When a series of unusual events begins to draw the attention of the world’s population, high school teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and their family go on the run. Their attempt to avoid becoming victims of these bizarre occurrences develops into a desperate fight for survival as an apocalyptic crisis threatens humanity.

BD: So this is weird, they just told me about this interview this morning –

Night: Oh really?

BD: - and its weird because I just watched Unbreakable last night, I had picked up the Blu-Ray over the weekend.

Night: Oh, cool!

BD: And I never noticed before, or it just didn’t dawn on me: that’s your only scope (2.35:1) movie. Was that just a one time sort of experiment for you?

Night: No, well it’s really a conversation with the cinematographers, what they are comfortable with. And also what the subject is. You know, 2.35 is a little bit like looking at a movie through a glass, in my opinion. It makes it more of a painting that you’re watching. And so you just have to be more aware of the games and the drawbacks. I think it’s the most beautiful format, but it’s a tricky one, because it’s one you don’t necessarily get intimate with. I think like, Silence of the Lambs was like a 1.66 ratio, they went for a REALLY claustrophobic feeling on that. It’s difficult to judge, I’d really love to have both, the beauty and the intimacy, and you really have to make a choice.

BD: So is The Happening the very first movie to be advertised around its rating?

Night: (laughs)

BD: I see these ads and they’re like “THE FIRST R RATED FILM FROM M NIGHT SHYAMALAN!”

Night: I don’t know, that’s a good question. Clearly we didn’t know they were going to do that, but I guess it’s just an angle, you know, letting people know the type of movie you’re going to see from me, by using the rating as an expression of tonality.

BD: Now they said the R rating is for like, disturbing visuals; can you explain what those are? Are we going to get the Night version of hardcore gore? Or is it simply too intense?

Night: Well you can’t really get any sex in my movies, or my parents would kill me (laughs). They’d be like (mocks his mother’s voice) “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” It would be very disturbing for them. It’s really just... you know, I’ve gotten the R before, for Village and Sixth Sense...

BD: Oh really?

Night: Yeah, we just had to make minor trims, mostly just sound effects, and we’d get the PG-13. But with Happening I didn’t even ASK what would be involved with bringing it to PG-13, because I figured we were WAY over the line of R. It’s mainly for how shocking the images are that you see.

BD: Your films always deal with supernatural themes, but they have all been completely different in the actual story and how you tell it. But with Happening, I can see some similarities to Signs, at least based on the trailer (note: FOX had us do the interview before they let us see the movie). Is that true, or just in the way that they are advertising it?

Night: You won’t feel that way when you’re watching the movie, it’s definitely its own thing and structured completely different. Its closest cousin would be Signs for sure, because they are both end of the world movies, they are in that vein. But that’s about as close as they get; you’ll see that it has its own silhouette.

BD: Can we talk about the score a bit? Your films have all had terrific scores.

Night: Yeah and he did such an amazing job with this one.

BD: It’s James Newtown Howard again, right?

Night: Yeah, it’s really beautiful, and he did an exceptional job. He scores my movies to my screenplays, which is very unusual. So he comes over my house and we work through everything. And it’s really just the two of us sitting there talking, and I sort of perform the movie for him, and at some point he’ll just be like “OK, I get it” (the movie), and he flies home, and then sometime later, this magical moment comes where I get a CD. And it’s a big moment, I get everyone out of the room, you know “don’t call me, everyone out, don’t bug me!” Then I put a chair in front of the speakers and sit down and listen, and I’m like “Wow”. And it’s usually like a suite of music that eventually makes up all the score.

BD: The Village score in particular is like permanently ingrained in my head, when I went to the movie they were playing the score in the theater, but only the main theme. And we had gotten there really early, so we just listened to that one 3 minute cue over and over for like a half hour or so, and I was like “I want to hear the whole thing!”

Night: (laughs)

BD: But my wife didn’t mind, she plays the violin, she wanted to learn the theme.

Night: That violinist was unbelievable, Hilary Hahn. And in this movie we have a pretty strong cellist, and the cello actually emerges as one of the voices of the movie.

BD: Let’s talk about the actors a bit. Usually you have some returning faces in your films, but in The Happening it looks like every actor is working with you for the first time.

Night: That’s a good point, yeah. Actually no, there’s one actor, Frank Collison, he was in The Village. But yeah, Betty Buckley, Mark (Wahlberg), everybody... it’s true!

BD: I’m excited to see Betty Buckley again....

Night: Oh my God, wait till you see her, she rocks in it. When I saw her I said “I had a crush on you in Carrie.”

BD: How big is her role?

Night: It’s pretty big. Really, the last third of the movie is about her, it’s like a mini-movie about her.

BD: It’s a mini-movie anyway! 90 minutes is really short for one of your films, was that the intent all along or did you get into editing and realize there was stuff you didn’t need?

Night: No no it was literally two years ago, at a press conference someone asked what I was doing next and I said “A 90 minute paranoia movie!” And so it was, it literally ended up being 90 minutes! I was trying to get it down to 88, 85 minutes, but I couldn’t pull it off. I told everybody “We are making a 90 minute movie, it’s going to be like a freight train!” It’s supposed to be one experience; the thing about the movie is its simplicity, there’s no acrobatics, it’s just one classic type of approach; one movement, one song. Simple, as quick as possible. I was thinking about other paranoia movies that I wanted to emulate, like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s 81 minutes. So to sustain a single note for that long without the need to go onto other notes, again, that lack of acrobatics. Some of my movies have a lot of those acrobatics, but I wanted this movie to be a different song.

BD: Back to the actors for a second, how were they all to work with, being that it was essentially your first time with all of them?

Night: You know, it makes me nervous, because it was actually the easiest movie I ever had to shoot. Usually the movie is stressful, not necessarily because of the actors, but just in so many ways. It was a very fun shoot, we had a very tight schedule and we just knocked it out. And they all had the same kind of energy about them, which I loved. When we were all hanging out, Mark, Zooey, John Lequizamo, all laughing and joking, and they just came to the table with their bright colored acting, and as long as you have that consistency among the actors, it works out pretty great.

BD: I wish I could ask more about the movie but since we haven’t seen it-

Night: (laughs) Well you can call me after!

BD: Deal. But with you it’s even harder, because unlike every other movie, you can’t go online and find out every single thing about an M Night Shyamalan movie...

Night: (laughs).

BD: So can I ask about what you have planned next? You’re not one of those guys who is perpetually announcing projects that never happen; when you say you’re doing something you do it.

Night: No, I have no movies in development. I’m doing another movie right now for Paramount called Last Airbender. We start heavy pre-production in August but that’s not coming out until July 4, 2010.

BD: And I assume that one won’t be rated R.

Night: (laughs) No, PG. One end of the spectrum to the other.

BD: Were you comfortable with the freedom of an R rated film, not having to worry about holding back?

Night: It was disturbingly easy, I don’t know what that says about me. But my calling is definitely on the gruesome side. Gruesome comes pretty easy!

BD: So you’ll do it again someday?

Night: You know it’s fun to kind of open your palette up a little bit, so then your body of work can go from writing Stuart Little to The Happening, that’s really cool, a really cool spectrum, and that allows me to let the subjects, whenever an idea pops in my head, to find its own identity without too much of an agenda, and hopefully if The Happening does well, I won’t have to make decisions based on ratings of any kind.

BD: Funny you mentioned it, my editor told me to ask about the horror stuff, the gore and what not, and I told him I was only going to talk to you about Stuart Little.

Night: (laughs)

BD: On your introduction to the Happening clip you mentioned that when you got the idea for the film, you threw out what you were working on and began working on the Happening instead, is that idea, whatever it was, forever buried?

Night: No, it’s not dead forever. I have on my desk, 3 or 4 notebooks full of ideas. Each notebook is its own idea, and they are all the thoughts about that idea. And I am unwilling to let go of them. Maybe at some point they will come to gestation, but they’re still in kind of an early phase right now.

BD: And would any of those ideas happen to be Unbreakable 2? Every time I watch it I still mourn the lack of a followup...

Night: I know! You know, I regret not making Unbreakable 2 earlier. It’s definitely on my mind.

BD: Bruce is still up for the action stuff...

Night: I know, well look at Harrison!

BD: And Bruce is younger! He’s got like ten years on him.

Night: (laughs)

BD: So one final thing, going back to something you said earlier about The Village, that it was a sound effect that got it the R rating, can you tell us what that sound was?

Night: Yeah it was the knife going into Joaquin, when he pulls the knife out of his stomach. And then subsequently when the camera pans away there was a continued stabbing sound. So it was toning down the sound of it pulling out, and just taking the sound out entirely when it’s panning away, so your emotional memory wouldn’t think you actually SAW them. So we did that, and the MPAA was like “Oh, OK, you trimmed the three stabbings, you don’t see them anymore!” And I was like “You NEVER saw the three stabbings, you just thought you did.” It’s the psychology of what you saw.

BD: Actually I still think the sound in Unbreakable, when Sam falls down the stairs, is the most sickening sound effect in movie history.

Night: Oh, yeah!

BD: Well I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us, we appreciate it. See you on the next one.

Night: Thanks, thanks for talking to me.