Home Media Magazine - Agent DVD - July 2008 - (Page DVD46) *HORRORFILES SHYAMALAN PLANS BLU-RAY UBER-CAMEO FOR ‘THE HAPPENING’ as Joey. Still, he thought he might be able to poke fun at himself in a disc extra, but it didn’t work out. BY FRED TOPEL A udiences are used to seeing M. Night Shyamalan in his movies. His Hitchcockian uber-cameosarewell-known. Now viewers may be able to see even more of him on the upcoming high-definition Blu-ray Disc of The Happening. Shyamalan recorded an interview specifically for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment’s Blu-ray edition of the film. Intended to play along with the movie, perhaps in a picture-in-picture mode, the final product displays a morbid sense of humor. “It reminded me of how interesting and fun the process can be when you’re making a fun, scary movie,” Shyamalan says. “You laugh the whole time you watch the Blu-ray interview with me because you’re watching all these gruesome things going on behind me, and I’m saying, ‘Well, when we made this and that …’ It is fun watching it, and it reminded me of being a kid again.” Shyamalan is often criticized for giving himself parts larger than cameos in his own films. He is barely visible in The Happening M. Night Shyamalan “I wanted to shoot [faux deleted scenes] as a joke for the DVD, all the scenes of me that I cut out as Joey,” Shyamalan says. “Like me being an obnoxious guy, we really wanted to do that. I wish I’d done it, but [costar] Zooey [Deschanel] lives in L.A., and we couldn’t do it.” The Happening is Shyamalan’s first ‘R’rated movie, but he didn’t collect a lot of additional gore for alternate versions. And he isn’t planning to add any shots back to the film for the DVD or Blu-ray. “They asked whether I wanted to make for the DVD all the things I took out for the movie and put it back in for Blu-ray, but I never like that,” he says. “I took it out because I thought the storytelling was better in this version, and it would be wrong to put it back in.” Many of Shyamalan’s previous films are available on Blu-ray, so the filmmaker has had a chance to revisit his early work in high-definition. “A bunch of people called me about Unbreakable on Blu-ray,” he said. “The visceralness of it, I guess, was what stuck out to me. Just seeing it closer to the original we get to see when we make movies. We see it in the mix room, and everything is perfect. I’m designing the sound on it, and it’s a perfect scenario and everything is precision. So it’s a closer experience to that one which no one ever gets to see except for me and the eight people who are finishing the movie.” AGENTDVD JULY 2008 45 AgentDVD.com http://agentdvd.com
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