To M. Night Shyamalan, any publicity is good publicity.
That’s the attitude the director is taking about the casting controversy surrounding his latest project “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
“It’s a compliment when everybody is up my ass all the time, it really is,” Shyamalan tells SciFi Wire. “You’ve got to look at it as, if they dismissed you, they weren’t paying any attention to you. They’re trying to dissect you to show you why you’re not that great, which is wonderful thing for them to try to do for my entire life. My job is to just keep making movies. It’ll go away, or I’ll prove them right or wrong, right? So time will tell. I’m fine with that. Your critics are … you want your hard teachers to tell you, ‘You’re no good, you’re no good because of this and this,’ even if they secretly believe the opposite. It’s good to be tough on yourself.”
“Anime is based on ambiguous facial features,” he said. “It’s part of the art form. You got a problem with that? Talk to the dudes who invented anime. It’s not my issue, OK? That girl [Katara] looks like my daughter. That boy [Aang] looks like Noah [Ringer]. There is no Inuit that looks like Katara. It’s not true. It’s just not true. She looks like my daughter. My daughter is a dupe of Katara. Our family saw ourselves in it. A Hispanic family saw themselves in it. My daughter’s best friend is Hispanic. She saw it, and their whole family thinks they’re all Hispanic, and that’s true. That’s the beauty of anime, [that] we all see ourselves as incredibly ambiguous and diverse. I wanted to be diverse. I wanted to be more diverse. I had to [build upon] whoever came in, the cultures that came in. This wasn’t an agenda for me. It was just very open to me.”
Hopefully the controversy will drive viewers to theaters out of curiosity and not away. Paramount is hoping the series could be a trilogy along the lines of “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings.”
“I think when we’re done with these three movies it will be, without even a second place, the most culturally diverse movies ever made by Hollywood,” Shyamalan said. “So the irony for me is if you look at me and say I am a problem, that I am the poster child for racism in Hollywood. … You look at the movie poster and you have Noah and Dev [Patel, who plays Zuko] back to back, and my name over it, and this is your issue with the state of Hollywood? I’m satisfied.”
Greg M says
Sounds like Shymalan and the FIFA guy would get along just fine. They have something in common.
KG from DC says
I’ve liked more M. Night movies than I’ve disliked them, so I’ll be seeing this. Mostly because it’s an existing property and I’m not concerned with his originalist take on it. I’ll probably be seeing this in 3D too. Whatever… throw your puny tomatoes.
Michael Falkner says
I’ve only seen three M. Night flicks: Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. I enjoyed the first two, and was moderately entertained with Signs despite its incredibly slow pacing.
Honestly, though, the entire trick of the “Last Minute Twist” is overdone. That, and I don’t have the motivation to actively look for any other MNS flick. If it happens upon my screen, fine. If not, oh well.
Diego S. says
@ Michael Faulkner:
Oh no, sir. Those three are about as good as it gets with Night. Please search out (or don’t, if you care about your sensibilities and don’t want to insult them) ‘The Happening’ or ‘Lady In the Water.’
You will see now how far Night has fallen since 6th Sense. It’s as if two entirely different directors made those movies.
Summer Brooks says
Actually, I enjoyed Lady in the Water. I have no idea why so many people dislike it. I look at it as a fairy tale in the same fashion as the comic book hero story in Unbreakable. Signs was rather aimless, but he should be punched in the throat repeatedly for The Village. If I’d seen that in theaters, I would have had some serious rage issues 🙂
That said, I love the animated series Last Airbender is based on, can’t stop watching it. I want to see this in IMAX (this weekend, in fact), but more importantly, I want to enjoy the story as much as I love the animated series. I guess I’ll find out.
sarah says
i saw the movie today in 3D, nd it wasnt that bad. im a huge fan of the anime nd the movie nd those critics r being harsh. thers good fighting scens and the effects r great.
Zergonapal says
Hmmm I have to concur, I havn’t seen The Happening, but at that point Shamalangadingdongs name was all over that and I just didn’t want to know after getting burnt by Lady in the Water.
I did enjoy Sixth Sense, The Village and Unbreakable though. I will probably look into Airbender though, purely from the great reviews the anime gets.
KG from DC says
Lady in the Water was pretty good. It was like a modern-day fairytale. I appreciated that movie. The Happening, not so much.
HJ says
It doesn’t stop with the ridiculous casting. The acting is truly horrible, the comic relief falls flat ( midnight showing I was at, one person would laugh out of the audience), and little parts in the movie are jarringly jammed into different scenes ONLY so they can be used in the trailer. The whole thing comes off as amateurish, something you might find randomly flipping channels in the middle of a summer afternoon. You might want to ignore this drivel and watch the cartoon instead…
Babaganoosh says
The argument that “anime is ambiguous” is an arrogant fallacy. If anime were so ambiguous why would non Japanese be so easy to identify in series – whites are typically square jawed, with smaller eyes compared to the characters of Asian heritage. The characters of anime are presumed to be Asian, unless otherwise stated because anime is inherently Japanese. They don’t have to be told that the cast is Japanese because the intended viewers already knows that.
It’s amusing that he cites Star Wars and Lord of the Rings as TLA’s cinematic ilk, because LotR never tried to force diversity outside of it’s initial source (European) and SW was a mixing bowl of spiritual/cultural ideas from all over the world. But SW had no source material to go on to draw from/ignore.
Indiana Jim says
I saw the movie tonight, and I have to say as a visual spectacle it was enjoyable. The music was pretty good, I think. Not James Newton Howard’s best, by any stretch, but passable.
What I found disappointing was it really is a rush job. No scene of dialogue lasts beyond five or six sentences, and entire episodes from the cartoon were crammed into 5 minute segments. It’s not like the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, where Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens condensed things with a keen eye for the deeper meaning of things. They were like translators. M. Night Shyamalan’s screenplay was like Cliff’s Notes. It completely lacked the magic and the heart of the cartoon.
He drastically violated Show Don’t Tell in the scene where Aang meets the northern Water tribe’s rulers. Once sentence supposedly justifies a burgeoning love interest between Sokka and Princess Yue, then a summation of “and then Aang trained with the water benders” and boom, we’re off to the next scene.
I knew the film would have to be condensed, but there was no creativity here. Shyamalan did not adapt, he merely synopsized.
John says
I have to agree with Indiana Jim, the movie seemed rushed and there was nothing to make you invest in the movie. Aang wasn’t likeable and fun loving like the Nichelodeon series. To top it off the acting was poor at best and the dialogue was atrocious. I loved the original series and had hopes for this movie but was severely dissapointed. I don’t know why I keep going to see this guys movies.
dan everyguy says
I just saw the movie and was stunned. Amatuerish does not even come close. This movie was clumsy, clunky and boring. I have only watched maybe a third of the animated series, which was stunningly directed. How Mr Shyamalan managed to phone it in so weakly is beyond me. Why did he change the firebending choreography? Why did he change the pronounciation of names? I read one interview in which Mr Shyamalan stated that he did not mispronounce the characters names because he pronounced them as they were written, indicating he probably never bothered to watch the source material.
For me this is Mr Shyamalan’s last film, he is now, in my mind, permanently classed with Ed Wood.