M. Night Shyamalan Quotes

There's no staying where you were. If you're not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.

There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.

I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.

I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.

I love 'The Killing', I love 'Homeland' and 'Mad Men', all those shows that lean into the tone of things.

My biggest fear in life is to be average.

Always in life bad times will lead to great times.

The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.

People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.

The whole world makes comic book movies now.

You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.

'The Last Airbender' is genetically engineered for me. I love martial arts. I study it. The movie's based on a lot of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. I was raised Hindu.

The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.

You don't get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can't.

I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.

You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.

When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.

When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.

As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.

If I'm hesitant at all about an idea, then that's not the right idea.

People who come to see my movies, you're coming to see a drama masquerading as a genre piece.

There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can't. What I can't take is when my older brother, who's everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don't ever want to see that look in your eyes again.

See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?

Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.

I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.

I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.

I knew the moment it happened, it was a miracle. I could have been kissing her when she threw up. It would have scarred me for life. I may never have recovered.

I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.

Saw #‎ Birdman . Such singular, audacious filmmaking. Can't stop thinking about the ending.

I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them anyway!

A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.

You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.

For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.

I consider myself an independent filmmaker.

I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.

Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].

I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.

There is no one looking out for us. We are all alone.

Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.

Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.

I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died.

My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.

I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.

I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.

This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.