M. Night Shyamalan

Manoj Nelliyattu "M. Night" Shyamalan (/ˈʃɑːməlɑːn/ SHAH-mə-lahn; born August 6, 1970) is an American filmmaker and actor. He is known for making original films with contemporary supernatural plots and twist endings. He was born in Mahé, India, and raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. The cumulative gross of his films exceeds $3 billion globally.

He made his directorial debut in 1992 with his first movie Praying with Anger. His second movie was the comedy-drama film Wide Awake (1998). His most well-received films include the supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense (1999), the superhero thriller Unbreakable (2000), and the science fiction thriller Signs (2002). For The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Afterward, Shyamalan released a series of poorly received but sometimes financially successful movies, including the period-piece thriller The Village (2004), the dark fantasy Lady in the Water (2006), the eco-thriller The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010) (an adaptation based on the first season of the Nickelodeon animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender), and the science fiction film After Earth (2013). Following the financial failure of After Earth, Shyamalan's career was revived with the release of the found footage horror film The Visit (2015), the psychological thriller Split (2016), and the superhero thriller Glass (2019). With a total budget of $34 million between them, these three films earned a combined box office of $625 million. Glass is the third and final chapter of his Unbreakable film series, which commenced in 2000.

In addition to his directorial work, Shyamalan was story creator and a producer for the horror film Devil (2010). Shyamalan was also called in for an uncredited rewrite for the teen film She's All That (1999) and also served as a writer for the film Stuart Little (1999). He is also one of the executive producers and occasional director of Wayward Pines and the critically acclaimed series Servant.

Shyamalan is also known for filming and setting his films in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Most of his commercially successful films were co-produced and released by Walt Disney Studios' Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures and Universal imprints. In 2008, Shyamalan was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India.

Early life
Shyamalan was born in Pondicherry, a town in the Union Territory of Puducherry in India. The son of Indian Tamil and Malayalam parents, his father, Dr. Nelliyattu C. Shyamalan, is a Malayali neurologist from Puducherry and a JIPMER graduate, his mother, Dr. Jayalakshmi, an ethnic Tamil, is an OB-GYN.

Shyamalan's parents immigrated to the United States when he was six weeks old. Shyamalan was raised in his hometown of Penn Valley, Pennsylvania. Shyamalan was raised Hindu. He attended the private Roman Catholic grammar school Waldron Mercy Academy, followed by the Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopal high school located at the time in Merion Station, Pennsylvania. He felt like an outsider and remembers that teachers would say that whoever was not baptized would go to hell. When he was a student there, a teacher once became upset because he "got the best grade and [he] wasn't Catholic". Shyamalan earned the New York University Merit Scholarship in 1988, and was also a National Merit Scholar. Shyamalan is an alumnus of New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1992. It was while studying there that he adopted "Night" as his second name.

Shyamalan had an early desire to be a filmmaker when he was given a Super 8 camera at a young age. Though his father wanted him to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged him to follow his passion. By the time he was seventeen, he had made forty-five home movies. On each DVD release of his films, beginning with The Sixth Sense and with the exception of Lady in the Water, he has included a scene from one of these childhood movies, which, he feels, represents his first attempt at the same kind of film.