Watch M. Night Shyamalan explain the secret origin of 'Glass' (exclusive)
Most modern movie trilogies take five to seven years to complete; in an entirely appropriate plot twist, M. Night Shyamalan’s wait stretched into the double digits. Back in 2000, the filmmaker followed up his breakout blockbuster, The Sixth Sense, with Unbreakable, the story of an ordinary man, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who discovers he’s capable of extraordinary power. Made before the comic book cinema boom, the movie offered a realistic take on the typical superhero story, climaxing with David realizing that his mentor, easily breakable Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), is actually his nemesis, Mr. Glass. That confrontation begged for a resolution that never happened … until now.
Nineteen years later, Shyamalan’s latest film, Glass, concludes the trilogy that began with Unbreakable and continued with 2017’s Split, which created the supervillain the Horde (James McAvoy) set to challenge Willis’s superhero, aka David “the Overseer” Dunn, with Mr. Glass acting as the ringmaster of their brawl. “It’s probably the most ambitious thriller I’ve ever done,” the director remarks in a new featurette, premiering today exclusively on Yahoo Entertainment in advance of the movie’s Jan. 18 opening day. (Watch the featurette above.)
One of Shyamalan’s chief ambitions with Glass was finding a way to mix the strikingly different styles of Unbreakable and Split into a single movie. “[With] each movie, I kind of invent a new tone and a new life,” he explains. “It was really different for me to kind of bring characters from two different movies I had invented earlier.” He eventually found common ground between the two movies by approaching Glass as an exploration of good and evil, and the ways in which we choose to use our innate abilities for either purpose.
If you think fans have been waiting a long time for another face-off between David Dunn and Mr. Glass, Jackson was even more more impatient. “Sam would joke, ‘When are we making the sequel?'” Shyamalan says. But Jackson seems to feel that the 19-year wait has paid off. “It’s a valid culmination of the trilogy,” the actor says in the featurette. “It’ll give the audience a sense of closure.” Until the next adventure, of course.
Glass opens in theaters on Jan. 18.
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