Broken and Battered

Defying expectations, but whose expectations? M. Night Shyamalan on the set of Unbreakable.

Unbreakable, with Samuel L. Jackson, has a comic-book ending -- which, the writer-director fears, is why some people kind of hate his new movie.

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• M. Night Shyamalan
• Bruce Willis
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Steven Spielberg
• Hollywood

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"That was the main goal with this movie -- to put the stamp on my voice," he says. "If, back in the day, you heard somebody say, 'It's a movie about a guy trapped in an elevator directed by Alfred Hitchcock,' you'd be like, 'Yeah, I am all over that!' Now, in a weird way, I've got a little of that going for me. You tell someone it's a movie about a guy trapped in an elevator directed by M. Night Shyamalan, that person will go, 'Ooooh, but he's not reallyin an elevator, is he?' The Sixth Senseand Unbreakableare where I found my voice, and it feels really good to be talking in it finally, and there's so much more I want to say. I'm just learning how to talk, and I feel like I found my own way of story telling, which is awesome in this day and age, when everything's derivative of everything else. With my movies, audiences don't have anything to compare it to. This one, some of them said it reminded them of Sixth Sense, obviously, but nothing else." He laughs -- giggles, actually. "That's a great achievement at the end of the day, so I feel real lucky about that."