When he was a budding 25-year-old filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan was tapped to adapt The Notebook — Nicholas Sparks' soon-to-be famous romantic novel — for the big screen. Shyamalan turned it down because he was already working on what would become his breakout film, The Sixth Sense (1999).
Nearly three decades later, the two storytellers have finally come together. Their new project Remain is both a novel and a film based on a story they developed in tandem. The book is out now. The movie is due in theaters next October.
"I'm so blessed that the first date that I had with the audience, The Sixth Sense, was something that came wholesale from me," Shyamalan told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel in a joint interview with Sparks at NPR's New York studios, "so I don't have to pretend to be somebody else."
If he had taken on The Notebook, which was ultimately directed by Nick Cassavetes and released in 2004, Shyamalan said Hollywood would have put him in a box as a creator of romantic dramas. "They would want me to do that over and over and over — now I'm pretending — and that would have been a scary 30 years. But our relationship began with honesty," through Remain, Shyamalan added.
A one-time experiment
Remain centers on Tate Donovan — played by Jake Gyllenhaal — a successful architect who arrives on Cape Cod to design a summer home for a client. Tate begins working on the design after being released from treatment for severe depression following his sister's death. A young woman — Wren, played by Phoebe Dynevor — then challenges the way he sees the world.
"From there, the story moves in a very Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan way," Sparks said, meaning with heavy doses of both romance and the supernatural.
Sparks and Shyamalan developed the story jointly rather than adapting an existing work. While the plot remains consistent in both the novel and the film, the characters have different backstories depending on the medium.
"I read Night's script. I said, 'that is great.' It's going to be an unbelievable movie, works on every level. It will not work as a novel, the structure won't work," Sparks recalled. "He [Shyamalan] read the novel once and was like, this is a great novel, love the novel, because it is different than what I did."
Sparks compares the story to a coin that they each stamped on one side, while Shyamalan compares it to having identical twins raised separately.
"You can tell they're identical, but they're very different in their personalities," Shyamalan said.
He and Sparks said the experiment worked out because of how attuned they were to one another and the trust they could have in each other's work as long established masters of their respective disciplines.
"I can't imagine this ever happening again," Shyamalan said. "You would need exactly this type of relationship for it to work."
Growing new storytelling muscles
Remain is Sparks' 26th book overall and 25th novel. Many of the prolific, best-selling author's works were adapted into film, like Message in a Bottle and The Last Song. He's also doubled as producer for film adaptations of his novels The Choice, Safe Haven, The Best of Me and The Longest Ride.
But Sparks says he's sometimes struggled with directors who were "just not getting it" when it came to his vision. "There wasn't any of that [with Remain] because I trusted him on the film and he trusted me on the novel for this same story," Sparks said.
Just as Shyamalan was nearly pigeonholed into making romantic dramas, Sparks didn't set out to write romance at first. His first novel, The Passing, was a horror story he wrote in 1985 while studying at the University of Notre Dame. He followed that with The Royal Murders (1989). Sparks has called these early novels an "apprenticeship of sorts" in writing that he has no plans to publish.
It was with The Notebook (1996), based on the love story of his then-wife Cathy's grandparents, that Sparks found his breakthrough. The popular tale has also made it to the stage with a Broadway musical.
"My challenge was then to not do the same thing I just did with The Notebook," Sparks said, adding that he's since tried to take a different approach to each new romance he puts to paper.
Early in his career, Shyamalan says he struggled with being seen as someone who only makes supernatural films, a genre he says gets less love in Hollywood, but it's grown on him.
"I wrote The Sixth Sense, so then everyone was like, 'Well, you're this guy.' But I was like, 'Well, the same year I wrote Stuart Little, why am I not that guy?'" he said. "I kind of love it, kind of like, 'Nothing to see over here, we're just making genre...' I can then approach it at the highest level of execution — the performances, the cinematography, everything — so that so that somebody will look at me and go, 'wait a minute, that's not just a scary movie.'"
Sparks also doesn't expect to earn a Pulitzer Prize or a MacArthur Fellowship for his romantic novels. "I think the readers who enjoy my work get that," he said.
Shyamalan wrapped filming on Remain earlier this year, using various locations in Rhode Island as a stand-in for the Massachusetts peninsula Cape Cod. The movie is now in post-production.
"Hopefully, the readers and the audience will feel, whoa, there's another set of muscles that have grown in storytelling," Shyamalan said, thanking Sparks for teaching him a different approach. "He thinks deeply about the backstory in a way that's natural to his craft and then I think in movement or structure, in a way that's natural to my craft. Putting them together is really powerful."
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Julie Depenbrock and edited by Olivia Hampton. The digital version was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi.
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