[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Trap.]

The Big Picture

Writer/Director M. Night Shyamalan tells ‘Trap’ from an unexpected point of view for a fun, darkly humorous experience.
Collaboration with his singer/songwriter daughter Saleka Shyamalan brings music and movement to the thriller.
Casting of Josh Hartnett as the lead showcases the need for actors who are willing to risk everything.

This summer, M. Night Shyamalan will be releasing his latest movie Trap in August while his daughter, Ishana Shyamalan, will be releasing her feature directorial debut The Watchers in June. With Trap, the story will follow a father (Josh Hartnett) who takes his teen daughter to attend a pop concert. Once there, what starts as a night of fun entertainment turns into a darker and more sinister event, as the cops set out to catch a killer they believe will be in attendance and the audience learns that they’re already following his point of view.

To bring the pop star to life in a live concert setting, Shyamalan collaborated with his singer/songwriter daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, and choreographer Cora Kozaris to continue the storytelling through music and movement and fuse it into the package of a thriller. Collider, along with other members of the media, was recently invited out to Soho House in West Hollywood to preview the trailer for Trap and hear from Shyamalan as he broke down what he wanted to achieve with his most recent venture. He also talked about the experience he hopes audiences will have, why he wanted to cast Hartnett in the role, collaborating with his artistic family, surprising audiences, and the challenges of staging a full concert as a setting.

M. Night Shyamalan Wanted To Tell the Story of ‘Trap’ From an Unexpected Point of View
Image via Warner Bros.

Question: What can moviegoers expect when they experience your film in theaters?

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: The idea of making the [audience] one-to-one with a character, and then taking advantage of that is fun. The idea of doing this story, but from the vantage point of the unexpected person that you don’t realize is your point of view was the epiphany when I was talking to Saleka about it. I leaned, more and more, into the dark humor angle that Servant, The Visit, and Split have. I wanted to really embrace that and make sure it’s just a fun time for everybody, as they’re gasping. It’s odd to be laughing when you should be terrified, and terrified while you’re laughing. There should be a term for that.

Will there be a soundtrack?

SHYAMALAN: Oh, yes. Definitely. It will be on Columbia Records because Saleka is there.

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How do you feel about your kids becoming artists? On the one hand, it can be exciting, but on the other hand, it can be a really tough business.

SHYAMALAN: I always think that art should lead commerce, and not the flip. You can make a movie about a video game, as long as you love it and you came from the love of that video game. Then, it’s art leading commerce. We don’t really talk about the commerce side of it. We don’t go, “This is what’s popular and this is how you do it.” In our house, you heard concertos playing, there were paintings and easels up everywhere, there were poems and pottery, there were ballet recitals, and there was just art and what that means in terms of understanding yourself. For Saleka when she’s writing songs, when you get deeply into a character and you empathize so deeply with that character, a part of you gets released and it’s honest, and many times more honest than we are with ourselves, and we can be with this fictional character. I’ve seen that myself, and now I see it with [my kids].

They know we’ve been very, very lucky. People would come up to us when they were babies and they’d say, “How do you know everybody? How does everybody know you?” And I’d say, “I don’t know them. They’ve seen [my movies]. We should be kind because they’ve paid for one brick of our house, that person that came up.” They understood what we owed that person in their debt and that responsibility. How you be responsible to that person is by taking risks. You have to risk their love by being pure. You can’t chase it. We had those kinds of conversations, day after day, and they heard me. They know we would burn the whole house down for an idea. They know that’s just a fact.

I was hoping Ishana would become a filmmaker because she was great at all art. She had a dress form in her room and would be draping, and she’d be painting on these huge easels, and she was a trained ballerina, and she would write these beautiful poems. I was like, “Well, you know, there’s one art form that you can do the whole thing.” I just watched it curate itself by not pushing it. When she toured NYU film school, I didn’t go that day. I think it was a very special connection that she had with that culture. It was very natural. And then, Servant happened and that allowed the education to continue.

M. Night Shyamalan Describes His Writing Process as a Snowball That Continues To Build

You’ve talked about always wanting to surprise the audience, so what can you say about your writing process? How do you approach a script?

SHYAMALAN: (My daughter) Ishana is fantastic at structure. When I was working with all the writers in the writers’ room on Servant, each writer had different strengths, and Ishana had a really strong handle on structure, which in the film format is the holy grail. I remember working on my first TV show with the Duffer brothers and feeling the exact same thing with them. I was like, “Wow, these guys just inherently understand structure.” That’s where they come from. As writers, we can get lost. We follow something and go to the right, but then we’ve lost the vertical of the structure of the plot.

Ishana is very Jackson Pollock and just throws all this stuff up. If she was doing a rewrite on either The Watchers or Servant, I’d be like, “Ishana, I just want you to work on this one little moment, this one scene. That’s all I want you to do.” And she would come back with the whole thing changed and everything was different. I’d be like, “What?!” And she would be like, “Is it good?” And I was like, “It’s really good. Now, don’t change this.” And it would go on. I find it, like a Swiss clock. I hold something, and then I wait for it to all make sense and fill it in. It never does this experimental thing. It forms, and then builds and builds and builds, like a snowball. And then, the artificial things that come into your head because you want it to do this or you want it to do that way gets excised or just doesn’t fit, and it gets rejected along the way. They are two different ways to get into flow state. One is that you close your eyes and go, “Well, what happens to this guy in this situation,” and you just listen and something happens. And then, the other one is this experimental, beautiful thing where you’re following something, and you’re listening to try to understand it, but you don’t wanna think your way through, you wanna feel it.

Could Trap be called a musical?

SHYAMALAN: I don’t know what you would call it. It’s a thriller set at a pop concert.

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Did you have the songs in advance? Were you able to write them into the script, or were you working in conjunction?

SHYAMALAN: I would say to Saleka, “This is the outline and we need this moment here. This is what he’s doing at this moment and I need a song here.” And then, I would just count them up and tell her where the beats of the songs were, and she just went away and wrote. She was slightly scoring it, in the way she was writing the songs. I didn’t ask her to do that. She was just feeling it out and commenting on the scenes. We just went over the 14 places and what they would mean. It was an interesting process. What I do with the actors, like with Josh [Hartnett], is that I spent a month or more, just talking line by line about, “Who is he?,” so his body could just be that person. It was the same thing with Saleka. We talked about, “Who is this fictional character? How does she write? Who are her fans? Why does she do this? What is the movement of the concert? How are these two things related, in the themes of the movie?”

M. Night Shyamalan Cast Josh Hartnett in ‘Trap’ Because He Was the Right Actor at the Right Time
Image via Warner Bros.

You have such a great history with actors. What made you cast Josh Hartnett?

SHYAMALAN: The way I make movies is outside the Hollywood conventions. It’s like, “Hey, I’m making this movie. We’re gonna make it in a very small, reasonable way. We rehearse in this way. I can tell you, on day 17, what we’re gonna shoot. It is very much like a play, and what I’m looking for is someone that’s willing to just let go completely, give themselves over, like a play, to the movie and leap. Don’t protect yourself. That’s my job. You just empathize and find that beautiful electricity.” And that requires the right actor at the right time in their life. That’s where Josh was when I met him. He lives outside London. He doesn’t live in the United States. He was raising, at that time, three girls. Now he has a fourth, a boy. You can tell he’s curated his life in a way that’s rich and has a lot to say. When I brought him this character, he’s very smart and he’s very analytical, and he was the right person at the right time. I saw him in Black Mirror, which was a great episode. And then, Chris [Nolan] cast him in Oppenheimer. And then, I cast him. It was just a feeling of the right person at the right time who has a lot to say. It’s so beautiful when you have an artist at the right place. It was so lovely. I just had the most wonderful time working with him.

There’s been a trend with horror movies casting heartthrobs as villains, like with Ethan Hawke in The Black Phone. Did that inspire you in casting Josh Hartnett?

SHYAMALAN: I needed a charming, handsome guy, who was somebody that could do humor and has charisma. Those are all descriptions of a movie star, but I want you to discover him a little bit. I love reinvention. I try to do that, even with contemporary actors that you are familiar with, and try to put them in different kinds of roles that you’ve never seen them in. A lot of times what happens in the trajectory of actors is that they’ll audition for everything and they so desperately want it, but they won’t be able to give anything. And then, one day, they figure out it’s not about getting something, it’s about giving something. And then, they’ll suddenly get that role, and they’ll give everything and risk everything, and they’ll become well-known for that role. And they might do that again and get a couple of those. After a couple of those, they start to think about how to protect it, and then they do safer things. They’ll be like, “I’m gonna do characters that have already existed in real life,” which is safer, so they leave original stories. We lose those actors to this other trajectory, and then they get into franchises. So, to find somebody that’s a bona fide movie star, that’s a great human being, and is willing to risk everything is a rare combination. Sometimes you think that doesn’t exist anymore. And then, he walked in.

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You’re no stranger to directing actors playing a villain. What were the challenges in making this one different?

SHYAMALAN: I found the duality of this human being really interesting as a character, and so did Josh. He’s delicious. Can I get you to root for him, even if he’s doing the absolute worst things? What will you feel inside, as you watch the movie and you’re like, “I’m rooting for this guy. What’s wrong with me? Am I crazy?” For me, the father-daughter relationship clearly is a predominant thing in my life, and that part of him is so beautiful.

What does it mean to you to be releasing Trap in the same summer that your daughter, Ishana Shyamalan, has The Watchers coming out?

SHYAMALAN: It’s lovely. It just played out this way. It wasn’t intentional, in any way. It was about where Warner Bros. thought The Watchers should go and where they thought Trap should go, in this very unusual year after the strike. We made it independently, and it just happened to be this way. It wasn’t at all scheduled like this. We just went, “What is the best date for that movie? What is the best date for this movie?” And it turned out it was in the same summer.

Did we see a poster for The Watchers in the Trap trailer?

SHYAMALAN: You did.

‘Trap’ Incorporates a Full-Blown Pop Concert Set in a 20,000-Seat Arena
Image via Blumhouse Pictures

How did you stage the concert and how much of it will we actually see?

SHYAMALAN: You’ll see a lot of it. I know I’m gonna look back and go, “How do we do that?” We put on a full-blown concert in an arena outside Toronto. I needed an arena to give me [the space] for two months. Who’s gonna give me a 20,000-seat arena for two months? We just got so lucky because they were renovating and I said, “Stop and let me just take over for two months,” and they said okay. It was a very complicated and wonderfully rewarding process. I was just very excited about it. I was doing it with Saleka and we were coming up with it together, with the different departments, from production design to the costumes to the choreography. From having done some of Saleka’s videos – both Ishana and I have directed some of her music videos – I’ve learned the form of dance as storytelling is absolutely amazing.

Ishana was a ballerina, so I was very awakened to the storytelling possibilities of choreography, and we found this incredible choreographer out of Canada, named Cora Kozaris. We really hit it off and she did brilliant work. We would talk about the choreography in relation to the song and to the movie, and it would come out of that. She was just wonderful. It was so satisfying. I wrote this script, but behind them is this really intricate, beautiful thing that’s happening. When we all saw The Lord of the Rings, we thought, “Someone didn’t just make that on the fly while they were in pre-production. That house design and that language, somebody thought about that for a long time.” That was the most important thing. You can feel the world-building very deeply. In the same way, this wasn’t a secondary element of the movie. This was equal to the movie.

We see glimpses in the trailer outside the concert, with flashes of what he might have done before. How much will we see outside the venue?

SHYAMALAN: I can’t tell you that. I will tell you that you’ll be surprised. It’s wild. This one was really interesting, the way I wrote it. I don’t know why it came out differently than the others. It was like a movie that I wrote when I was a kid. It just tumbled out. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it ended here, and then it kept on going. And then, I was like, “Wait a minute, it doesn’t end there,” and it kept on going. And then, I realized the end when I got to the end, which is really unusual for me. It was a discovery, and you feel that when you’re watching the movie. When you see the ultimate movie, you’ll see that it’s tumbling towards something and you’ll go, “Oh, my God.” It’s strange because it wasn’t born that way. It was born slowly through movements. It’s strange that this one came out that way.

Trap is out in theaters on August 9th. Check out the trailer: