Movies
Director M. Night Shyamalan And Daughter Talk OLD Movie At Premiere Prior To July 23 Release
M. Night Shyamalan, along with cast and crew, attended the premiere of his film OLD at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on Monday. The film follows a family who begin to rapidly age while on vacation. (Trailer)
His family also joined him on the red carpet. OLD hits theaters this Friday, July 23.
Shyamalan’s daughters have joined him in the business. He has posted on Twitter photos of his girls with him on the sets of his movies.
Telling a story with a family at its core was especially personal for Shyamalan, who recently has been giving much thought to the passage of time in his own life as his parents and his children grow older. For the first time on one of his features, the writer-director worked with his daughter Ishana Shyamalan, who served as second-unit director for Old (she previously wrote and directed episodes of her father’s series Servant).
“It’s funny, the movie is about seeing your children grow up so fast—that’s the feeling that I wanted to capture,” the filmmaker says. “In real life, my children have grown up now, and they’re amazing artists. Leaving home to make a movie was scary for me—having Ishana there made me feel like I never left home. That gave me a lot of courage, just to have her on one side of the beach shooting second unit while I was shooting over here. At the end of the day, we would go and have dinner together. It was just us two sometimes. It kept me centered on the storytelling.”
During the premiere Shyamalan talks about his latest film and “the collective world view” when seeing a movie in a theater.
His daughter, also at the premiere, says this particular film represents a certain time in her father’s life, especially raising his daughters and fatherhood and her understanding of how Shyamalan was seeing the world at certain stages in his life.
Additionally, Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan, a classical pianist turned R&B artist who releases her debut album this year, wrote a song for the film, first performed by Alexa Swinton as Maddox Capa and later by Thomasin McKenzie. “The idea of seeing a little girl that ends up becoming this beautiful singer is our experience with our oldest daughter, Saleka,” M. Night Shyamalan says. “When she was a baby, she used to sing in the car, and we went, ‘Wow, she isn’t going to be a singer’ because she was so bad! Now, she is one of the most beautiful singers in the world! I can’t believe that I actually said those words and that she grew up to be this thing.
“That feeling of [how] your own children astonish you, what they become, I wanted to feel that on screen,” Shyamalan continues. “I’m mimicking a lot of the emotions that happened to me.”
Check out the new featurette for the film where Shyamalan says he wanted to amp up the tension and the sense of mortal danger for the characters while preserving the confounding mystery and chilling dread that throbs beneath the narrative. “I wanted it to feel like you’re watching a two-hour Twilight Zone episode—which I love, the weirdness, trying to understand what’s happening,” Shyamalan says. “With Old, I never wanted the audience to feel safe. I wanted the audience to be figuring out one thing, now another and another and another, like the characters in the movie.”
This summer, visionary filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan unveils a chilling, mysterious new thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.
The film stars an impressive international cast including Golden Globe winner Gael García Bernal (Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle), Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), Rufus Sewell (Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle), Ken Leung (Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending), Abbey Lee (HBO’s Lovecraft Country), Aaron Pierre (Syfy’s Krypton), Alex Wolff (Hereditary), Embeth Davidtz (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Eliza Scanlen (Little Women), Emun Elliott (Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens), Kathleen Chalfant (Showtime’s The Affair) and Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit).
Old is a Blinding Edge Pictures production, directed and produced by M. Night Shyamalan, from his screenplay based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. The film is also produced by Ashwin Rajan (Glass, AppleTV+’s Servant) and Marc Bienstock (Glass, Split). The film’s executive producer is Steven Schneider.
The score is from Trevor Gureckis (The Goldfinch, Servant series). The music supervision is by Susan Jacobs (Cruella, Promising Young Woman)
OLD movie poster, Hollywood-style (Sunset on The Strip)
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