'The Sixth Sense' and a career of plot twists : Consider This from NPR

Twenty-five years ago this month, one film, and one filmmaker, became synonymous with the big plot twist.

Now, if you haven’t seen The Sixth Sense, we won’t ruin it for you, but it’s no spoiler to say that the film became a phenomenon, and its director, M. Night Shyamalan, an overnight sensation.

Brian Hiatt, a senior writer for Rolling Stone says Shyamalan’s career has had twists and turns to rival his movies.

“You know, in the ’90s, it was a great time to be a director, it was a great time to go from almost nothing to superstar,” Hiatt told NPR.

“The faster the rise or the bigger the rise, the sort of harder the fall.”

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The public reaction.

Shyamalan’s rise was fast AND big.

The Sixth Sense became the second highest grossing film of 1999, and was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture. By 2002, Newsweek touted him on its cover as “The Next Spielberg.”

But in 2004, with his gothic thriller The Village, things began to go wrong.

“Backlashes don’t happen all at once. They kind of actually can happen in slow motion. And that was the first hint that a backlash was coming,” Hiatt said.

“It was 2004. It had a pretty mixed reception. The promotion of the film was was a little bit overdone at the time. And a lot of people thought the twist was just flat out dumb.”

His next films were not only critically panned, but also flopped at the box office. By the time he made the almost-universally-hated After Earth in 2013, many moviegoers decided that Shyamalan was a sham.

But Hiatt says Shyamalan made a comeback by betting on himself. In 2015 he released The Visit, which he made with a minimal budget and partly financed himself — and earned some of his best reviews in over a decade.

That stripped-down approach has helped fuel a run of recent successes. And Shyamalan hopes for another hit starting this weekend with his latest thriller, Trap.

Propelling from success.

Starring opposite Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense was young Haley Joel Osment. He was 11 when the film came out — and he grew up in the shadow of the its success, like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.

“It makes me very happy that 25 years later he’s gotten an incredible run of movies,” Osment told Consider This host Scott Detrow.

Like his director, Osment never really stopped working. Dramas, comedies, fantasies, voiceovers, TV, movies … he’s now 36 years old and still busy.

But how did he contend such a huge splash, so early on?

“As an actor, it can be an opportunity [to make such an impression], because you can find all these ways to camouflage yourself. One of the most gratifying things you can have happen as an actor is people go like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that was you’ in something, which I think actors get a kick out of,” Osment told NPR.

“So I’m 36 now and I feel like, all these new opportunities for roles are opening up to me because of my age. I was able to play so many different types of roles, an unusually diverse group of roles, I was very fortunate to have when I was a kid,” he added.

“And now, I’ve never been afraid of getting older, because it’s just it broadens the horizons of the different types of characters you can play.”

This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas and Patrick Jarenwattananon. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.