Heart
Of Glass
After almost 20 years, the long-awaited sequel to
Unbreakable is about to be released. Director M
Night Shyamalan talks heroes and villains...
Heart
Of Glass
The journey from
Unbreakable
to Glass
WORDS AbigAil ChAndler
Most sequels have a pretty
straight-forward journey to the big screen.
The first film does well, the studio wants
to capitalise on it again, and a sequel gets
greenlit. Glass, on the other hand, is the
product of an 18-year-old movie and its
secret spin-off, which are owned by different
studios. Even director M Night Shyamalan
wasn’t entirely sure if he would ever do a
sequel to Unbreakable. “This is the first time
I’ve ever done anything based on anything,”
he tells us when he comes to London ahead
of Glass’ release. “I own the sequel rights
to all of [my] movies just so nobody does
anything with them.” But for him, Glass
wasn’t a sequel – it was his chance to
finally complete the story he had wanted to
tell with Unbreakable.
Split, the James McAvoy-starring thriller
that turned out at the last minute to be set in
the same world as Unbreakable, was never
supposed to be a film on its own – Kevin,
the man suffering from Dissociative Identity
Disorder who has a monstrous, super-human
identity known as The Beast, was initially
the villain of Unbreakable (and Samuel L
Jackson’s Elijah Price was “a more benevolent
Xavier type”). But in the process of writing
Unbreakable, Shyamalan realised that he had
over-stuffed the film with plot, and there was
no room for character development.
“I couldn’t tell you what it was like to not
know what your place is in the world, what
it’s like to feel grey for David Dunn, say why
is his marriage not working, why is he not a
good dad, why is he not happy at his work.
I can’t spend that much time because tick
tick tick tick these girls need to be saved
[from The Beast].” So Shyamalan reworked
Unbreakable, with the vague intention of
returning to Kevin’s story one day – which he
did with 2016’s Split.
Now that his trio of characters are fully
realised – Bruce Willis’ David Dunn,
Jackson’s ‘Mr Glass’, and McAvoy’s Kevin
and co, collectively known as The Horde –
Shyamalan can finally explore them properly,
by placing all of them in an insane asylum
with a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
vibe, while a psychologist, played by Sarah
Paulson, attempts to get them to realise that
their ‘superpowers’ are all in their heads.
“The whole premise of the movie is what
if Marvel was real?” he explains. “There’s no
flying, there’s no lasers out of eyes, there’s
nothing like that, but can a mum lift a car off
a child? Is that possible?” Unfortunately, he
wasn’t able to make the “grounded” comic
book movie he wanted to make the first time
round with Unbreakable because “Disney felt
that we couldn’t sell it as a comic book movie
because they said no-one would come to a
comic book movie,” Shyamalan laughs.
The film marketplace has changed since
2000, when Unbreakable was released, in
more ways than one. Back then “we were
just coming off of the era of mainstream
with Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis and
Ron Howard and really kind of uplifting
and reinforcing nuclear family and all these
amazing things that were really resonating
with me and everybody, and Fincher and
Nolan were like the weird dudes over there
that were like ‘what are they making? Those
guys are so weird and dark’, and now they’re
dead centre and it feels like this approach,
the angle on this filmmaking, the way I
saw it, kind of weird and darker, is cool.”
Shyamalan wasn’t able to go quite as weird
or as dark as he wanted to with Unbreakable,
and he’s relished the opportunity to do so
with Split and Glass.
But let’s go back a bit, to Split, and that
mid-credits scene. Getting Bruce Willis on
board was easy enough – all that took was
a phone call – but getting him in required
some cloak and dagger action. “[W]e took a
small crew, they didn’t know what we were
doing, and Bruce comes and the costumer
knew and the hairdresser knew and they
were like ‘what’s happening?’ and he sat
down at the diner and we did it as fast as we82.Glass
Director
M Night ShyamalanCast
Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson,
James McAvoy, Sarah PaulsonRelease date
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2000
Unbreakable is released.
2004
Samuel L Jackson voices
superhero Frozone in
The Incredibles.
2005
Bruce Willis appears in comic
book movie Sin City.
2008
Samuel L Jackson first appears as
Nick Fury in Iron Man.
2010
M Night Shyamalan makes
The Last Airbender as he
moves temporarily into
making family films.
2011
James McAvoy plays a
superpowered person for the first
time in X-Men: First Class.
2011
Sarah Paulson makes her
first appearance in American
Horror Story.
2015
Shyamalan moves back into
making thrillers with The Visit.
2016
Split is released, and shortly after
Shyamalan announces Glass.
2017
Anya Taylor-Joy’s casting in The
New Mutants is announced.
2019
Glass is released.