Will this man be the new Spielberg?

HE'S the 29-year-old Indian whizz kid from Philadelphia being hailed as the new Spielberg. While not walking away from the epithet, he's wary of such comparisons - though it's not surprising to discover (we met the day after Halloween) that he used to dress up as Indiana Jones to "trick or treat".

"No, I don't dress up any more," he confesses laughingly. As he lounges in his swish offices at the Four Falls Corporate Centre just outside Philly, you'd never believe that this is the man who has just made one of the most successful Hollywood movies ever. He looks like a big kid, but don't be deceived by appearances: this guy plays hardball with the Big Boys.

The Sixth Sense has now chewed up Jaws in the league table - $250 million profit and counting. On his table are home videos of the films he made as a high schooler in which he posed as a pint-sized James Bond. You see, M Night Shyamalan understands kids in the same numinous yet megabucks way that Steven Spielberg does. But could he really be that person the movie business has longed for more eagerly than the Second Coming?

Shyamalan attended a Catholic school ("for the discipline") in Philadelphia and the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City. Three months after graduating, he acted in and directed Praying With Anger (1993), about an Indian American going back to his Madras roots. While still only 21, he sold a script to Fox for $750,000 called Labour of Love; it was never made, which was, he says, "the worst experience of my life". (Fox is now naturally talking of reviving it.) Then came Wide Awake (1998) for Miramax, which bombed, followed by the sale of The Sixth Sense script for $3 million. The rest is history.

The people who would most like Shya-malan to be the new Spielberg is Disney: it has been raking in the profits for his crisp and intelligent ghost story centred around a young boy who is cursed with the ability to see the dead (with Bruce Willis as the sad-faced shrink who deals with him, in this his most successful movie role ever).

Ever since Spielberg's right-hand man at Dreamworks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, took Disney to the cleaners for not paying him off with a golden handshake, Disney has smarted from the assault. Now it has bought Shyamalan's latest script for $5 million, and is throwing in another $5 million for him to direct it, plus endless back-enders. It would be sweet revenge to secure the long-term services of a man who could be the pretender to the Spielberg crown.

"Spielberg has seen the film twice," confesses Shyamalan, with that mix of warm self-assurance (and lack of conceit) that everyone notices about him.

Indeed, this is probably the first film for adults where a second viewing is virtually essential, and return viewings are what's pushing up the audience figures. Not even Spielberg came up with such a good commercial gimmick.

By all accounts, Spielberg admires the movie, though the two haven't yet met.

This charmingly bumptious acolyte has already asserted - almost unbelievably, since he's talking about a licence to print money - that he's cracked the patent Spielberg formula ("I implemented it throughout Sixth Sense, but I won't say what it is").

So what is it about Shyamalan's technique that makes him resemble the older director? It's mainly an affinity with children and an ability to tell stories from a child's point of view. His office has more pictures of children being hugged than at a Michael Jackson charity fundraiser; his last film, Wide Awake, was also about a young boy dealing with death and mortality.

BUT it is Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense who proves Shyamalan has a talent for casting children and coaxing breathtaking performances out of them. I left the film convinced that this odd little chap could see spooks.

"As a kid, everything is more salient," Shyamalan says, "more real. When you're an adult, things get dulled. You don't cry when you're upset, or jump around giddy when you're happy, and when you see a beautiful woman, you don't jump on her."

Both directors combine a kind of innocence and a kind of ruthlessness. Yet there is one crucial area of divergence: Spielberg's pursuit of his own ethnicity does not seem to be shared by Shyamalan. His parents are doctors who emigrated from southern India, and briefly returned so he could be born in their home town of Pondicherry. "To call me an Indian filmmaker is a misrepresentation," he insists.

"My wife loves the Bollywood movies but they go against my philosophy of film-making because they're just made for an Indian audience. I want to make movies everyone wants to see, movies for the whole world."

He denies that there's any kind of Asian new wave in Hollywood, despite the arrival of Shekhar Kapur (director of Elizabeth), Anand Tucker, and Ayub Khan-Din in England - plus technical wizards including Umesh Shukla, who directed many of the special effects in Titanic. He's also wary of discussing his Hinduism, though he displays a great enthusiasm for the fact that his second daughter is due to be born next week during the major Hindu festival of Diwali. "It's very lucky," he assures me.

Next month sees the release of his animation movie, Stuart Little, about the adventures of a mouse. In April, he starts his latest big flick with Willis - again - and Samuel L Jackson, which, of course, will be the big test of his mettle.

Though he assures me that "some of the scariest people I know are in the film industry", he seems happy to swim with the sharks and if necessary, eat up Spielberg and his movies. "I didn't like The Lost World at all," he tells me, suddenly and surprisingly. "He shouldn't be making those movies if he doesn't respect them any more." So beware, Mr Spielberg, your greatest fan is also your greatest critic. M Night Shyamalan is destined to be the man who put the Indian into Indiana Jones.

Copyright 1999
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