Obviously, a lot of people as they come away from the film, or as it will be depicted in the press, will talk about the environmental aspects. Clearly, the whole plot revolves around that. But I wanted to ask you from a deeper level—that there's this breakdown of the survival instinct. In the real world that we live in, there's also sometimes this breakdown of the survival instinct. We do things that are not in our own survival interests. There's the classic example of someone smoking in an organic food restaurant. There's also our attitudes toward risk, and that comes out in how the government is not approaching global warming, for example.
That's true. You could give mitigating factors for each of those. The survival instinct is somehow ingrained in us. Maybe there's a gut version of that and an intellectual version of that, and the intellectual version of it fails us all the time. So we smoke in an organic food restaurant. It just fails us.
A lot of our instincts have flipped. It's not like we're running out to go hunt deer down for the dinner; we have it readily available. So the body's instinct to store carbs is now turning against us, and so everybody's obese. But you can't turn it off. You can't go, "We're always going to have food, stop triggering that thing!" You just crave and crave. That's why everybody's kids are always, like, "How come we always want to eat the bad things? Why can't we want the vegetables, and not the carbs?" The body's doing that from an old, old habit of trying to store as much fat as possible.
When I was thinking about what could you do to the human species if you were fed up with it, it's a very basic thing of the survival instinct gets turned off.
There's this natural backlash against humanity in the film. Of course, in reality, there's always a type of a backlash. Life is much more precarious than we sometimes give it credit for. Civilization is more precarious. Was that also kicking around in your mind?
Right now, I'm on the highway in Manhattan, and there's a million of us, and it all seems very important, where we're going. There's some trees lining this road that we're on here, the West Side Highway. But really the moment that you feel accurate, with regard to our importance in the world, is when you're out in the ocean and you get a little too far out. You're floating out there and you get a little bit of a pang and then you look around and it's so far out. You thought you were in the same place, but the ocean has pulled you another 50 yards out. And you're out there, and you feel vulnerable.
Those are the tiniest moments in your life that you actually feel the correct relationship with nature, as when people are in a giant storm. At those moments, it is precarious. Those are the moments when we go back to the Native American point of view of nature: "Oh yeah, you remember those silly, simple folk? They're right!"
You mentioned in the press conference you had done research as you were writing the script and talked to people about the plausibility of the whole concept. Can you describe it a bit more?
It was about the plant mechanisms: how they react to threats, that they are proactive, and that they have evolved incredibly complex systems to deal with problems. A cotton field, when it's getting attacked by a parasite on one side, will send out a signal to the other side of the field to tell it in advance that it's getting attacked and should put out the chemical for predators. It's an amazing kind of communication system.
Also, could it be possible that everything is reacting? That would only work if they were all communicating. Is that possible? And it came back that it was the case.
One thing that really struck me also about the film is really the ending. Three months had passed, and it was almost as though life had gone back to normal. Was that because, in your conception of this, people had ignored that signal?
Yes, that there was enough ambiguity to let it go. As long as you give them an out to go back to their lives, they'll take the out. The path of least resistance. So if you tell me it's probably the government or it was a nuclear leak, if that was possible, I'm just going to go to that, and I'm going to keep it at that. To make a change [to our relationship with nature] on that scale that we would have to make if that was happening, I don't know if we would be capable.
See what we're tweeting about
15 Comments
Add Comment"The fact that the placebo effect exists is a fact, but what is it? We have no idea. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUhoh...
Mr. Shyamalan -- for a small fee I would be happy to serve as a 'Basic Science Consultant' for one or more of your film efforts, with the proviso that you at least agree to *listen* to some reasoning before committing the subject to film.
During my first 20 minutes of watching your film 'Signs', I genuinely thought it was a bizarrely-formed black comedy, then I realized the viewer was supposed to believe it to be a serious drama with the protagonist fighting with a lack of belief in his faith and a subsequent supernatural message from the dead about a baseball bat. Basic practical science was thrown out with the bath water, for the most part. But then I learned that, like several contemporary film directors, you require your audience to take a leap-of-faith into the 'Shyamalan Universe' to make your point.
Well, I am sure its great for ticket sales to generate an anything goes environment certainly makes it easier to do or say just about any absurd thing, but it makes for a much more interesting, intriguing and dramatic story line when the story contains some basic reasoning and hence realism.
The synopsis Crop circles are needed as navigational aids for an alien race that has traveled light-years to invade Earth. Just when they have humanity nearly wiped out, a country preachers brother takes one out with a baseball bat&
Perhaps if youd have included a scene that had some yokel with a lawn mower accidently changing the design of a circle so that the aliens end up in Poughkeepsie now THAT would have been hysterical!
Cheers,
Steven
I liked the premise of "The Invasion Of Body Snatchers" a lot better. Whether you believed something like that could happen or not, it still was a gripping story. This movie however seems to rely on too many undefinable concepts to gain much traction with me anyway. "Friday The 13th" and sequels made money, so who knows.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImperialism and the bad conscience about that; this is the key to the understanding of that film. Science? The guy is slippery about that notion. Nature? The hippies always have had that experience. The movies, the movies ... Good invention for us spectators, and good too for film makers and their dollars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImperialism and the bad conscience about that; this is the key to the understanding of that film. Science? The guy is slippery about that notion. Nature? The hippies already have had that experience. The movies, the movies ... Good invention for us spectators, and good too for film makers and their dollars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis movie is pretty silly, without the effectiveness of "12 Monkeys". But, it is a big step up from "The Andromeda Strain".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI felt like sighing reading the interview. Oh, well.
--
Edited by John_Toradze at 06/16/2008 9:04 AM
Yawn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSame old. Man evil. Nature good. Go hug a tree and utopia shall return.
I was surprised Shyamalama could still get a job after "Lady in the Water," but now it makes sense. Make a movie about how evil humanity is towards the environment, and you're bound to get a green light.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this--
Edited by CraigC762 at 06/16/2008 4:54 PM
I actually really liked the movie; however, I can tell that there are going to be people that don't like it. It wasn't what I was expecting, but I appreciated the underlying theme. I believe the film will remind people of the tenacity of nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately for M. Night Shyamalan and others this movie is wishful thinking; mother nature is not that quick and kind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe don't understand the placebo effect completely, but the idea expressed in the interview that we don't understand it at all is wrong. I recommend "Snake Oil Science" by R. Barker Basall for a good discussion of our current understanding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBased upon his comments for this article, I find Mr. Shyamalan surprisingly narrow and naive in his views, statements and perspectives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlmost any science fiction reader of the past 50 years can tell you that the question about the future of humanity on earth is almost solely an issue as to whether evolving technology can completely replace our past dependency upon "the natural world"--- for food and shelter, etc. In most humans' judgement, all non-human species are but inconveniences to be liquidated, intentially or unintentially, if "humankind" can to benefit as the net result. There is absolutely no value or respect to be attributed to non-human species, who basically just "get in the way".
Consequently, the film is almost moronic in its focus upon "nature striking back" against the human foe.
I am sure SciAm can do better than provide a platform to the sort of statement inherent in this interview and film.
MNS does not go far enough,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnano-tech isn't the only think set to wipe out our populations! We are eating mad cows, radiated grains, and new germ epidemics daily that we don't hear about, and hearing LEMP. Oh what are they bringing back from space really? Hope we don't have to Kiss our a_s's good bye yet!
I listened to the podcast and I was really hoping the interviewer would nail M. Knight -- but he remained polite. Shayamalan doesn't really deserve science coverage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA lot of things could be explained if enough money is spent on research.I wonder,has anybody studied the placebo effect on any other species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like Shyamalan's movies: as pure entertainment. There is NO Science in anything he'd done, however.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Shyamalan is one great example of how people can talk about something without actually having any knowledge of it.
To say the placebo effect isn't understood or "answered" - it ridiculous.
Picking apart his movie, "Signs," is quite easy even for informed laymen. What others here evidently forgot is that the actual "defeat" of the aliens was due to their (very improbable) vulnerability to water. How could an advanced race that specialized in taking over inhabited planets have MISSED the fact that the Earth is cloud-covered and has a total landmass of only 30% of it's surface??!! Hilarious!
It would be interesting to see a good story on intuition or precognitive dreams.