On a Monday in October, M. Night Shyamalan sat down with a notebook he found at a London airport and began writing the outline for a film he has been carrying in his head for years. The notebook has a Ferrari engine printed on its cover. That detail is not incidental: Shyamalan picked it because the new movie has what he calls a propulsive structure, and the image matched the feeling before a single scene was committed to the page. For anyone who wonders what the very first morning of a major film actually looks like, this is it: a director alone with 45 pages of raw, contradictory notes, trying to trick his own left brain into staying quiet.
The notebook before the screenplay
Shyamalan’s pre-writing process begins with what he describes as a sacred ritual: finding the right physical notebook. The London airport find checked every box. Once the notebook is chosen, anything goes inside it: characters who contradict each other, scenes that cancel out earlier scenes, relationship pairings that get revised and reversed. ‘There are contradictory things in here,’ he explained. ‘This thing happens. No, this thing. He’s dating this, but no, the other person is with that person.’ The notebook is not a draft. It is permission to be a hot mess before structure arrives.
What began on that October 19th morning was the step after the notebook: turning 45 pages of accumulated feeling and instinct into a working outline with what he called a beautiful cadence. That transition, from raw accumulation to shaped structure, is where the friction lives. Shyamalan noted that this particular project is unusually complex from the start, different from how Remain arrived for him fresh and fast. The new film came to him with its structure already embedded in the idea, which he described as rare, and that pre-formed architecture made the first morning harder, not easier, because it required thinking rather than free-flowing.
The comparison he keeps coming back to
The project shares something specific with Split: Shyamalan has held the idea for many years without making it, partly, he admitted, because the specificity of the concept frightened him. When an idea arrives that clearly formed, the stakes of executing it feel higher. October 2024 was the moment he decided the time was right. With Remain in its final stretch of sound work and a few remaining CGI touches, he is already overlapping the ending of one film with the beginning of the next, which he described as a regular part of his process.
He plans to document the entire journey from this first morning through the eventual release, including the stretches where he gets lost.
A director grading his own first day
Shyamalan was candid about what the morning actually produced. ‘I probably lied to myself a lot about the fact that I was writing,’ he said, ‘but there were a couple of moments where I got deep into it.’ His self-assessment landed at a B-minus.
The Ferrari-engine notebook sat on the desk, 45 pages of years-old instincts inside it, the outline just barely begun.
Two years of work, by his own estimate, still ahead.
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