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Field Of Screams Yelling at God, dealing with tragedy and being scared witless... Mel Gibson and M Night Shyamalan had a fine time making Signs, the year's scariest movie. "An idea for one of my movies has to have meaning, suspense, emotion and humanity," says Signs helmer M Night Shyamalan. "It has to have global significance and a universal message that everyone can relate to, whether they're in India or Philadelphia, and it has to touch on some connection between people. Plus, it should feel like a great rollercoaster ride at the same time." So, just a little ambitious then. In fact, it sounds like Shyamalan's discussing a Steven Spielberg film. Which is appropriate, really, seeing as the US reaction to his latest movie has resulted in him being hailed as "The Next Spielberg" by Newsweek magazine. And not without justification... Shyamalan was putting the finishing touches to his skewed superhero thriller Unbreakable when he first hatched the idea for Signs. Hard to believe, but the real-life phenomenon of crop circles had never been the subject of a major Hollywood flick. If that wasn't enough to hook Shyamalan, the chance to put a resonant, emotionally cathartic spin on the sci-fi genre was. In the wake of the astonishing success of The Sixth Sense and the painful, unexpected criticism of Unbreakable, this idea had everything the writer-director was looking for. Yet crop circles are merely the springboard for this anxiety-churning spooker, in which Pennsylvania farmer and ex-Episcopalian minister Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) wakes up to discover one carved into his cornfield. Initially, he thinks it is a prank but bizarre incidents — the family dogs go doolally, he hears scratchy footsteps on the roof, his baby-monitor starts picking up strange clicking noises — suggest there could be an otherworldly explanation.
"Supernatural movies kind of have this disclaimer in the beginning saying none of this is real — wink, wink — so let's just have some fun with it," says Shyamalan. "But I tried not to do the wink, wink. I tried to make the movie go: 'What if this really happened? What would you feel? What would you say? What would you do?'" "I'd be under the bed, or hiding in the cellar," says Gibson, laughing. "The scariest thing to me is the unknown thing. It's like the expectation of something horrible is always far worse than actually knowing what it is. Knowledge dispels fear and all that stuff...If you found crop circles, or you found ants crawling backwards up the sink, it's puzzling, troubling, unnerving, in a situation that already has its own built-in-tension." However, there's far more to Signs than jumps and jolts. Its intricate, jigsaw-puzzle plot provides an excuse to explore weighty themes like religious belief and the search for meaning, with Gibson's former preacher beginning the film in an existential mess, having ditched his faith after his wife's agonising death. And that's something Gibson could identify with. "Sometimes you chuck a shittie," the Catholic-raised Gibson tells Total Film. "You're like : [shakes fist toward the heavens] 'What's the point!?' Cos nothing's ever going to plan. Ever. But that's the mistake, you know? You have to be prepared to accept most of it's out of your hands. And that's where the humility starts...I'm not very good at humility, so I have a struggle there. I don't think I ever had a crisis in faith, but I walked away from it for a long time, from about 17 to 35, you know a good 18 years of sort of wandering in the wasteland. But you mature and start pondering these questions and I came back." Gibson's name cropped up at the first casting discussion. Shyamalan loved that scene in Lethal Weapon where Gibson's Martin Riggs, tormented by his wife's death, almost puts a bullet in his head, and that suicidal angst was exactly what he was after for Graham Hess. With Disney already forking out $12.5 million for Shyamalan's services ($5 for the Signs screenplay, the rest to direct), you can picture the Mouse House execs' faces blanching when the $25 million-plus-gross actor's name came up. But, when you're the man behind the $660-million-raking Sixth Sense, you have a right to make a few demands. Shyamalan phoned Gibson and said he'd only send him the script if Mel was prepared to say yes or no as soon as he'd read it. Gibson committed himself the very next morning. It wasn't the extraterrestrial storyline that hooked him, though. "Aw, I think if aliens wanted to make contact, they simply would," scoffs Gibson at the odd do-aliens-exist? question. "They'd drop in for a cup of tea. I just get a vibe when it comes to these things, just like I don't think we came from monkeys. I don't think great-granddad was an ape somewhere. I just don't buy it. They tell you that and you hear there're things out there like Martians, but something instinctively tells me it's all just a crock."
Same goes with crop circles. "I'm a sceptic as far as all that goes," says Gibson. "I'm not gonna rule out the possibility that there's some kind of force that's not easily explained at work here, but..." Although they're the laughing-stock of supernatural phenomena, usually pinned on hoaxers, some crop circles have been so mind-boggling in complexity and size, it doesn't seem possible they were created, as Gibson puts it, "by a bunch of hoons in a truck." Which is a pretty accurate description of how crop circles were manufactured for Signs (well, maybe not the "hoons" part), with Shyamalan electing to go au naturel rather than take the CG route. He also opted, out of cinematic consideration, to put them in fields of corn, even though in real life they never occur in such an unmalleable crop, instead typically appearing in wheat or barley. With Signs, 50 acres of the green stuff were planted in Bucks County in late spring and then grown during the following four months, before being crafted into the movie's crop circles: an amalgamation of previously documented designs, giving a sprinkling of religious flavour. The rudimentary tools beloved by hoaxers the world over — a ladder and a giant, makeshift plumb line — weren't enough to get the job done: "When you lay down your plank and walk around in a circle of corn, which is eight foot tall and strong," says Signs production designer Larry Fulton, "it does not want to fall or break or bend beautifully." So, after the ladder, line and pole method had cleared a counter-clockwise spiral corn radius, hired greensmen stomped the jagged stalks into submission using their feet and planks. Shyamalan had three days to get his shots done before the corn turned brown and had to be replaced with new stalks, a painstaking process for the continuity team. But then the whole making of Signs was about attention to detail, and that's where Shyamalan shines, preparing his visuals so meticulously that by the time he comes to shoot, there's little filmed that won't make the final cut. "When we're on set, I know where I'm going to use a shot," he says. "We don't have extra stuff." Which didn't stop him from taking a headstrong approach when it came to putting his cast through their paces. In particular, the director didn't want the Gibson coasting by on superstar charm, and would bray a gameshow buzzer noise whenever he was slipping in one of his "shortcuts", as Gibson calls them. "After the last two movies, I really know what I want from actors," says Shyamalan. "An absolute truth. These are amazing actors, but I tell them it's going to be brutal because I'm going to say: 'That was fake'" "He picked up on my bad habits and tricks that I've learned over the years," says Gibson. "Some people get their noses put out of joint by that, saying: 'What did you hire me for?' But it's been a great experience. It was like he had me under a microscope. He didn't miss anything. He would get right down to: 'Hey, your nostril moved in that scene.' And I'd say: 'So?' and he'd say: 'Well it gave the wrong message.'"
The outcome is an excellent Gibson performance, in a film crammed with exceptional turns, including Rory Culkin as his 10-year-old son Morgan, Abigail Breslin as his youngest child, Bo, and the superb Joaquin Phoenix as his brother Merrill. For that key role, Shyamalan originally cast You Can Count on Me's Mark Ruffalo. But when Ruffalo was forced to drop out to recover from an ear operation, Shyamalan phoned up his other top choice, Phoenix. The 27-year-old Gladiator star was anxious about coming on board so late. For one thing, there was the lack of rehearsal time, for another, there was Gibson's famed relish for practical jokes. And there was a practical joke..."I'd heard that about Mel," says Phoenix, laughing, "but I'm not sure if he was behind this one joke they played on me during the shoot. There's this scene when I'm watching TV in a closet, and when we did the scene it suddenly got very quiet and I slowly realised everyone had left the set and I was still sitting there, locked in this closet. I was going: `Hey! Guys! What's going on?' This went on for about 20 minutes. It could have been Mel, it could have been Night, or maybe just the crew. But I refused to leave in the end. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction." A little light relief went a long way during the shoot, which started on 13 September 2001 — two days after that world-shattering event. While the World Trade Centre smouldered a mere 90 miles away from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Shyamalan had built the Hess house, the cast and crew pondered how to proceed. "The whole 11 September thing drew a pall over the shoot's kick-off," says Gibson, "because we felt like: 'Man, maybe we shouldn't even work.' But we'd gone too far to back out. Many of the actors who came to work with us literally lived eight blocks away from there and they came in shell-shocked, and it dawned on me that my character was also in a perpetual state of shock, he was just a little stunned all the time, so..."
Shyamalan's upbringing — born in India to Hindu parents, raised in suburban Philadelphia — has moulded him into the filmmaker he is: the middle-class sensibility, the outsider's perspective, the love of storytelling. Shyamalan never aspired to be Godard or Kurosawa, he's always worshipped entertainers like Lucas and, of course, Spielberg. For the 32-year-old, there probably is no greater compliment than to be hailed as "The Next Spielberg." Even if not everyone agrees it's doing him any favours. "That's an insult to both men," says Gibson. "There's only one Spielberg, Spielberg is Spielberg. But Night is Shyamalan and there's no other Shyamalan. And they'll be saying in 10 years: 'The Next Shyamalan...'" |