The multiplex catered for new releases unavailable on a home format, but something more was needed to get audiences interested in seeing classic and cult favourites on the big screen again. Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, I was enamoured when the Greasers, played by Ralph Macchio, C Thomas Howell and Matt Dillon, went to that bastion of early Fifties Americana – the drive-in movie. What was most fascinating was that the Greasers didn’t even have a car; they watched the movie from plastic seats at the back of the park. The lack of an automobile demonstrated that it wasn’t the cars that were “cool” about the experience, but the romance of watching the silver screen under the stars.
The past decade has seen alfresco movies take off in the UK.

As video ate into cinema revenues in the late Eighties, distributors searched for new ways to excite audiences into watching films away from their sofas. Movies were meant to be watched in cinemas or on video with the curtains drawn. But I’d wanted to see a film under the night sky ever since I had my first taste of outdoor cinema, which bizarrely came at home on video. At the time, sitting waiting for the sky to darken with a group of friends, a blanket and a picnic seemed positively alien. You have such an intense relationship and then they’re gone.”A bit like Disney, really.’Lady in the Water’ opens on 11 August.

The first time I saw a film in the open air was in Paris in 1997. Showing on the big screen in the gorgeous surrounds of the Parc de la Villette was Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff. So in a way it was just perfect.”If I’d gone there, I might have focused on networking, or a million things everybody says you need to do But I spent those five years learning to write. I don’t think you get to write a screenplay like The Sixth Sense unless you devote yourself exclusively.”The only bad thing for me about not living in Los Angeles is that I make close friends and then I cannot continue that relationship on a daily basis That can be very lonely People like Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis I physically miss these guys. “Being in Pennsylvania forced me to concentrate on the one thing I have that Hollywood didn’t, screenplays. That’s what Bryce is to me – she isn’t one of the 40.” The director first showcased Howard’s talents in The Village, although next year’s Spider-Man 3 is likely to cement her future as a leading actress.If Shyamalan ever doubted his wisdom in trying to conquer Hollywood from Pennsylvania, he’s probably grateful to be so far removed now. Our personalities create our facial features, and every now and then you meet someone who doesn’t fit into an archetype.

It makes you go, ‘Whoa!’ And I wonder if the ‘it’ quality of somebody is that they’ve created their own archetype and you’re attracted to that glow because it isn’t an archetype. “Sometimes it feels like everybody you meet is one of 40 different personalities, the whole world, everyone is one of 40 personalities. “My wife just got her doctorate in psychology,” he says, somewhat forlornly Does she put him on the couch? “Yes, all the time. I have a lot of problems apparently! A wife with a PhD in psychology is not something I’d recommend.” He met his Hong Kong-born wife while both were studying in New York.If Shyamalan’s wife is his daily muse, then Bryce Dallas Howard, 25, daughter of the director Ron Howard, is his film equivalent. IfUnbreakable (2000) was disappointing, then Signs (2002), with Mel Gibson, and The Village (2004) brought in healthy receipts.Shyamalan was the son of an obstetrician mother and internist father. “Growing up, film-making didn’t even register with my parents as a legitimate career. I could have said ‘rock star’ to them and they would have viewed it with the same level of legitimacy.” He was born in India but raised in Pennsylvania’s Penn Valley suburb, where his Hindi parents sent him to a strict Catholic school.But he can’t escape the doctors, even at home.

Wide Awake (1998) grossed little more than $250,000 in the US, giving little indication of the potential of The Sixth Sense, which raked in more than $600m globally for Disney. “Following that thread, I become a film-maker, I get lucky, I get successful, I get money, I put it into a foundation, so now we have a big foundation which my wife [Bhavna] runs and she just went to India where she visited this woman who stood up against these gangs and now she’s helping the children. So we’re going to help fund that village, to educate the women who then will help the kids go to school from where they might go on to become doctors and save thousands of lives – so Spike Lee saved thousands of lives in a village in India by his actions! Right? So how do you know where you are in that link?”I think that ultimately the power of this movie is the realisation of the beauty of the idea of how connected we are,” Shyamalan says.He was born Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan; “Night” is a name he dreamt up in college. That’s what I tell my kids; that ordinary people can do great things, that your actions can have thousand-fold results.”In recent years, he’s become impassioned about this “chain effect” theory, citing his discovery of Spike Lee’s low-budget “guerrilla film-making” theory as an empowering inspiration. His first film, Praying with Anger (1992), was self-financed; he also directed, produced and starred in it. This idea of being a link in the chain is an empowering story. And part of the fun was to tell the most absurd story that I told my kids and then have you, through the course of the movie, laugh at it, and then slowly start to take it seriously and it becomes tragic and then grounded and real and has metaphoric qualities.Shyamalan has expanded his trademark cameo into a fully fledged role, portraying a writer whose books will inspire future generations and may even change the world.”It’s really a story about muses that are supposed to inspire ordinary people to do things that will have big effects down the road, that will do something good for the world.