Like Alfred and Steve . . .

NEW YORK -- Writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan is a genius worthy of mention in the same breath as Hitchcock and Spielberg. Just ask him.

The creator of The Sixth Sense is back with Unbreakable, another paranormal yarn starring Bruce Willis. Willis plays David Dunn, a security guard who is the unscathed sole survivor of a horrific train wreck. His polar opposite is Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), whose osteogenesis imperfecta (a real-life congenital disease that renders bones as brittle as glass) makes him as fragile as David is invulnerable. Elijah, who runs a gallery devoted to comic-book art, tries to convince David that he is a comic-worthy superhero; this leaves both David and his worshipful little boy (Spencer Treat Clark) in much existential angst over David's place in the world.

Such high-mindedness is typical for Shyamalan, whose Sixth Sense and little-seen Wide Awake also used Keane-eyed kids to explore metaphysical questions in a pop context. "What interests me in storytelling is the idea of believing, taking ordinary people like yourselves and making you believe in something, give it plausibility, and ride that line between fiction and fantasy," he tells reporters. "If there's someone with osteogenesis imperfecta in the world -- and there are thousands and thousands of people like that -- then it's plausible that there are people in the world who are impervious to being hurt. There's certainly a lot of examples of that. People fall out of planes, survive fires without a scratch. Those things intrigue me and make me start to believe, and I like to exercise that muscle, that believing muscle. That's why children are in my movies a lot, because their muscles for believing are very strong. All of ours get pretty weak as we get older."

Shyamalan jokes that he reteamed with Willis because "everyone else was unavailable." (Willis adds, "I was unemployed at the time.") But the real reason was that he wanted to use the shorthand of a frequent director-actor pairing to make his name (pronounced "SHAM-a-lahn," though even his own publicists can't say it right) as familiar as those of other brand-name filmmakers. "I look back at other directors that I admire, and you see collaborations that establish a pattern of filmmaking -- Hitchcock with some of the actors he kept repeating, or better yet, Spielberg with Richard Dreyfuss in the first two movies, Jaws and Close Encounters [actually, those were Spielberg's second and third theatrical releases]. It's to have a mass-audience relationship. I'm trying very hard to develop an understanding of what this name means when you see it on a movie. For me and Bruce to do two movies together, then they come to associate with that name and that style of filmmaking that feeling and experience."

To protect the integrity of that experience, Shyamalan cautions viewers not to spoil the ending, which is a Twilight Zone twist like the one in Sixth Sense. "It's a very unsatisfying thing to do, I would think, and a very unkind thing. If you enjoyed the experience, why wouldn't you want your sister or brother to have that same kind of fun?"

Indeed, Shyamalan is so protective of his work that when I ask Jackson, a real-life comic-book geek, an arcane question to test the depth of his comics knowledge and determine whether certain comics characters had influenced his portrayal of the flamboyant, eccentric Elijah, Shyamalan cuts me off. "He can't answer that question. That's not a good question." Jackson interjects, "The answer is no." Says Shyamalan, "The answer and the question should not be printed."

Shyamalan wrote the role with Jackson in mind, and Jackson says it was an eerie fit. "I've had knee surgery, and I've been on crutches for 10 and a half weeks in New York City in the winter. So I understand that dynamic of walking around and not having access to things. I also understand his sense of ridicule as a child, being called `Mr. Glass,' because I stuttered when I was a kid, and kids would call me things like `Duh-duh' and `B-b-b' and `Machine Gun.' So I stayed in the house too. And I do read comic books, still. I have a healthy respect for comic art. So I relate to Elijah in a lot of ways that Night didn't know. Karmically, maybe I was supposed to do this."

Shyamalan also created David specifically for Willis. But the action hero insists that though he's "just a regular guy" like David, he's not indestructible. "I'm vulnerable emotionally. I'm vulnerable as a human being. I'm not invincible. I'm just like you guys. If you cut me, do we not bleed?"
-- Gary Susman

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