M. Night Shyamalan sat down inside an old indoor horse riding rink on his property, a cavernous space he rarely walks through, and opened a physical notebook he had not read since the day he wrote in it. The notebook was the daily journal he kept while directing Signs, and the date on the page he opened to was September 9th, 2001. Two days before the world changed, he had been quietly wrestling with whether to fire a 13-year-old actor. What followed was one of the most intimate windows into the making of a film that any director has shared, not a polished retrospective but a live excavation, with laughter, long silences, and at least one entry that stopped the room cold.
Shyamalan found the journal on a shelf at his Pennsylvania property, alongside stables he describes as very old and a set of white chairs that he suspects have not moved in 25 years. He settled into the space because of what he called its ‘Andrew Wyeth light,’ and began reading aloud, genuinely discovering each entry as the camera rolled. He suspected Signs might be the first film he ever kept a production journal for, though he noted he would have to check the drawers and shelves he still keeps for Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense to be sure.
The entry nobody in the room expected
The September 9th entry ran long. Shyamalan had fired a 13-year-old actor that Sunday and described his heart going ‘a million times a minute.’ The boy cried. He then noted that he had spoken with Rory Kulkin, who seemed excited to join the production, and that he himself was still anxious about playing Ray, a small role he had written for himself. Reading it back, Shyamalan realized he had completely forgotten that Kulkin was a late addition to the cast. ‘In my mind, he was always there,’ he said quietly.
Then he turned the page. September 11th, 2001 held exactly two sentences. ‘Today the world changed. I can’t stop crying.’ He had not read those words since writing them. He sat with that for a moment before turning ahead. The next entry he read described his first day back on set, still distracted by the events of Tuesday, watching Mel Gibson find the character of Graham in his final two takes of the day, and Cherry Jones delivering what Shyamalan called a ‘breathtaking performance.’ He got home at 4 a.m. He was 31 years old.
Forty-six days of a filmmaker fighting his own limits
The basement sequence proved the hardest stretch. By Day 38, the handwriting had tightened and the entries grew blunter. Thirteen shots required on Day 39. Three completed by lunch. Half an hour left to capture Mel Gibson’s side of the asthma attack scene, the one moment in the script that had made everyone cry during the read-through. Shyamalan wrote at the time, with characteristic candor, that he had reached the stage where he genuinely did not care if it turned out well or not. Reading that line back, he laughed and then went quiet. ‘He’s burnt,’ someone in the room said.
He acknowledged that action sequences had always been his Achilles heel, that his instinct to control rather than to gather the kinetic energy of the moment working against him in those basement days.
The final entry, Day 46, was a different register entirely. He had spent the morning at a parent-teacher conference for his daughter before arriving on set at 1 p.m. The day moved fast. When he called ‘check the gate’ on the last shot involving Joaquin Phoenix and the children, he and Phoenix looked at each other and both teared up. It took Shyamalan ten minutes to collect himself. The very last shot of the entire film was Gibson emerging from a bathroom in his priest outfit. After the final take, the crew walked to a makeshift bar they had built on set, run by a man called Jimbo, who later came to work on the property and later died there. Gibson squeezed Shyamalan’s face and told him he was ‘the rarest kind of filmmaker.’
A notebook that outlasted what it was documenting
Shyamalan mentioned that he had been reading the published diary of the making of Jaws around the same period, watching Steven Spielberg describe being physically sick before walking onto set each day of what became a perfect film. That book was probably the reason he started keeping a journal at all.
By the end of the session inside the old riding rink, he had not resolved anything cleanly. He noted that memory tends to smooth a production into something without wrinkles, and that the journal was a corrective, proof that the thing was always messier and more human than the finished film suggests. ‘Everybody came to the movie and gave a little piece of their lives and their heart,’ he read from his own last entry. A wonderful little EKG, he had called it then.
The notebook sat open on his lap in the horse rink, its pages still visible in the afternoon light filtering through old stable windows.
