Director M. Night Shyamalan said he is on track for a July 2010 release of his live-action version of The Last Airbender.
"It's going to be really cool," the director said about the Paramount picture on which he is now working. "I'm at the stage where we have [pre-visualized] about the last act of the movie. And because of my normal approach to filmmaking is almost like I'm making an animated movie to some extent, I think out every shot and analyze everything. It kind of lays out really nicely for a big CGI movie."
Speaking in a conference call last week with reporters, Shyamalan added, "Basically, I feel like I'm making the movie right now, like I'm editing it and all that stuff, because I'm doing the [pre-visualizations]. Like, if you were here, I could show you the last 30 minutes of The Last Airbender in animatic form, and it is an amazing and emotional experience just to watch that. I'm like, 'Oh, this is so exciting.' It gives you such safety, because it's such a different kind of movie then I'm used to making. But yet, as we all were, we all came kind of born out of Star Wars, and somewhere in there is the desire to return to fantasy on that level."
Expect a lot more colors, the director of The Happening said. "This fantasy movie may seem as if it's coming out of nowhere, but it's not," he said. "You'll see the seeds of it in Unbreakable and in Lady [in the Water] and in Signs, all of them a little piece of this and that, and the formality of The Village and the things in it should all go, 'Oh, I get it, these are all the colors of his personality.' As opposed to, 'I don't get these other ones, how they relate.' Do you know what I mean? It should be more of an honest palette."
Shyamalan said that Airbender, which is based on the animated TV series, is very spiritual. "And sometimes in my movies, like Signs, they're more overt, but sometimes--like in The Happening--they're more about faith and not necessarily religious faith. So when he steps outside, it's really just a holy moment."
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Director M. Night Shyamalan on the set of his last SF movie, The Happening.
Shyamalan said Airbender is slated for release over the Independence Day weekend of 2010. After that, he said that he will think about his next project. "There are scripts," he said. "I cannot tell you anything about them. But there are three that I'm struggling with in my head right now, trying to decide. They are very different tonalities, so I'm trying to decide what to do. It's hard to guess where you're going to be. I mean a little bit of it is like going on a date for two years. So it's like, do you really want to go skydiving for two years? Do you really want to [go] rock climbing for two years? So you've got to think about it really carefully. And I have no idea how I'm going to feel, post ... Airbender, as I'm about to start the next one. But I do have a couple of ideas."
Shyamalan's follow-up film could be very different. "I don't even know if fantasy is the correct word," he said. "I don't even know what to call it, but it has some really amazing quasi-martial-arts stuff. I mean, probably, when I saw The Matrix, it struck me, because that came out in '99, I think, and I remember when it came out I was, like, 'I've always wanted to make a signature martial-arts movie that's different than anything that's ever come before it.' So I was totally in awe of those guys when they made that movie. And so this has a lot of those interests of mine, because I took martial arts for a long time. And so all those kinds of interests, they're all coming out."
Shyamalan offered this much about possible new films. "One is straight-up scary," he said. "One is more light-head scary, more in the <>Signs vein, that tin-foil helmet thing, which I had a great time doing that, having that light end on it. And then one is gothic. But I'm always in that world when I'm thinking about the original idea."
The DVD of Shyamalan's last film, The Happening, drops on Oct. 7. --Mike Szymanski
