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A Complete Unknown is far from the worst thing you'll see this Christmas season, and many people will probably like it simply because of the various performances.
Posted in: Movies, TV, Warner Bros | Tagged: Ishana Night Shyamalan, the watchers
The Watchers: Servant Was Ishana Night Shyamalan's "Training Ground"
The Watchers director, Ishana Night Shyamalan, explained that her work on the AppleTV+ show Servant was "the best training ground."
Article Summary
- Ishana Night Shyamalan debuts with The Watchers after honing skills on Servant.
- Servant's tight TV schedule prepped Ishana for strong visual and structural direction.
- The Shyamalan family juggles film releases, with cross-collaboration in editing rooms.
- The Watchers faces tough competition at June box office against major sequels.
We're getting another book-to-movie adaptation next month with The Watchers, a film that is looking to simultaneously court the fans of thrillers and horror with an intriguing premise. We're also going to see the big screen debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, one of the daughters of M. Night Shyamalan, with this film, but it's not the first time she has directed. Shyamalan recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about how the directing work she did on the show Servant was instrumental to her learning so much about her style and structure of storytelling. The show ran for four seasons on AppleTV, with M. Night acting as an executive producer and showrunner. However, it sounds like M. Night let the directors of the various episodes of the show have considerable freedom to tell the story they wanted. Shyamalan was one of the directors who did one of those episodes. She also had writing duties on episodes, so it was a great way for her to learn everything. She described it as "the best training ground."
"It was the best training ground I could have had," Shyamalan explained. "With those 30-minute episodes, I got to exercise both my structural dialogue skills in writing and then also learned how to do as much visual storytelling and curation of vibe and tone as possible with directing. The TV world moves so fast that you don't really have time to think about it. You are continuing to learn and grow at this very rapid rate. So that was wonderful. It was like doing short film after short film in a very isolated period of time."
The Watchers is set to come out next month, but Shyamalan isn't the only member of her family with a movie coming out this year. M. Night also has a film coming out in August, in which he is collaborating with Shyamalan's sibling, Saleka Shyamalan. Shyamalan explained that the family has been busy, which led to a unique experience with her father in the editing room. "I filmed last summer, and then literally the day I locked my film, he started his prep," she says. "So it's kind of been madness. Now we're editing side by side. We have two editing rooms on either side of the theater, and it's just back and forth — we're in each other's editing rooms and talking about the movies. It's this really cool flow." June is pretty busy, and The Watchers has some serious competition against it in terms of known properties, but this sort of thing could easily become a sleeper hit if the reviews are good. The early footage we have seen so far looks promising, and we say that as someone infamous for not liking horror. It'll be interesting to see if it can find an audience opening opposite Bad Boys 4: Ride or Die and the week before Inside Out 2. Both of those are courting different audiences, but as we have said, people are broke as a joke right now and are rightfully picky about which movies they choose to support in theaters.
The Watchers: Summary, Cast List, Release Date
From producer M. Night Shyamalan comes The Watchers, written for the screen and directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan and based on the novel by A.M. Shine. The film follows Mina, a 28-year-old artist, who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. When Mina finds shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers who are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night. You can't see them, but they see everything.
The Watchers stars Dakota Fanning (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Ocean's Eight), Georgina Campbell (Barbarian, Suspicion), Oliver Finnegan (Creeped Out, Outlander), and Olwen Fouere (The Northman, The Tourist). The film is produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan and Nimitt Mankad. The executive producers are Jo Homewood and Stephen Dembitzer.
New Line Cinema presents The Watchers, set to open in theaters internationally beginning 12 June 2024 and in North America on June 7, 2024; it will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures.
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