M. Night Shyamalan scored monster hits with his films The Sixth Sense and Signs, but his most recent ventures, The Village and Lady in the Water, were relative critical and box office disappointments. The moviemaker is hoping to rebound with his latest effort, the top secret fright film The Happening, which finds Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo running for their lives after a deadly incident occurs on the East Coast of the United States. Shyamalan talks to Jonas Nelson about The Happening, assesses Lady in the Water and previews his next film - a live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

We’ve heard there’s a nature-biting-mankind-in-the-butt theme to The Happening. What can you say about that, especially since the film’s working title was The Green Effect?

Well, I have heard that theory, too. That is a possible theory that’s in there, maybe. There are a lot of theories bandied about in the movie…You know what’s so hard about making movies in this day and age? It’s like someone rifling through your shelves as you’re trying to develop an idea. The Sixth Sense was a ‘serial killer movie’ way before it was a ghost movie. So these things always morph. They evolve. Things happen en route. But there are a lot of theories thrown around in the movie.

This is your first film to receive an R rating…

I was thinking in terms of The Exorcist and how intense that experience was - of going from zero to 60 every time Ellen Burstyn opened the door to her daughter’s room, and not being prepared for what I was seeing. It’d be dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, open the door and “Oh, my God, I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” That kind of feeling is throughout this movie.

How was the experience of filming The Happening?

It was the most fun experience making a movie that I’ve had. A lot of times the ‘making of’ has nothing to do with the final product. A tortuous one can feel effortless when it comes out. This one, the making of it, everything about it, the post-production, all of it has rails underneath it. I wonder if that’s because, unlike the last couple of movies, which were ensemble pieces and were quirkier and had fragmented storylines, this one had more of an engine right from the second the movie starts.

It becomes like a slingshot. There’s a certain glue to it, so when you’re putting the film together it just gels very nicely. When we screened it, it was an incredible experience because everybody was frozen in their seats. When they came out everyone was sore from how tight their muscles had been and how many times they jumped and all of that. It’s really cool. It’s a fun experience to watch it with an audience.

Lady in the Water was the least successful of your post-Sixth Sense films. Do you think people will appreciate it more in the future?

Time has been really kind to my movies that were misfits. It’s been really kind to Unbreakable and The Village, and I assume it will be to Lady as well. You can’t help but benefit by getting a cleaner look at it and not having as much nonsense around it. It was very personal. There’s a nicer way to say “I didn’t like the movie.”

What lessons did you take away from the Lady in the Water experience?

Two things. One is there’s really no roadmap for me. I kind of knew that before, but now I’m very crystal clear about it. I have problems - I have to live by the rules of a filmmaker, but I have also the burdens of a star to sell a movie and the connections with the audience that are normally the kind of connections you’d have with Will Smith. Those are a complicated set of things.

I love the relationship. I honor it, just like an author of novels or plays would, or actually in TV, where the author is generally the person you come to see. I understand that’s not normal in film and it’s always been resisted as some kind of negative thing. The rules of the game are becoming clearer to me. I have never been good at following the rules, but at least they’re clearer to me.

And the second?

The second thing is I don’t think about how we are going to sell it. I don’t want to think about anything that calculatedly. I want to be completely improvisational and jazz-like and make a movie that is not agenda-driven. It discovers itself.

Your artistic freedom is in ratio, a lot of times, to your ability to protect yourself as a business. So I can get a lot of freedom to do things if I’ve protected myself. I consciously did not do this [on Lady in the Water]. I said, “I don’t know how to sell this movie!”, that kind of thing. That was unfair, because I was taking a lot of risks. If I sat down again I’d go, ‘OK, this is how I would orient it. Obviously, we’re going to have giant expectations because of the other movies, and we want to make sure everyone knows it’s a different kind of movie...’ Maybe it wouldn’t be called Lady in the Water. If you know how you’re going to position it, I think you’d orient the movie five, 10 percent more in that direction... It’s about its essence, and I consciously didn’t do that because I wanted to show a whole different side of me. But it didn’t protect me and it didn’t protect the movie, that abdication of that process.

You’re doing The Last Airbender next. How’d that come about?

You never know why things happen. ‘Why did you write Stuart Little? Why did you do Lady in the Water? Why have your instincts been moving towards family films?’ I have always dabbled with the idea of doing one of these movies, like a Harry Potter or Narnia, all these franchises that I’ve been approached about, that we’ve thought about and struggled over… No matter how much I try, it comes out with my accent, and I have to make sure I find material that my accent is appropriate for.

This project came organically from my seven-year-old, who was watching this show and forced us to watch it. I was like, “Oh, my God, this is amazing!” I was in the kitchen and I said, “Wow, this would make a great movie!” Everyone started screaming and yelling, and my wife was like, “This is it! This is it! This is everything you ever wanted to make in one movie.” I couldn’t be any happier about it.

The Happening is released in the US & UK on 13 June 2008.

Click here to view the trailer.