro so if I say to you absolutely never, as
soon as a week click off here, I'll probably go
make it right.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
I've thought about it a lot.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Do you do it more as a as a ritual
almost to honor that part of you in all of
us that came from a pure place, regardless of its success,
regardless of what would happen.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
There is a kind of a.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Wise warning about labor of love, that there's something where
you're blind about the labor. Oh, I always wanted to
make that movie about blah blah blah whatever it is,
or I always wanted to write that thing.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
It's a labor of love for me.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
That automatically means you're blind a little bit. Some massive
you know, blind spot exists there. There is that wisdom
acumen to be careful of.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Your labor of loves.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
That meant that you were you were kind of obsessed
in a way about something. I don't know if that's
the case here. I feel even as we talk about it, like,
you know, I could go do this in another year
and do exactly the way I said it.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
I had this conversation with someone in my office about it.
I said, I don't know if the world even wants
to remember feeling this way anymore.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
It's painful to remember that we used to feel this way,
and it.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Was was It was okay and wonderful and celebrated and calm.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
When you say feel this way, you mean get swept
up in what that man was doing.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, yeah, this amount of the expression of love, you know,
whereas today it's our relationship to our emotions is so
being attacked. We're not supposed to have our own feeling anymore.
We're being manipulated by algorithms constantly and distraction, and so
(28:08):
the AI world is already deciding how we live and
experience our lives. And maybe that's the absolute reason to
make it.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
As I'm talking to you, this is probably the deepest
conversation I've had about it, because it is it is
a kind of like are we still Are you still
torching yourself about this movie?
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Bro?
Speaker 3 (28:28):
After thirty years?
Speaker 2 (28:30):
This odyssey is that there's been opportunities and there is
one now of a wonderful filmmaker that wants to make
it themselves the same story.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And whether I'm okay with.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That, are you?
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Bro? I don't know. I don't know that feels like
I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I'm almost shutting down when you're asking me that question,
and I haven't. Actually I've actually shut down in that
process too.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
So you know this.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
So someone just called you up and said someone famous
calls you up and says, night, I've read I've read
the secret screenplay. Yes, how did this person get a
hold of it? They just heard through the great thing.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yeah, And it's happened before. It's happened before. Somebody wants
to make it. Every few years, somebody wants to make it.
And I could just let it go, just let it
go and and and let someone put their point of
view on love. So it's this screenplay that represents the
(29:43):
purest version of me that's on a page, and it
has been chasing me like a ghost or haunting me.
It started my career and I've got to do all
these amazing things. I continue to just have these incredible opportunities.
And really it's like a part of me that I
betrayed at one point, and now I can make it now.
(30:07):
I mean today, I can make it right now out
and I think probably with the same actor. And even
as you and I are sitting here I have all
these reasons that are holding me back. So I don't
know what this screenplay is to me and what this
movie is to me. Maybe it's the softest part of
(30:27):
me and so scared to show you guys that.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
You said that your great fear at the time when
you wrote it was that you would never have anything
write anything so pure again. But listening to you, my
fear about it is that had you made it, then
what followed may not have happened. In other words, having
(30:57):
as one of your very first screenplay is something so perfect,
like fueled all of this extraordinary productivity that came afterwards,
And that had you made it and had it been
a big success, maybe you would have been kind of
paralyzed by that. Like the fact that it's it's unrealized
(31:18):
allows you to keep going and right if it's think
about the what is the curse of the one hit wonder?
The curse of the one hit wonder is someone who
is unlucky enough to have written their greatest song. First,
it's just bad luck, and everyone looks at the second
and the third ones and says it's over for you. Well,
(31:39):
it's not over for you. It's just out of order. Right,
whereas the same the same thing only put the one
hit Wonders breakthrough hit ten years into their career, and
we think, oh, what a progression right towards.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, I keep you know,
maybe you're right, the unfinished nature of that is keep
driving me. You know, the movie I've just editing now
and finishing. When I think of it, I have a
little bit of magic feeling about it, and I'm like, oh,
this is reminding me of labor of love. When it's
feeling effortless and right, You're going, well, where did that
(32:16):
come from?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
How do you do that? And you're like, oh, yeah,
that's how it felt to twenty two.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
But then here's the other fear I have that what
if you made it and it wasn't magical, then you
wouldn't have You would also have destroyed this thing that
you've been able to look at throughout your entire career.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Well, I can tell you if I at twenty two,
I wouldn't have made it a particularly great movie that
at that moment, I think we've been you know, up
and down, flawed and this and that, And then when
we jumped forward to the first time with that, the
most incredible actor. I wasn't in the right emotional space
to have made it properly. Now that we're really getting
(32:58):
serious about it, Yeah, so that wouldn't have worked out either,
because I just was not where I am right now.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
One last question, what is your What does your wife
say this president the creation?
Speaker 3 (33:11):
That's a great question, I would.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I think she's seen me torture myself for thirty years about.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
This in her mind.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
You know, for a while she kept asking me why
do you keep killing off the wife?
Speaker 3 (33:23):
You know, like in signs.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
And He's like, why do you keep killing off the wives?
And I'm like, no, no, no, it's because I'm so
scared to lose you. You know, she knows I wrote
it for her, and so it's kind of already in
our lives.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Is it already happened? It already existed, and what was
made and was so lovely?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
You know. I have this check from back when we
used to get checks and from twenty century Fox, and
it was my first check that I got, and I
have it framed. It's in my office, so it's if
you come to my office, which you will, and it's there,
and then if you go into the cafeteria. There's a
poster of a mock up of a poster the twenty
(34:03):
century Fox made for Labor of Love, and that's hanging
on my wall, so on my walls all the movies.
I'm mad in a movie that wasn't me.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
It's your own ghost. You've you've created your own ghost.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Night.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
This has been so much fun. Thank you so much.
I really really really enjoyed this.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
You're so lovely. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I was learning something about myself too as we were talking.
You're a good therapist, man. I was starting to get there.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
This episode was produced by Nina Bird, Lawrence, and Tali Emen,
with ben at Alphaffrey, editing by Sarah Nix, original scoring
by Luis Gara, Engineering by Eco Mountain. Our executive producer
is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Glamo.
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