Source: Associated Press
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, July 29, 2002: M. Night Shyamalan says he wanted to include more emotion in his new film than there was in his hit “The Sixth Sense” and its less successful followup, “Unbreakable.” The 31-year-old director says he moved away from the detached tone of those movies with “Signs.” “What I realized with ‘Unbreakable’ is that it doesn’t matter if you have technical prowess if you don’t connect with the people in the theater,” Shyamalan told the Daily News of Los Angeles. “So I decided to just let myself be myself on this one and show the two things about me that I don’t think I’ve let audiences see — joy and emotion.” “Signs,” which opens this week, stars Mel Gibson as a former minister who has renounced God and finds himself facing possible evidence of a coming space invasion. Shyamalan says the movie is about spirituality — but not necessarily about religion. “Religion is some group saying their particular version of God is the right version, and that’s hard for me to accept,” he said. “The world has become such a smaller place. It makes it hard for me to believe that the guy in Nepal and the little boy in Africa and the old man in Maine, all three of them with different versions of God, and yet maybe none of them are right.” “I just can’t believe that. There has to be some unifying thing.”