044 | w w w. s c i fi n ow.co.u k
Shyamalan tells us that Sarah Paulson was his first and only choice.could and didn’t talk to the crew... [we]
took him out before anyone even knew he
was there. He literally was there for like an
hour and a half, two hours, and we took him
out. And I didn’t edit it with that [scene] in
there.” He didn’t even tell Universal until he
screened it for them for the first time.
“[L]ights go down, they watch Split, and
the end of it happens and they lose their
minds! They’re like ‘we made a sequel to
ANOTHER STUDIO’S MOVIE?’” Amazingly,
though, it all worked out. Shyamalan had
already got permission from Disney to use
his Unbreakable characters, and Universal
agreed to it too. He puts it down to “just a
confluence of such good people... I dare you
to give me another explanation other than
they were just nice people when I asked
‘could I borrow your character for no reason
and put it at the end of a movie?’ and they
said ‘yeah’, rather than getting all legal
They were just ‘go ahead and do it’. And
they said ‘if it all works out maybe we’ll do
something’. That’s just a supportive thing to
an artist that they like, that is it.”
Universal was similarly accommodating,
and the two are co-distributing Glass. “I
think they just wanted to see the movie
made. I’m a super lucky dude. When I was
writing Glass I wasn’t sure it was going to
work, I was scared when I was writing it
because this was the one time I was writing
something where I need the actors to say
yes and I need the studio to say yes, because
that’s never usually the case. I can go make
it somehow, right? I can get someone to be
in it and I can get someone else to pay for it
or distribute it or whatever I’m looking for,
but in this case these two had to say yes and
these actors had to say yes. So very lucky.”
In the case of getting Willis, Jackson and
McAvoy back on board, luck barely came
into it – they were all keen to return. Willis
has been gently pestering Shyamalan for an
Unbreakable sequel for years, and Jackson
had been far more up-front about it. “Our
cars would pass on a movie lot and he’d
roll down his window and be like ‘when
are we making that sequel, motherfucker?’”
Shyamalan says, delivering a pitch-perfect
Jackson impersonation. “That happened
twice. And literally at a light in Los Angeles,
same thing happened again.”
As for bringing new cast on board,
Shyamalan had Sarah Paulson in mind for Dr
Ellie Staple from the very start. “I thought,
well, who could really challenge these three
guys, both as characters but as actors, and
really just get in there and rip it up with
them?” Shyamalan says. “I wanted a theatre
trained actress who was really buoyant and
there was definitely only one person for me.”He says the scenes between her and
McAvoy were so electric that “we had a
hard time shooting because everyone was
clapping constantly... I think [McAvoy] plays
20 personalities in the movie, it’s insane.
And so Sarah’s there firing away and these
two guys are going at it like the best actors in
the world, which is what they are.”
Once the studios and main cast were on
board, Shyamalan was keen to keep the
whole thing as low-key as possible in order
to recapture the fire and passion you bring
to the table as a new director. “The instinct
was to take all the money away, make it
super limited, then work with brand new
people every time. So on these movies that
I’ve been doing recently it’s the editor’s first
movie, the cinematographer’s second movie,
the composer’s first movie... For them, they
haven’t learned any bad habits, everything is
terrifying, everything is hopeful, they want
to do things differently, I don’t wanna do
the same old bullshit.”
Shyamalan even stumped up the cash
himself in order to make Glass. “[L]iterally
there’s a mortgage on my house right now for
this movie. That’s a fact. So you can imagine
what my emotions are on set,” he chuckles.
His passion on the film was matched by
everyone else on set. “The cinematographer
came a month early unpaid just to sit