Signs by M. Night Shyamalan

I loved this movie. M. Night Shyamalan is a genius. The story is simple, but it makes you think.

The following is an excerpt from the NY Times movie review.

“The real question, posed by Graham to his brother at an especially tense moment, is what kind of person Graham (and, by implication, everybody else) is. There are two kinds: those who believe everything happens for a reason and that we are therefore not alone and those who believe that we live in metaphysical solitude, our destinies governed by nothing more than random chance. There are people with faith, in other words (and the point is reiterated frequently), and people without it.”

This was the heart of the movie for me. I am a person of faith, but I do believe there is some randomness in life that cannot be explained.

Shyamalan shows that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to scare people. You can build tension and scary moments in a movie with every day actions, every day fears and every day assumptions.

I liked how Shyamalan opened the movie and got right into the action of the story. From the start, the audience is immediately sucked into the story. In Screenwriting class, one of the tips was to open on the “cusp of conflict”. I was going to open up the second draft of the screenplay with an exposition scene. In my first draft, I opened the movie up with a locker room brawl. I think I will stick with a locker room fist-a-cuffs scene as the opening scene.

All through the movie, I kept wondering how I would have reacted if I was in story. I like a movie that makes me wonder about how I would behave in a certain situation. I think Shyamalan also made me sympathetic for how each person in the movie was behaving. I could relate to every character in the movie, so I understood every rationale for each character’s behaviour. I want to mimic this in my screenplay. I want the audience to be able to relate to every character in my movie. How I am going to achieve this effect is unknown to me, but I think it’s worth trying.

The ending of Signs was a little far fetched. Perhaps Shyamalan couldn’t figure out how to bring resolution to his interesting plot. I understand his problem. I don’t think I would know how to resolve the ending of this movie either.

All the ufologists are up in the arms over the movie. I know they don’t like the assumption that the space visitors might be less than friendly, but who knows what the space visitors will do when they decide to reveal themselves to us.

What Shyamalan also does well is put conflict into every scene. Richard Walter, in his book Screenwriting, wrote that every scene in a movie should have some sort of conflict. Every scene of the movie is infused with two opposing forces, two opposing point of views, someone who wants something from someone who doesn’t want to give it to them, etc. There is tension in every scene, of varying degrees of course, but tension nonetheless.

I am going to try to add tension and conflict to every scene of my screenplay. I want to add tension and violence as well. I read somewhere that violence is the currency by which we spend our lives. I’m not talking gun violence or battle violence, but physical and emotional violence.

Violence in my characters makes sense. They are people who bottle up their emotions because they are afraid of them. I believe emotions are like energy, and energy cannot be contained and when it is not expressed, it finds a way to explode. My characters are at war with their own emotions, suppressing them, but to no avail. The emotions bubble up with a subtle and violent explosion, often at odd moments, sometimes for a reason, but most of the time at random.

I hope I can do all of this. The idea to violence just popped into my head after I saw Signs. I should probably watch Signs again to study how Shyamalan does what he does. Maybe I even need to rent some Hitchcock movies, the master of suspense. Is it weird to add this much suspense to my family drama movie? I keep asking myself this question.