M. Night Shyamalan says his reputation as the master of the plot twist has been misunderstood for 20 years — dating back to his Oscar-nominated movie “The Sixth Sense,” in which Bruce Willis’ character was revealed to be dead the entire time.
“For me, [the twist] is not actually something that’s of interest,” Shyamalan, 49, says in talking about his new Apple+ series, “Servant.” “Mystery or suspense inherently has a moment of awareness. If I told romantic comedies, there would be an emotional moment.
“So by nature of the genre that I’m interested in, it will most likely have a moment where you realize something,” he says. “That comes more with the genre than with me.”
His latest buzzy project is “Servant.” The half-hour horror/suspense series — already renewed for a second season ahead of Thursday’s premiere — follows Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose, “Six Feet Under”) and Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell, “Black Mirror”), a young couple reeling after the death of their baby. Dorothy is in such denial that when Sean uses an outlandish form of therapy — getting a doll and pretending it’s their still-living baby — she doesn’t seem to notice it isn’t real. To keep up the charade, the couple even hires a nanny, Leanne (Nell Tiger Free, “Game of Thrones”) to look after the doll and pretend it’s a human child … and things get strange and creepy really fast.
“Servant” is set in the couple’s Philadelphia brownstone (Shyamalan’s home turf) and is essentially a four-actor performance between this small cast of characters (including Dorothy’s brother, Julian, played by “Harry Potter’s” Rupert Grint).
“I’ve been thinking about doing a play for a long time, and maybe one day I’ll have the guts to, but this is like a play,” says Shyamalan. “We can be in one location and it’s these four actors, mainly. My dream is to do six seasons if we’re lucky enough. It’s similar to my one-location movies like ‘The Visit.’ ‘The Sixth Sense’ wasn’t one location, but it had a kind of formality in a brownstone like this. ‘The Village’ is a village but it’s one location, and ‘Split’ was that basement as a primary place.”
Shymalan says he’s most interested in this repeated theme of one location. “Containment evokes a sense of incomplete with the audience — and incompleteness is a very powerful tool,” he says.
Shymalan’s reputation has undergone a rocky ride following “The Sixth Sense.” His follow-up films such as “Lady in the Water” (2006) and “The Happening” (2008) opened to mixed reviews, though he’s had something of a comeback with recent films “Split” and “The Visit.” Shyamalan says he’s unruffled by the ups and downs in public opinion.
“In general, as you don’t know somebody, you have generalizations,” he says. “You go, ‘Oh, he’s a partier,’ or whatever it is. Then as you get to know the person, it gets more three-dimensionalized. That relationship [with the audience] has been growing over the years, and ‘Servant’ will add another part to that.
“It’s been a really interesting journey. I’m learning as well,” he says. “If ‘Unbreakable’ was my first movie that everybody saw, that would have boxed me in in the same way [as ‘The Sixth Sense’]. So whichever one was first would have been, ‘Hey, that’s you.’
“And you change that definition as you go.”