M. Night Shyamalan Biography

QUICK FACTS
Activities Director , Screenwriter , Producer more
Real name Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan
Nicknames Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan, Manoj Night Shyamalan
Nationalities USA, India
Born August 6, 1970 (Pondicherry, – India)

BIOGRAPHY
Manoj Nelliyattu “M. Night” Shyamalan is an American/Indian director, born on August 6, 1970, in Mahé, India. Son of Nelliate and Jayalakshmi, a doctor and a gynecologist, his family moved to the United States when the future director was 6 years old, settling in Penn Valley, a small suburb of Philadelphia, where he studied at the Roma Academy grammar school Waldron Mercy, to then enter the Episcopal Academy.

Although his parents wanted him to follow in their footsteps in medicine, little Shyamalan always had in mind devoting himself to art, so his father gave him a super 8 camera, with which he experimented and developed several stories. By the age of 16, Shyamalan had already filmed just over 40 short films. A great admirer of Steven Spielberg’s films, the young man studied at the prestigious Tisch School of Arts at New York University, where, still as a student, he got money from friends and family to film his first film Playing with Anger (1992 ) and , shortly after, Wide Awake. In the mid-90s, he would sell his first scripts professionally. The first of these was the unproduced story, Labor of Love, and, later, the script for the film Stuart Little (1995).

But it would be at the end of the decade when the director would make his most important film and for which he is recognized worldwide: The Sixth Sense (1999), a film that he also wrote, which became a box office success, in addition to getting several nominations. to the Academy Award, including best director and best screenplay. His style and his narrative, with attention to detail and an unexpected ending, became a characteristic of his cinema. After the success of the film, the director would embark on projects such as Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), The Village (2004), The Girl in the Water (2006) and The End of Time (2008).

After two films that failed, Shyamalan has returned to the cinema that characterized him, with The Visit (2015) and Fragmented (2016), in addition to preparing the long-awaited sequel to the latter: Glass (2019).