His biggest commercial success as of mid-2006 is the 1999 film The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, which has grossed over $600 million worldwide [1]. Shyamalan, along with Jay Chandrasekhar, is one of several South Indian-diasporic filmmakers working in Hollywood. Like director Alfred Hitchcock, one of his idols, he is known for making cameos in his films.

His last name is pronounced in English, and his name given and pronounced, respectively, as മനോജ� നൈറ�റ� ശ�യാമളന� and in Malayalam.

M. Night Shyamalan was born in Pondicherry, India[2], and is of South Indian heritage: His father, Nelliattu C. Shyamalan, a physician, is a Malayalee, and his mother, Jayalakshmi (called Jaya), an obstetrician and gynecologist, is a Tamil [3]. In the 1960s, after medical school and the birth of their first child, Veena, Shyamalan's parents moved to the United States. Shyamalan's mother returned to India to spend the last five months of her pregnancy with him at her parents' home.

Shyamalan spent his first six weeks in Pondicherry, and then was raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, an affluent Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. He attended the private Catholic grammar school Waldron Academy, which his parents chose for its academic discipline [4], followed by The Episcopal Academy, a private Episcopalian high school in nearby Lower Merion. Shyamalan went on to New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, in Manhattan, graduating in 1992.

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 Shyalaman to follow in the family practice of medicine, his mother encouraged Shyamalan to follow his passion.[5] By the time he was 17, Shyamalan, who had been a fan of Steven Spielberg, had made 45 home movies.

Shyamalan made his first film, the semiautobiographical drama Praying with Anger, while still an NYU student, using money borrowed from family and friends.[6] It was screened at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 12, 1992,[7], and played commercially at one theater for one week.[7]. It has also been shown on Canadian television. Filmed in Chennai (Madras), it is his only film to be shot outside of Pennsylvania.

Shyamalan wrote and directed his second movie, Wide Awake in 1995, though it was not released until 1998.[8] His parents were the film's associate producers. The drama dealt with a 10-year-old Catholic schoolboy (played by Joseph Cross) who, after the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia), searches for God. The film's supporting cast included Dana Delany and Denis Leary as the boy's parents, as well as Rosie O'Donnell, Julia Stiles, and Camryn Manheim. Wide Awake was filmed in a school Shyamalan attended as a child. [9], and earned 1999 Young Artist Award nominations for Best Drama, and, for Cross, Best Performance.[10]. A commercial failure, the film grossed $305,704 dollars in theaters.[11]

That same year Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for Stuart Little.

In 1993, Shyamalan married Indian psychologist Bhavna Vaswani, a fellow student whom he'd met at NYU [12] and with whom he has had two daughters. As of mid-2006, the family resides in Wayne, Pennsylvania, near Shyamalan's usual shooting site of Philadelphia.

Shyamalan achieved commercial success in 1999 when he wrote, directed, and produced The Sixth Sense, a supernatural drama about a psychologist (Bruce Willis) who blames himself for a patient's suicide and his own broken marriage. Upon meeting a disturbed child (Haley Joel Osment) who claims to see people who have died, the psychologist feels he has a chance to redeem himself. According to the book DisneyWar, David Vogel of The Walt Disney Company read Shyamalan's script and, without obtaining approval from his superiors, bought the rights to it for a high $2 million dollars and allowed Shyamalan to direct.[13] Vogel's bosses, disagreeing with his decision, sold the profits to Spyglass Entertainment, and kept only a 12.5 percent distribution fee for itself.[13]

The film had a $40 million budget, and grossed over $600 million box office worldwide. It is one of the 25 most commercially successful films through mid-2006[1], and Disney's biggest live-action hit.

The Sixth Sense was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Osment, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay.

Unbreakable is a naturalistic drama about David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the sole survivor of a train crash. He eventually meets a comic-book collector (Samuel L. Jackson) and mysterious mastermind who is convinced that Dunn, in fact, has super powers. Budgeted at $75 million, it grossed $95 million domestically and $248 million worldwide.

Opening in August 2002, Signs is a science-fiction drama of a rural Pennsylvania pastor (Mel Gibson) who has lost his faith after his wife's death, and regains it with his family as they witness the worldwide events of an alien invasion. Joaquin Phoenix also stars.

Budgeted at $72 million, Signs grossed $227 million domestically and $408 million worldwide.[14] It was the highest-grossing film of Gibson's career, as well as his highest-opening weekend gross ($83 million), until The Passion of the Christ (which he produced and directed, but in which he did not star).[15]

Shyamalan said in an interview with Science Fiction Weekly that his choice of Gibson was based in part by the actor's emotional role in the film Lethal Weapon: "I was on my parents' sofa watching the video of Lethal Weapon, and then this guy did stuff emotionally that had no business being in an action movie. ... I completely believed the humanity of a man who was so torn by the loss of his wife that he wasn't afraid of dying, which made him a lethal weapon. ... [W]hen I wrote the movie about a guy who loses faith because his wife has passed away, I felt like that was the guy. And I also like taking an action guy and not letting him be The Guy". Shyamalan also said that originally, there was going to be very little music in the film, but that composer James Newton Howard's intense and emotional compositions changed his mind.[16]

Originally titled The Woods[17], The Village was released in July 2004. A drama starring Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Adrien Brody, it tells of a small, 19th-century community (We see the tombstone of a boy is being laid to rest in the opening of the film that reads 1890-1897) run by a group of "Elders" who seem to be content in their isolation from the outside world. The village is encircled by a forest said to be filled with mysterious and threatening creatures. Even as an uneasy truce between the villagers and the creatures seems to be falling apart one villager (Phoenix) starts to question their forced isolation.

With total production costs of $71.6 million[18], the film grossed $114 million domestically ($50 million in its opening weekend) and a further $142 million in non-USA receipts. Its opening weekend earned almost 50% of its overall gross, followed by a severe dropoff, and the film is considered a commercial failure. Critical response was mostly negative [19]: Desson Thomson of The Washington Post called it "a bewildering disappointment"[19]; Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said, "It's tedious instead of provocative and so unconvincing as to be preposterous".[19] Shyamalan claimed he was exploring a more romantic story than he had in his other works.[20]

The Village earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

Lady in the Water, scheduled to open July 21, 2006, is a fantasy about a Philadelphia apartment-complex maintenance man, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who discovers a young woman named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the swimming pool. Heep eventually learns she is a water nymph who has come to "the world of man" to deliver an important message to someone in the complex. Her life is in danger from a vicious, wolf-like, mystical creature that tries to keep her from returning to her watery "blue world".

The film brought about a severe rift between Shyamalan and Disney, the studio for which he had done his biggest previous films. In the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger, Shyamalan said that he felt Disney "no longer valued individualism ... no longer valued fighters".[21] Shyamalan left the studio after production president Nina Jacobson and others became highly critical of his script, which Warner Bros. eventually produced.[22]

The advance review that appeared in Variety (July 16, 2006) in anticipation to the release of the film was negative. The review began as follows: "Vindication is rarely as swift or complete as that likely awaiting the Disney execs who passed on M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort "Lady in the Water." [...] Disney's misgivings were well founded, as Shyamalan has followed "The Village" with another disappointment -- a ponderous, self-indulgent bedtime tale. Awkwardly positioned, this gloomy gothic fantasy falls well short of horror, leaving grim theatrical prospects beyond whatever curiosity the filmmaker's reputation and the mini-controversy can scare up."

Shyamalan has been approached to collaborate on several movies with strong fan bases, the most notable of which was the fourth Indiana Jones film. This would have given Shyamalan a chance to work with his longtime idol, Steven Spielberg. Shyamalan turned down the opportunity, claiming it was too "tricky" to get everyone on the same page and that it just "was not the right thing" for him to do.[23]

On July 16, 2006, Shyamalan was featured on Pottercast, a podcast from the Harry Potter fansite The Leaky Cauldron, in response to rumors that he could direct the next Harry Potter film.

In 2004, Shyamalan was involved in a media hoax with the Sci Fi Channel, which when eventually uncovered by the press prompted Sci Fi's parent company, NBC-Universal, to denounce the undertaking as "not consistent with our policy at NBC. We would never intend to offend the public or the press and value our relationship with both". [24]

Sci Fi claimed in its "documentary" special � The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, shot on the set of The Village � that Shyamalan was legally dead for nearly a half-hour while drowned in a frozen pond in a childhood accident, and that upon being rescued he had experiences of communicating with spirits, fueling an obsession with the supernatural. The Sci Fi Channel also claimed that Shyamalan had grown "sour" when the "documentary" filmmakers' questions got too personal, and had therefore withdrawn from participating and threatened to sue the filmmakers.

In truth, Shyamalan developed the hoax with Sci Fi, going so far as having Sci Fi staffers sign non-disclosure agreements with a $5 million fine attached, and required Shyamalan's office to formally approve each step. Neither the childhood accident nor the supposed rift with the filmmakers ever occurred. The hoax included a non-existent Sci Fi publicist, "David Westover", whose name appeared on press releases regarding the special. Sci Fi also fed false news stories to the Associated Press [25] and Zap2It.com [26], among others. A New York Post news item, based on a Sci Fi press release, referred to Shyamalan's attorneys threatening to sue the filmmakers; the attorneys named were non-existent.

After an AP reporter confronted Sci Fi Channel president Bonnie Hammer at a press conference, Hammer admitted the hoax, saying it was part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to generate pre-release publicity for The Village. Despite his office's disclosure-agreement requirement and approvals of each marketing step, Shymalan told the AP, "I was, of course, involved in the production of the special but had nothing to do with the marketing of it. If the Sci Fi Channel erred in their marketing strategy, it was totally out of enthusiasm".