“I believe that the stories that have impacted me the most have happened in the movie theater,” says writer-director M. Night Shyamalan. “Trap is intended for the movie theater experience. My job within that experience is to provoke the audience and give them something original, something they’ve never seen before.”
In Trap a father and teen daughter attend a pop concert, where they realize they’re at the center of a dark and sinister event.
In conversation with director / writer / producer M. Night Shyamalan
Genesis…
M. Night Shyamalan: “Trap” was created by me and my daughter Saleka from our conversations together about music and movies. It basically started us thinking about doing a music movie together that would also function as a thriller. I started to wonder, “Could we do a thriller about music?” I thought that Saleka could write an album and we could experience that music the way you would if you were at a concert, and then intertwine that with a thriller. Could those two things coexist? I started noodling on it, and I pitched Saleka—she was really into it. We started building on that… so we follow a father and daughter to the concert, and we keep mixing together the concert and the dark things happening there. And that’s how “Trap” was developed.
As is customary on the films of M. Night Shyamalan, prior to cameras rolling, the full cast is assembled for a table read of the script—and TRAP began the same way. It’s at this point, per producer Marc Bienstock, that “the third D is brought into the 2D of the script—the cast are breathing life into the characters that have only existed on the page.”
Josh Hartnett…
M. Night Shyamalan: I have come to think of the way I make movies as a reinvention of myself, reinvention of tone, reinvention of a genre every single time. That’s what gets me excited. To do that, I look to do things differently. I offer the opportunity to make smaller, provocative movies, and maybe we can connect with people from around the world. I look for someone who’s at the right place in their life and is willing to take a real risk. I think the result of that is then an audience gets to see something rare and extraordinary, and that’s another reason to come to the movies. I think Josh Hartnett exactly fits this description—he lives in England with his family. He’s an incredibly thoughtful and philosophical man. When I met him, he looked me in the eye, and I just knew he was ready to do anything—there was an energy, an electricity coming off of him. To play Cooper, this particular role, I needed someone that was all in and was ready to take a risk. I think for audiences, one of the great reasons to come to this movie is seeing the amazing performance that Josh gives.
Josh Hartnett: I first read the script just before meeting with Night and had an understanding of what his approach would be beforehand. I knew that the script was a type of blueprint for the storyboards that he was going to draw, but I needed to speak to him to get a sense of the film’s tone and flavor. There is a lot in the script that feels larger-than-life, wild and unusual, and some of it is very dark. It feels heightened, but I knew that Night was going to be able to pull everything together and make it something surprising and of a whole. But I really wanted to hear his perspective. My whole process was trying to find the buoyancy and the lightness within that, and to understand what this character could be going through. But really, at its heart, I think that this film is a father/daughter love story, how they care about each other. They’re going to see his daughter’s favorite singer in concert. And then, it grows into something that is much more nefarious and wild.
The character of Cooper…
M. Night Shyamalan: I think we’re fascinated by complex, very dark characters. I am as well. There are dark individuals that live amongst us. It’s real. In a way, I think it’s why people love dinosaurs so much. Because they existed—real-life monsters that lived in the past. Well, there are real-life monsters in the present. Writing dark characters—and playing dark characters—is fascinating, because it is still on the continuum of the human experience. For me, it’s finding that bit of humanity in a character that does extremely dark things. It’s challenging and wonderful, and locating that humanity is what resonates with audiences. Finding that human understanding about why somebody does something very dark, it makes us have empathy for each other… because if we can see each other as versions of ourselves, that recognition is a very moving thing. It’s also a bit of wish fulfillment, at least on my part—that even in the darkest person, is there a way to get to their heart?
The movie’s built around this character, and the concept of this character is something that Night was really interested in exploring—he doesn’t do many films that are single perspective films, and this is pretty much just from the perspective of Cooper. In order to do that, we had to make him as fascinating, as layered, as possible. It’s a very tricky but fun character to play. If it leans one way or another, you could lose the goodwill of the audience or you could lose the sense of danger. It really needs to be on that fine line, a high wire act. And I think that’s why Night wanted to take it on. That’s definitely what appealed to me. There are so many challenges. It’s been a lot of fun to find that balance with Night, because I think we both have a similar sensibility about these characters and the desire to play something that is so dangerous. You know, “Let’s see if we can pull it off!” Josh Hartnett:
Lady Raven sings…
M. Night Shyamalan: Although we set out to create Lady Raven, a fictional pop star, it started with letting Saleka write, produce and record an album. It’s such an amazing thing to watch an artist do something that’s inspired. I think of her as an artist who’s fierce and uncorrupted. I look at my daughters and think that as they’re learning their craft and battling their demons, the one thing they’re not compromising is authenticity. They’re teaching me that again. I think that as soon as you have success, you unconsciously want to be accepted. You might lose sight of yourself. You might tell yourself things that aren’t true. So, they are teaching me this lesson of authenticity again. And so, Lady Raven, what I wanted her to be, I knew it was going to be because Saleka is pure in her artistry. I said, “Saleka, this is the situation. This is who I think this fictional character it. She feels this way to her audience. This is who loves her, and why. This is her latest album. Can you write with this angle on this character?” We would continue these discussions, and then one song after another, Saleka would write them. Every time she said, “I have another song,” it would be like Christmas and I couldn’t wait to hear it. And every time, I was in awe. When you’re with an artist—whether it’s Josh or Saleka—who are at that place, that perfect pitch place where they can hear their own voices, just get a little bit out of the way as a director and creator. I hope the audiences will feel that authenticity and magic from the music.
Saleka: When I first read the script, well, it was shocking, because it was the first time I was reading a script and thinking of myself as a character—I usually read his scripts and am in awe of his work and imagining what the film is going to be like. There was a personal element that was different, but it was just so enthralling, even more than I thought it was going to be. I couldn’t stop turning the pages and it was very exciting—I was kept guessing the whole time.
My dad’s passion for filmmaking is one of the purest things that I’ve ever seen anyone have a passion for—it’s something he’s had since he was a little kid. It’s the thing that he loves. He thinks about it all the time, morning to night. When we were kids, he used to make up scary stories and build all these characters, and tell them to us over months, with every night being a different chapter. That’s who he is. He’s a storyteller. What’s interesting to me is that he tells such dark stories, because I think he is such a positive person. You see that positivity in the context of these dark situations, and you know that he thinks the universe is good. It’s a key throughline in a lot of his movies. And I think this is another example of that. It’s beautiful to watch. That makes me feel safe on set, and it makes a lot of people feel happy and joyous to be here. It’s like we’re living the dream. He feels that and so we remember that every day.
Ariel Donoghue…
M. Night Shyamalan: The experience of finding actors like Ari has happened so many times in my life. I’m extremely lucky. It’s like a lightning bolt. She is just amazing. I can’t tell you how much I think of her. She’s just a sweet, sweet human being, on top of being an incredibly, intuitively gifted actor. Most child actors that I work with, I am not working with craft that much. It’s more working with this kind of pure, raw energy. I try to get them to empathize with the character and sort of guide them: “This is what happened. What do you think that means?” When I see it in their eyes, we roll cameras. And Ari has craft on top of this thing that we’re talking about. I think she can do anything. She’s effervescent and the camera loves her. I’m so lucky that these wonderful young performers keep showing up for me.
Shooting film…
M. Night Shyamalan: I don’t know if I can fully articulate why I love film so much over digital. I’ll start with I love limitations. Working with them, I feel, is how we create the best. Film, because it involves chemicals, it’s a real, organic thing that happens. It’s alive, in a way. It captures life and experiences in a way that digital doesn’t do. Film feels like a representation of life. And ironically, digital has much more detail than film. So, maybe in there is the answer: we only need this much to represent what something looks like, what something feels like, and we do the rest. We fill it in with our experiential knowledge. The computer says that this is what the color red looks like, and this is what hair feels like. But in its limitation, film creates this relationship with the audience that I think makes it alive. Too much information makes us confused and we shut down. Film is just the right amount of storytelling information in the frame. What’s in the frame? The characters, the lighting, everything. So, it’s always about keeping it a bit incomplete. It could be as simple as that. It could also be that all of my favorite films from my childhood were done on film, and I feel those that way.
It’s amazing to feel a film breathing and moving; because it’s slightly out of focus, it’s alive and undulating. I think it creates a very distinct experience.
Filming the concert…
M. Night Shyamalan: I’m not a big CGI guy, so when I decided to do the concert, I kept telling everybody, “We’re going to put on and shoot a real concert, and we’re not going to cheat.” And by cheating, I’m a very point-of-view driven filmmaker. Our main characters are watching this concert from not great seats. So, that’s how they’re watching the concert, and that’s where we’re going to stay. But how can we get to see what’s on screen the way everybody in bad seats gets to see them, which is there on the monitors? This was the challenge—to keep my integrity, I had to find the way to do this. I ended up directing the live show of what you’re seeing on the screens on each take. So, the actors are acting and I’m on a headset with everyone, “Go to the zoom cut there,” and we did it like a real live concert. What’s onscreen at the moment that Cooper and Riley are speaking is what was happening—it makes it real, because it is real. It’s not CGI; it wasn’t thought of later. We took it seriously early on in pre-production. The songs, the costumes, the choreography, the show lighting—it was a Herculean effort to put on a concert and nail it right as we’re shooting a thriller. A scene going on between Josh and Ari, while there’s a whole group of people dancing in a musical performance with light changes… It’s something that I’ve never had the opportunity to do. And I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself that much to do something that’s just a part of the storytelling. It was incredibly challenging, but incredibly rewarding. It was a beautiful thing to create this whole art form and then put that at the center of this art form.
To create the sold-out concert of Lady Raven (Saleka) in TRAP, visual effects supervisor Will Towle began with a LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scan to create a 3D version of the venue itself. Performers were then filmed against a green screen, and 2D sprites were created of concertgoers engaging in a variety of activities (clapping, cheering, silently appreciating, etc.). 3D models were also created, which allowed filmmakers to overcome the limitations inherent in 2D renders (e.g., if shooting from a different angle, the lighting cannot be modulated as it’s already pre-baked into the sprites). Motion capture was done to provide the 3D CG models a range of movements and reactions. The simple technique of tiling was also used. By employing all of these techniques, 300 concertgoers could be multiplied to fill the 15,000-seat house where Cooper (Hartnett) takes Riley (Donoghue) to see Lady Raven. In the end, there were more than 250 visual effects shots (mostly involving the crowds of Lady Raven fans) in TRAP.
Working with cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom…
M. Night Shyamalan: Sayo, first of all, as a human being, is almost like meeting the Buddha. He’s so joyful, peaceful and spiritual. He lives in Thailand in a fishing village. This is who he is, you know? He loves film and he just loves to make films, and he makes them in Asia and he makes them in Europe. I really loved “Call Me by Your Name.” I thought it was very daring. They shot it with one lens and they did all these incredible things, and I like thinking like that. He’s also a naturalist, which I really like as well. I’d like to think of myself as someone who really finds wonder in the universe. And he does, too. He is just so easy to work with. He made the process of moviemaking on this project feel easy. We both lean towards film as well. You need a cinematographer who lives in what it’s like to expose light in this way and how much to push and pull film. And how much grain we want and what the depth of field is… and to intuitively understand all of that. And he does. I think he brought a real textural quality to this thriller that you feel, and it accumulates during the watching of the movie. And in the end, you’re left with kind of this gothic Americana.
Working with production designer Debbie DeVilla…
M. Night Shyamalan: I produced a film in the South where Debbie was the production designer. Her work was amazing. Beautiful. I could tell she was thinking of things in a deep way that went beyond what you see. The set was a house under construction that had been abandoned—the couple it was meant for were no longer together. I marveled at what walls were up, which weren’t; where ivy had grown and where it hadn’t. It was so beautiful. And talking to her, I found her to be delicate in that incredible way—someone who had gone through life and was still gentle, vulnerable and delicate. That makes you a superhero to me. I could tell she would feel this movie in her heart and in her soul. And the things that she brought to me had this realism to them. And she created a full, real concert that you would buy tickets to. To accomplish that with her, with all of my film artists, is one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.
For the look of TRAP, M. Night Shyamalan found inspiration in the palette and paintings of turn-of-the-century Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Per costume designer Caroline Duncan, for her and production designer Debbie DeVilla, “We let that push and guide us into the world that we were visually creating.”
One of TRAP’s themes—compartmentalization—found expression in the stage design of Lady Raven (Saleka). Art director Stephen Depko says, “Cell phones are one expression of this—that’s the face we put forward to the world and it’s another part of us. Instead of using this black rectangle as a representation of that, we decided to go in another direction of something more like an iconic tube TV shape.” These boxy shapes with rounded corners sometimes punctuate the stage picture of the pop star and seem to surround her dancers.
Working with editor Noëmi Preiswerk…
M. Night Shyamalan: Noëmi started on “Servant” and then became the editor on “Knock at the Cabin.” She has this thing that I look for, which is a combination of extreme intellect and extreme gut and instinct. I would also add something that Sayo says—a singular perspective and unique accent on the way she thinks about things. She doesn’t have a generalized way of thinking about things. She has—as do all of the people I use—the ability to do something that, when I see it, I always say, “Well, I could never do that.” For me, that’s when a movie is at its best: when I say, “I could never do what that person just did.” She brings this very specific way of thinking. And she’s a beast—she just works. I like to believe that I work harder than anybody, but I can’t keep up with her. She just keeps on driving and she’s super-fast. And so, I think we’re really kind of a great team.
Working with costume designer Caroline Duncan…
M. Night Shyamalan: Caroline has done my costumes for a long time now—on “Servant” and my last few movies. I find her intellectual, and then passionate and visceral in how she approaches things. That’s a tough balance, because if you’re as smart as Caroline is, that can become a problem, thinking too much. But she balances them all. They say you should go with your gut when it’s a complex issue. When it’s a simpler thing, you should think it through. In talking about colors and textures and patterns, and how they react to the lighting, how they relate to the themes of the film, and the added consideration of within a concert with movement… That is incredibly complex. She came from the gut and then used intellect to bring form to the things we discussed. We’re very connected in the way we think about art. I love working with her, and she did an incredible job on this.
The humor…
M. Night Shyamalan: “Trap” is related to some of my movies in that there is quite a bit of humor at the center of it. It’s a combination of tones that is really unusual. In the early days, like in “Unbreakable,” I maybe didn’t trust the humor, and extricated almost all of it. My instinct was to mix dark humor with something wondrous and emotion in a thriller all together. Only when I got older did I think, “Wait, the audience will dig this if you get the vibe just right.” So “The Visit” was the first time I really pressed on the humor and mixed it with the horror and the emotion to get this cocktail. “Split” was the second. And then in “Servant,” it was throughout the show. In that way, “Trap” is related to those movies. It has a buoyancy because of that, and also because of the nature of it—it has music at its center. It’s new and very different from my other movies. It was a particular moment of how I was feeling… a kind of mania, that was coming from joy and playfulness. I think you have to be honest about where you are. I can’t be more joyous than I am, or pretend to be dark when I’m not. So, “Trap” is a little mischievous. That was the space I was in as I wrote it. And I hope audiences feel that.
Moviegoing experience…
M. Night Shyamalan: I believe that the stories that have impacted me the most have happened in the movie theater. “Trap” is intended for the movie theater experience. My job within that experience is to provoke the audience and give them something original, something they’ve never seen before. There are certain types of movies where you are getting spectacle, or you’re getting something that you might have seen before, but in a big, physical way, with huge CGI. Those aren’t the reasons to come to my movies in the movie theater. Mine are meant for you to experience something provocative, something funny, something shocking. And maybe, I want you to be slightly uncomfortable, trying to figure things out. Or shocked by something that a character does. “He did that!? This is what’s happening!?” That kind of group gasp, I guess, is the thing that I’m addicted to. And that’s what makes watching “Trap” in a movie theater a great experience with everyone there.
Screenwriter, director and producer M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN (Director / Writer / Producer) has captured the attention of audiences around the world for almost two decades, creating films that have amassed more than $3 billion worldwide. His thrillers include The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and The Visit.
Shyamalan began making films at a young age in his hometown near Philadelphia and by 16 he had completed 45 short films. Upon finishing high school, he attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to study filmmaking. During his final year at NYU, Shyamalan wrote Praying with Anger, a semi-autobiographical screenplay about a student from the U.S. who goes to India and finds himself a stranger in his homeland; the film was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival alongside Reservoir Dogs and Strictly Ballroom. In the years that followed, Shyamalan wrote Stuart Little for Columbia Pictures and completed his first mainstream feature, Wide Awake, a film that explored a boy’s search to discover his faith.
In 1999, The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis, catapulted Shyamalan into stardom and he became one of the most sought-after young filmmakers in Hollywood. The Sixth Sense was one of the highest-grossing films of all time and received a total of six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Shyamalan collaborated with Willis again in 2000 on the film Unbreakable, which also starred Samuel L. Jackson. A film ahead of its time, Unbreakable has become an underground hit in the years since its release. Shyamalan once again explored the idea of a man questioning his faith in the 2002 box office success Signs, starring Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix.
In 2004, Shyamalan released The Village, starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Joaquin Phoenix; the film explores an isolated community and the treaty they hold with the mysterious creatures living in the surrounding forest. In his next film, Lady In the Water, Shyamalan explored the supernatural world of a dark bedtime story. In 2008, Shyamalan wrote, directed, and produced The Happening, starring Mark Wahlberg; the film follows a man and his family as they try to escape from an inexplicable natural disaster.
Other feature credits of Shyamalan’s include The Last Airbender, Shyamalan’s first foray into family entertainment, and After Earth, an original sci-fi father and son story which starred Will Smith and Jaden Smith.
In 2015, Shyamalan teamed up with Universal on the horror hit The Visit. Bringing in close to 100M at the worldwide box office, The Visit was one of the highest grossing horror films of the year. Shyamalan released the thriller Split with Universal Studios, which was number one in the box office for three weeks in a row. In January of 2019, Shyamalan released Glass, the third installation of a trilogy that includes both Unbreakable and Split.
Shyamalan’s first foray into television also took place in 2015, when he executive produced and directed the pilot Wayward Pines. The highly anticipated 10-episode event series, based on a bestselling novel, was brought to life by Shyamalan in May of 2015 on FOX. The show quietly turned into a fan favorite, becoming the #1 most watched drama of the summer.
In 2021, Shyamalan released Old for Universal, starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, and Alex Wolff, based on the graphic novel, Sandcastle.
Most recently Shyamalan directed, wrote, and produced Knock at the Cabin for Universal, which was based on the 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. The film, which opened to #1 at the box office, starred Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Kristen Cui, Abby Quinn and Rupert Grint.
On the TV side, Shyamalan served as EP and showrunner, and also directed five episodes of Apple TV+’s popular thriller series Servant. The thriller was one of the streamer’s most watched series.
Shyamalan also devotes his time to the philanthropic projects of his foundation, which he co-founded with his wife, Dr. Bhavna Shyamalan, in 2001. The M. Night Shyamalan Foundation is dedicated to supporting remarkable leaders and their grassroots efforts to remove the barriers created by poverty and inequality in their communities.
With a great love for his hometown, Shyamalan is known for filming his movies in Philadelphia and the surrounding area. He currently resides in Pennsylvania with his family.
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