The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale and Lost

In 1999, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan exploded onto the cinema scene with his supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense, which garnered major acclaim and raked in massive box office numbers around the globe. Since then, his phenomenal commercial and critical success has continued as his films—including Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village—have grossed over $1.5 billion and reinvented the thriller genre. But throughout his rise to prominence, Shyamalan has remained separate from the Hollywood system, living and working solely in his hometown area of Philadelphia, and keeping his ideas, filmmaking techniques, and business practices tightly-kept secrets.

In The Man Who Heard Voices, journalist Michael Bamberger takes readers inside Shyamalan's world for the first time, getting total access to the man who has been called "the modern-day Hitchcock" as he prepares, creates, and test-screens his next film, Lady in the Water, which stars Paul Giamatti (star of Sideways) as a building superintendent and Bryce Howard (star of The Village) as a mysterious sea nymph. Bamberger's intimate perspective and insightful narrative prose will bring to life Shyamalan's creative process—from his multiple drafts and revisions of the screenplay to his on-location work with his cinematographer and crew and his relationships with the actors under his direction. The book also follows the high-stakes business decisions behind the scenes, including his agonizing decision to move from Disney to Warner Bros. for this film, his involvement in the studio's massive marketing campaign, and the evaluation of the crucial initial test-screening of the film.