The Visit – M. Night Shyamalan and Jason Blum Talk the Film and More!
DC: Your last movies haven’t connected as well, so you changed gears and partnered with Jason, who is a master at the low budget, atmospheric kind of thing… What it a conscious decision to try something completely different?
MNS: I’m always a philosophical guy. Each movie is a new relationship. It really is. You have to start fresh each time. I can’t go, ‘Well, the last date went really well, or didn’t go well, and I was really funny on that last date, so I’m going to tell some great jokes on this date. She is going to love me.’ That’s a terrible way to start a new relationship. Or, ‘My last girlfriend, she was always on my case. I can’t believe you just said that to me.’ That’s a terrible way. You know, each relationship is brand new. But I do feel like the best way, and I tell this to my kids, I tell [everyone] – whenever I meet a human being that is comfortable with themselves, their flaws, their arrogance, their love, their vulnerability, their fragility… they’re just comfortable with themselves. That holds the totality of it all. They are just so amazing to be around. That’s an attractive person to me. They may not be the most beautiful, they may not be the most smart, but when they are comfortable with themselves, that is like a light. That’s true for artists as well. The second you try to conform, you try to be something else, you aspire to be something other than what you are, your light diminishes. This is a Monday morning quarterbacking philosophical thing I’m saying to you: but, to go and make a small movie, which never strikes me as less-than, it’s just love of cinema. And it’s just irreverent and funny and gross and emotional and dark as I am. Let your balance be me. You know? What I’m saying is, you can walk away and you can say, ‘The Visit is 100% me.’ That is such a wonderful feeling, and whatever comes from it, how can the result be wrong? Because it was me. Really me, and so that’s kind of the philosophy. It’s really hard, because I’ll tell you, as I’m finishing writing the next one that hopefully we will do together, there’s this [little voice]: ‘Is this as funny as The Visit? Hmmm, people really laughed in The Visit… I don’t think it’s as funny as The Visit.’
JB: You’ve gotta get out of your head!
MNS: Yeah. See? I’m already doing that. Already not being myself, right? I’m already not being authentic. So obviously there’s a different variation of me in this new movie and it’s a hard thing to not want to just be yourself. So, this is a version of just stripping everything away. Just have fun. It was my funnest movie, ever.
DC: Was it intentional for the comedy aspects to show up this frequently?
MNS: Yeah. I did a TV show this last year, “Wayward Pines,” and everyone’s offering me TV shows, and I want to make “Sex and the City” and nobody’s offering me that. That’s what I really want to make, “Sex and the City.” That’s what I want to make, but everybody’s offering me, like, sci-fi-y, scary kind of things. Me as a person, as a human being, I enjoy this balance. Like, The Visit is the balance of who I am. I’m a mischievous kind of [guy]. And I’ve had a couple times where I wrote comedy – I wrote it in Stuart Little. It was a more family-oriented movie but it was there. In Signs there was some comedy. Occasionally I put some things in there, you know? But I’ve been enjoying making people laugh. I enjoy it and I hope to have that as a wonderful thread in the movies. I think it’s a great foil. Don’t you think?
JB: Yeah, I always think that the best scary movies or genre movies have a release. In Insidious – there’s a lot of funny stuff in Insidious, there’s a lot of funny stuff in Paranormal Activity 3. And I always think it makes the movie scarier and more thrilling because it gives the audience a chance to relax and sit back and laugh, and then the genre aspect sneaks up on you again. So probably my favorite aspect about this movie is that it’s got all the great aspects you hope for in a genre movie, but it’s also really fun.
DC: The pairing of you two is really a creative match made in heaven, and I really hope you get to work together again in the future. For both of you, what was the most surprising aspect of working with the other?
MNS: Wow, this is great. Well, we got over the whole awkwardness because we’ve had sex twice. [laughter from Blum] We got over that. But here’s the thing about Jason: He’s like the perfect foil for me because he’s super-inspirable, all right? If I’m next to a partner – and I know there’s business, I know this is about art and commerce, and that’s always tough for everybody. It’s just so hard. We’re selling art, and that’s just hard. I get it. And you can go over here and say, “I’m the artist!” And you can go way over here and say, “I’m sellin’ out!” It’s hard. And to have a partner that’s advising me on the business side, but all he cares about is being inspired, that makes me feel safe. Like, I know he won’t betray the individuality of the movie. That’s all he cares about. He’s the champion of those movies that other people did not see that would become something. Something that would be universal – no pun intended – in their reach. So Jason – I really looked to him like I’m super-confident about creative stuff, but I’m really not super-confident about human interaction stuff, but he’s very good at it. He’s always like, “It’s going to be all right. Let’s do this. Just put it out there.’ So it’s just been a really wonderful pairing. You can talk about how we first met.
JB: Yes, how we first met – I’ve always been a huge fan of Night’s movies and three or four years ago I started calling him and said, ‘We have this low-budget system. We make low-budget movies…” and he was really polite and listened and played his cards very close to his vest—
MNS: Wait, I’m going to pause there. This is to tell you how insecure I am. So he comes to my house—
JB: Yeah, not only did I phone, I went to Philadelphia—
MNS: Flew to Philadelphia, sat down at my table and was telling me about all the merits of making a small movie, not taking any money. “Okay, we don’t take any money – I got that part.” And he’s sitting there and he had a hole in his sweater. Just a hole in his sweater, and I’m like, “This dude—” And all I was fixated on was the hole, because I’m, like, a director, right? I’m like, “This means something, the hole is the sweater. How can this guy–?” You looked exhausted, too: “He’s exhausted and he can’t buy a new sweater.” So through everything he was saying I was just looking at this hole in his sweater—
JB: I wore the wrong sweater. But I kept going over. And I think one of my favorite things about making low-budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it’s almost impossible not to reverse-engineer the movies. It’s almost impossible – it’s irresponsible not to think about the result, and the financial result. But when you make low-budget movies, you can put that out of your head. I always encourage directors, if you start thinking about, ‘This is what happened on my last four movies, and my other movies before that…’ it’s suffocating. So one of the reasons I really love low-budget movies is that you don’t have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.
Anyway, I pitched our process and I pitched a longer version of what I just said just now to Night a bunch of times with my holey sweater, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while, and then I got a call – this is about a year ago – and he said, ‘Jason, I heard everything that you said, and I did it.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Well I made the movie.’ ‘But – But you didn’t call me, we didn’t talk—’ and he said, “I know. I did it all by myself.” Which to me was terrific. It’s the best version of what I said. I said, ‘That’s so cool.’ He said, ‘That’s why I’m calling you. I want to show it to you. I want you to see the movie.’ So I saw it. I saw a rough cut version and we’ve obviously worked on it, and I think, to answer your question specifically, we’d obviously met a bunch of times but we hadn’t really worked together until we started working on the movie together, and I was intimidated by Night. I’d always heard he has a very specific point of view and I think there’s been a lot of terrific things that have come out of our relationship over the last twelve or thirteen months, but the best one is it’s been so collaborative. Night doesn’t always agree, but every single comment, every time we have a conversation, he’s like, ‘Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.’ And it’s really fun. Some directors we work with are like that and some aren’t, but it’s really fun when someone is as collaborative as that and really wants to hear ideas and our point of view and we’ve had a very healthy dialogue. And as a producer that’s a very satisfying, fun thing, so that’s been the best thing for me.
The Visit was written and directed by Shyamalan and stars Kathryn Hahn, Ed Oxenbould, Erica Lynne Marszalek, Peter McRobbie, Olivia DeJonge, Deanna Dunagan, Benjamin Kanes, Jon Douglas Rainey, Brian Gildea, Shawn Gonzalez, Richard Barlow, Steve Annan, and Michael Mariano.
Related Story: M. Night Shaymalan Talks The Visit and Wayward Pines
Shyamalan produces The Visit through his Blinding Edge Pictures, while Jason Blum produces through his Blumhouse Productions alongside Marc Bienstock (Quarantine 2: Terminal). Steven Schneider (Insidious) and Ashwin Rajan (Devil) executive produce the thriller.
Look for it in theaters on September 11, 2015. For more info follow @TheVisitMovie on Twitter, and visit stayinyourroom.com.
Synopsis:
Writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable) and producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious series) welcome you to Universal Pictures’ The Visit. Shyamalan returns to his roots with the terrifying story of a brother and sister who are sent to their grandparents’ remote Pennsylvania farm for a weeklong trip. Once the children discover that the elderly couple is involved in something deeply disturbing, they see their chances of getting back home are growing smaller every day.
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