M. Night Shyamalan, talking to New York Magazine about his latest movie, The Last Airbender:
NYMag: Airbender’s running time is only 104 minutes, which isn’t very long considering that it’s an adaptation of the twenty-episode first season of the cartoon. Was it hard to pack everything in there?
Shyamalan: I’m dying to make a two-hour movie, I just haven’t earned it yet. I’m really tough in cutting and I have a style that creates a certain pace, and a way of writing where I try to get nuances in one scene that help other scenes; it creates a very similar pacing in every movie. Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and I believe The Village were all the exact same length. So it’s very bizarre. I guess also when I’m constructing the story in the script form, it must be that there’s just an inherent kind of “I need to be at this place in the story” driving me. So maybe that’s where it’s coming from.
Given the extremely negative reviews The Last Airbender is getting, perhaps a better answer is that Shyamalan is simply a hack with an extremely limited comfort zone as a writer and director.
