Posted in: Movies, Universal | Tagged: dave baustista, Knock At The Cabin, m. night shyamalan, Universal Pictures

Knock at the Cabin: M. Night Shyamalan – Dave Bautista Is "Infectious"

Published Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:02:10 -0600

Everyone loves Dave Bautista these days. The wrestler-turned-actor is making waves in many different movies and is taking on leading man roles with Knock at the Cabin next month. So far, everyone who has worked with Bautista has had nothing but good things to say about him. M. Night Shyamalan is the latest director to join the Bautista fan club. GQ did a massive write-up for the actor and spoke to Shyamalan about working with him. Shyamalan compared working with Bautista to working with Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.

"It felt more like working with Haley [Joel Osment] in Sixth Sense than anything else," M. Night Shyalaman tells me of directing Bautista in Knock at the Cabin. "When Haley came on set, the set would become reverential—even though he was 10, he was approaching it with an importance; all of his cells were going toward the emotion of his character. Dave conveyed that same thing. All the other actors fed off his purity of intention. It was infectious in the best way."

Knock at the Cabin: M. Night Shyamalan - Dave Bautista Is "Infectious" — From left: Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in KNOCK AT THE CABIN, directed and co-written by M. Night Shyamalan. © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Bautista explained that Knock at the Cabin is the most he has spoken in a film before and how the film's production was so much different from anything that he had done before.

"It's by far the most I've ever spoken in a film," he says. "Just huge pages of monologues. We were shooting on film, which is very expensive. And we were shooting with one camera, so you don't have the luxury of edits. It's your only opportunity—you need a perfect take. It's a lot of pressure. I want to remember my dialogue, but not at the expense of losing the emotion of the scene."

As for Shyamalan, he believes that Bautista can do anything and absolutely kills it with Knock at the Cabin, saying, "it's a revelatory thing. This anomaly of a person that looks like that and can perform at that level." Sounds like he really impressed Shyamalan, who has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. One can imagine he's not an easy man to impress, and he wouldn't be gushing like this if there wasn't a good reason. If you weren't already interested in this film, maybe the promise of the breakout performance for Bautista could be the thing to get you into the theater.

Knock at the Cabin: Summary, Cast, Release Date

While vacationing at a remote cabin, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand that the family make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. With limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.

From visionary filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, Knock at the Cabin stars Dave Bautista (Dune, Guardians of the Galaxy franchise), Tony award and Emmy nominee Jonathan Groff (Hamilton, Mindhunter), Ben Aldridge (Pennyworth, Fleabag), BAFTA nominee Nikki Amuka-Bird (Persuasion, Old), newcomer Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn (Little Women, Landline) and Rupert Grint (Servant, Harry Potter franchise).

Universal Pictures presents a Blinding Edge Pictures production, in association with FilmNation Features and Wishmore Entertainment, an M. Night Shyamalan film. The screenplay is by M. Night Shyamalan and Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman, based on the national bestseller The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. The film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan and produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Marc Bienstock (Split, Glass), and Ashwin Rajan (Servant, Glass). The executive producers are Steven Schneider, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, and Ashley Fox. Knock at the Cabin will be released on February 3, 2023.