How “Servant” prepared Ishana Night Shyamalan to make “The Watchers”

“It was the best training ground I could have had,” the young director says of her experience on the Apple TV+ series.

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Television and film are not synonymous art forms. Writers and directors who find success in one format can’t always translate their skills to the other. But Servant was not like most shows.

Though M. Night Shyamalan executive produced and directed the premiere of the Apple TV+ series about a Philadelphia family’s strange response to the death of their infant child, he was always insistent that every other director have creative freedom with their episodes. That made it an ideal learning experience for young filmmakers like Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau and his own daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, whose feature debut The Watchers hits theaters this summer.

“It was the best training ground I could have had,” Shyamalan tells Entertainment Weekly. “With those 30-minute episodes, I got to exercise both my structural dialogue skills in writing and then also learned how to do as much visual storytelling, and curation of vibe and tone, as possible with directing. The TV world moves so fast that you don't really have time to think about it. You are continuing to learn and grow at this very rapid rate. So that was wonderful. It was like doing short film after short film in a very isolated period of time.”

As the daughter of an acclaimed filmmaker, a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and now a seasoned writer/director of short films, Shyamalan has long harbored dreams of directing her own feature. And the timing just happened to work out perfectly, when a producer brought her Irish author A.M. Shine’s novel The Watchers just as Servant was wrapping up.

“I knew by the time I finished the book that it captured exactly the tone that I wanted to explore and play in,” Shyamalan says. “It had all these rich visuals and just felt like an endless well of inspiration. So it was one of those things that feels like divine timing — it came at the exact moment when I was seeking it. It’s like what they say about trying on a wedding dress: You know it when you feel it. I just knew when I read it that this was meant to be.”

The first trailer for The Watchers establishes an eerie sense of mystery. Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, a 28-year-old artist who gets stranded in an Irish forest. Though she finds shelter, she and the other lost people taking refuge in an isolated building find themselves observed by unseen creatures. The trailer has minimal dialogue, opting instead for creepy visuals like a winged skeleton or Fanning’s Mina tapping on a mirror that she suspects is a window on the other side.

“For me, it's always about visual elements first. The thing I love more than anything else in the film process is playing with colors and textures,” Shyamalan says. “So when I read the book, it felt like it had all these opportunities. He described environments in a very emotional, sensory way, and I had very distinctive visuals that came to mind as I was reading it. Those visuals are exactly what exists in the movie. It just feels like magic when you get to do that.”

As it happens, both Shyamalan and her father have new films coming out this summer; his Trap stars Josh Hartnett as a serial killer who realizes he’s being targeted by police while at a concert with his daughter. Shyamalan says the timing is coincidental but ended up coming together in a cute way.

“I filmed last summer, and then literally the day I locked my film, he started his prep,” she says. “So it’s kind of been madness. Now we're editing side by side. We have two editing rooms on either side of the theater, and it's just back and forth — we’re in each other's editing rooms and talking about the movies. It’s this really cool flow.”

The Watchers hits theaters on June 7.

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Related content:

• M. Night Shyamalan's daughter is now directing her own mind-bending movies like The Watchers

• Why M. Night Shyamalan brought in his daughter Ishana to direct Servant episodes

• Why Servant had to end with that epic confrontation between Dorothy and Leanne
  

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.