In the greatest twist of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, the director of recent flops like After Earth and The Last Airbender told Movies.com that he actually ghost-wrote the pretty popular 90’s rom-com She’s All That starring Freddie Prinz Jr. and Rachel Leigh Cook.
Movies.com: People have come to expect a certain something from an M. Night Shyamalan movie, so do you find yourself picking projects that are going to manage what has become this idea of you as a brand?
Shyamalan: I guess I would say that I manage it in the sense that I try to make it more accurate. For example, you’re saying the audience’s relationship started with me with The Sixth Sense. That same year I wrote Stuart Little. That combination is pretty accurate. The breadth of that and my interest in that, the family-oriented nature of that story — somewhere between there is where a lot of my movies fall, but if you don’t take that side of it into account, it’s probably more limiting than what my tastes are.
By the way, I ghost-wrote a movie that same year that would even add to the breadth of it all, but I don’t know if I want to tell you which movie I ghost-wrote. [Laughs]
Movies.com: We’d love to hear about it.
Shyamalan: I ghost-wrote the movie She’s All That. [Laughs]
I guess the twist in She’s All That was that Rachel Leigh Cook was BEAUTIFUL ALL ALONG! All she needed to do was take off those glasses and put on the dress. No one could see it but it was right there in front of our eyes. Amazing! Shyamalan did it again.