M. Night Shyamalan Breaks Down The First Jump Scare From 'Old'

This was the most difficult movie to shoot.

We were literally at the mercy of nature,

difficult to shoot on sand.

It's the heat, you're out there for 12 to 15 hours.

The tide comes up twice a day and the beach just disappears.

Movie-making is kind of like an act of faith

in and of itself.

At least for me, it is.

Hi, I'm M. Night Shyamalan.

I'm the writer director of Old,

and this is notes on a scene.

[chilling music]

This movie came to me in an unusual way.

It came from my daughters.

It was a gift that they gave me a graphic novel

on father's day.

And I started reading it and it was so cinematic.

The basic premise of it was so provocative

that I started getting ideas

about how to shoot it right away.

I was so inspired by the tone of Sandcastle,

the graphic novel.

It had a kind of a mystery,

but like a little wit to it,

Twilight zone, Black Mirror quality as I was reading it.

And I could feel kind of that angle

and I've been enjoying taking that kind of irreverent angle

on subjects recently.

The sequence that I wanted to show you guys

is early on on the beach.

It's at the tail of everybody's still having fun,

and right at that nexus moment

when the darkness starts to happen on the beach.

Why I chose it, it has a bunch of cinematic languages

that were important to me.

So I thought that it would be a cool one to talk about

just to see kind of the seeds of the languages

that are throughout the film.

As I'm looking at the kind of this frozen image here

of Trent here as a child,

this first thing that you're gonna see here is a language

that is borrowed from

what some people call Australia new wave,

which was like movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock

and Walk About.

And what we were trying to do with the language

was used the cinema verite, Australia new wave language

of movement and zooms almost like it's random

and it's fluctuating and alive,

a sense that the kids are in kind of in the present.

And so you'll see through the movie,

when you see this language,

people are kind of becoming in the present

and they're not really thinking about time,

they're almost kind of timeless.

And so that's what this particular sequence is.

We did this, I think 40 times.

It's really difficult, I gave the kids movement

and then the camera operator complete liberty

to kind of feel his way through it.

At the beginning,

you have this kind of moment at the top

right before it zooms out and there was this feeling like

I wanted you to not understand what was happening

so you using this movement to create an unease.

There's so many ways to create unease in the audience.

One of them is being very still

and being presidium with your framing

and another one is this kind of movement of zooms

that was indicative of the seventies

in that year of filmmaking.

And it's very eerie to see

as you hear the kids kind of giggling,

I use sound effects of them laughing and giggling

and of course they're kids so they had a ball shooting this.

I was reading something and I was thinking about freeze tag

and how it was ironic that children sometimes play the idea

that they're frozen in time in a movie

where their lives are gonna speed up really, really fast.

This was kind of a fun way

right before all the chaos starts.

And if you watch carefully at the end of this,

we crank the speed here.

So it starts to slow down right about here

and you don't notice it on her hair

and then you see them running in the background

and they're in slow motion.

If we're being broad stroked about casting,

I would say I tack towards theater trained actors

and children or people that have never acted before.

The rationale behind that is

the ones that have no craft, the children,

they're just themselves.

They have a hard time even suppressing

that innate quality about themselves

so it's wonderful when you're trying to capture something

on a film, they're so organic and real,

and I juxtapose them with theater trained actors

who know their craft at the highest, highest level

who on the other side of the spectrum can do the same thing.

So taking those two kinds of actors

and putting them in the same movie,

it's supposed to feel organic

and that's what those two versions of actors do

inside of a very formalized way of shooting.

So this scene here,

the one that follows the freeze tag scene is a rare scene

in some ways because there's a lot of shots in it for me.

I normally don't do a lot of shots in a scene.

As you saw, the freeze tag scene had one shot,

but this has a bunch of shots in there,

almost graphic novel shots.

The dolls in focus as is the person in the background.

Honey I'm home.

I told you, I don't want to live like this.

I'm gonna live in a condominium.

I'm going for a drive to calm down.

Essentially I wrote a fight scene

and one could even say this is a flashback,

but we see it through the eyes of the children playing

who are just regurgitating the fight.

The idea was to put the representation of Pam

in the female doll and the representation of her

in the robot doll.

It's more the colors of what they're feeling

and they're kind of imagining themselves

and the partner when they're looking at these things

and the irony of they're on vacation

and they have so affected their children in this way

that this family is in crisis when they get to this beach.

Their silent reactions to this are very poignant.

Honey I'm home.

I told you, I don't want to live like this.

I'm gonna live in a condominium.

By looking at the dolls, they're looking at each other

so it's a wonderful way for them to be looking

at each other without looking at each other.

She can be hurt,

but if she was staring at her husband

who she's having trouble with,

she wouldn't be that open about how hurt she is or sad,

or having empathy for him.

She wouldn't be able to use those colors

if she was looking right at her husband,

but she's looking at a representation of themselves in this.

This was a beautiful way to make paintings

that juxtaposed against each other,

but it worked out and even the prop department

and I finding these kinds of fantasy element dolls

added a really nice touch because it's so much armor

and so much fantasy on these two that it's not one-to-one.

I'm going for a drive to calm down.

I'm really, really hungry.

Me too, my stomach's growling.

If you just take this frame,

the negative space of the rocks here is a big decision.

I use every frame kind of think of it as a window.

That's not the end of the storytelling.

There's story going on here, there's story going on here.

But if you take this robot, for example,

and you put him back here,

back where he was in this position like that,

it has a similar impact to the mermaid doll

that I have a guy.

We're juxtaposing what do these dolls mean

to these individuals?

I try not to have them mean the exact same thing.

In this case,

I often do this where I cut someone's face off.

That creates a situation for me emotionally

where it's unknowable,

part of the person is unknowable or hiding.

And so there's this sense of

her leaving her family or leaving her situation

at least that's what emotionally it means to me.

We're supposed to be on vacation

and relaxed and all that stuff

and this representation of her armored and leaving

is a graphic novel kind of painting of her situation.

One of the reasons I wanted to show you this sequence,

it's a mini movement of genre.

As you saw the first scene, which was playful

and so lighthearted, almost genre lists.

And then it comes to this scene with the robots,

which is essentially a straight drama.

And then the next scene will kick into mystery.

I'm very interested in using hands and feet and insinuations

of people's emotions.

I often tell the actors, you think the thoughts

and we will imagine the rest.

And when I talk to them about movies,

they'll imagine that this was a close-up.

Yeah, where's the closeup of the kids' faces

at the sand burrow?

You had it in there and no, it was not.

You did that storytelling.

I really enjoy when you make it incomplete

and you have to participate in the painting.

And this would be an example of that, this burrow,

and you start to pull all these pieces out.

Who would leave this, hey mom.

You can see one of the reasons

I was wanting to make the movie

is my love of the original Planet of the Apes.

So it was like the Planet of the Apes,

the end of it is set on this beach

surrounded by a rock wall.

They find these artifacts in the sand.

I remember seeing it as a kid and was the original one,

and I just felt the imagination just firing away.

So we juxtapose these two shots over their faces here.

You can see there's a ton of negative space here.

From the hotel, they're so rusted.

Put that down,

you can get infected or cut yourself!

We've kicked into slight mystery mode

and you start to feel uneasy.

They're finding it innocuous

and by the framing and everything,

you understand that that's not the case.

Let's play hide and seek.

So in this escalation of genre,

we started with a slice of life,

then we went to the drama, then we went to the mystery.

This is the child is playing hide and seek

and when it turns from lighthearted to kind of horror.

And so there's an initial thing

where he's looking around and there's a little beat

where he notices there's no fish anywhere near this beach.

So that's already a kind of a dissonant note.

So it's starting to turn from mystery to thriller

a little bit there.

So I don't use handheld a lot.

I find it a very strong color like Tabasco sauce.

In this case, whenever we are in the water in this film,

we chose to not anchor the camera.

We chose to make it float a bit.

And then behind him comes this floating body.

And for me,

how to make something disturbing or uneasy

is like that you're ahead of the character

or you realize that at the moment of the character,

those are important decisions than this one

where a child is unaware

and then this movement of something threatening

coming towards them from the back as you're ahead of him,

it's really disturbing

and then here to kind of quietly have her arm

go around him like seaweed.

And then the music kind of reaches a crescendo

and goes this is the moment when you're writing screenplay.

When did the terrorists take over the building?

When does the boat hit the iceberg?

This is that moment and then from here on,

it starts to escalate in a momentum.

I have a rigid almost process of when we bring music

into the storytelling.

The editor's not allowed to put any music into it

for many cuts.

We do not look for help from our partners in music

until the movie is singing in its own way,

has its own cadence and movement.

Now philosophically, music is so strong

the color in the storytelling that I'm very careful

with how we use it.

I want it to be distinct.

Sometimes I want it on top of the movie,

like in signs and sometimes it's atmospheric.

So with the composer who's named Trevor,

we talked about making using primal sounds.

We were inspired by the Planet of the Apes score,

that conch shell kind of sound that they had.

What was our version of the primal music?

And this is the first beat of that mystery.

We went from that handheld kind of rare moment

where I'm using kind of choppy editing

to create a visceralness for me.

And then to this big vista of huge negative space here

with our rock wall and our tiny family here

as they hear their son screaming.

Normally there's been a one-to-one

with kind of suspense and claustrophobia,

and it kind of a contained atmosphere in one of my movies,

the basement and signs

or the room they're being held in in Split.

In this case, this is a big beach,

it's a mile and a quarter long.

How does one make that feel claustrophobic?

But this idea of having the rocks be dominant

in these frames here is imposing.

They feel that the characters feel small and vulnerable.

It implies a sense of how do we get out of here

if something were to go wrong.

One of the things that I think is a lost art

in modern day cinema,

and that I'm trying to learn and trying to get better at

is blocking where the characters

how do they move in the frame in relation to the camera?

The reason that's gone away a little bit

is we kind of make movies in the editing room now.

We get tons of footage and then we just make a version

of the scene in the editing room.

In the old days, you had a dollar,

you didn't have a computer,

so you were shooting it on film.

You would figure out, okay,

you come here, you grab your dress.

Then he comes forward, then he takes the line.

And so there's always this conversation

of where you are in the frame.

And so blocking for me is a critical part of storytelling.

So when I drew that kind of slightly canted

and lower as the family members pop up into frame,

as they know something's wrong

and in different depths of field there.

Depth of field means where's the focus.

And then this family who you see in the distance here,

they're not really connected to our main family,

but soon to be very tied to them.

You want to say,

what is their emotional connection to the child screaming?

So I wouldn't do a close up of them here.

Someone else's child screaming in the distance

isn't as personal to them

so this is a wider feeling of their emotion.

This is what they're feeling.

They're interested, they're disturbed a little bit.

If someone needs help, they look,

but it's meant to convey

that they don't have the same emotions as these guys.

This is their child's voice in the air

and this is just a stranger's child.

And this kind of meeting in the middle of the mother

and the child.

He's pointing off camera the whole time

is the last image of the sequence that I wanted to show you

because it keeps escalating after that

in terms of intensity.

This was a really interesting movie for me

because normally I pick someone's point of view and tell you

through the whole movie, but this is a group feeling.

This is a group feeling, and soon everyone

will be at the same place of what the hell is going on

on this beach.

The movies that I try to make are dealing with something

I'm struggling with or something I'm scared about

and old is definitely about this moment

where I'm like seeing my kids grow up

and I see my parents get older in a way that's frightening,

and I'm fully aware that this moment today,

my kids will not look like this very soon

and my parents won't be like that very soon.

I'm fully aware of how fast everything is moving.

So it's a scary moment

and I think that the movie represents that fear for me

that this is just today

that they're gonna be these people that I love so much

are gonna be like this just today.

And then I think the characters in the movie get to a place

that I aspire to get to, which is I'm okay.

I'm okay being right here right now

and those characters that don't come to that notion of

it's okay to be right here right now

don't think about what you lost

and don't think about what's gonna happen.

The characters that stay in those spaces,

it ends very badly, it's very scary for them

so a lot of this movie is about

this aspiration to be present.