M. Night Shyamalan On Unbreakable & Avatar: The Last Airbender Sequels

In an interview to the Huffington Post, After Earth’s director M. Night Shyamalan talked about a possible Unbreakable and Avatar: The Last Airbender sequels.

Check out the excerpt of the interview:

There’s been talk of an “Unbreakable” sequel for a long time.
Yeah.

Samuel L. Jackson seems to want to do it. I saw you two talking on Twitter.
It’s a harder one for me because — it’s getting closer, by the way.

I feel like I’ve heard that for the past 10 years. I want that to be true.
I want it to happen, too. We’ve been talking about almost the same subject in every one of your questions, which is artistic integrity — something versus an agenda. Right? And almost every single one of your questions was agenda versus intention, even though you didn’t realize it, but it kind of fell into that theme as we were talking.

Agenda how?
So, like you think I go and I write, “Oh, I’m going to write a twist ending.”

I didn’t know. That’s why I asked.
That’s an agenda versus “I want to talk about loneliness.” And then it comes out, “How is the best way to talk about loneliness?” Intention versus agenda. And then I go, “Oh my God, if I make a movie about loneliness and everybody hated it, will it be able to come out and people will get it?” That’s when you start going, “Oh my God,” and you try to push that away. The same thing with “Unbreakable,” to some extent, it’s excitement to be made. “It’s such a fun thing” is squashing my ability to find the thing that’s connecting me with it. Does that make sense? So, I don’t feel like I did it for agenda reasons. So, slowly I’m getting a story in my head that I feel like is able to tell what I’m feeling right now.

For people who like that movie, it sounds encouraging.
Yeah, it is! The story of a guy who kind of wakes up with a little gray feeling in the morning, I love that character. It’s something that I feel and I want to talk more about that character.

Another is a possible sequel to “The Last Airbender.” A movie that critics didn’t like, but it did make a lot of money.
Yeah, I love the kind of Eastern philosophies of that. Those are costly movies to make and they take a lot of time. So, what happens is, there’s a thriller I can do pretty fast, they go quickly. And I didn’t expect to make another big movie — I was going to make a thriller and then go make the sequel to “Airbender.” Then I made “After Earth,” which took a long time, so it kind of took that two-and-a-half to three-year period. So, I’m trying to sit down and see if I want to do a really small movie next.

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