The Village - BTS Featurette

[ZUBi]

teaser, trailer & tv spot here
http://www.movie-list.com/trailers.php?id=village

Behind-the-Scenes Featurette

QT high, 18MB, 480x360, 1m:38s
http://bvbp-qt.vitalstream.com/TheVi...S9012_1500.mov
QT low
http://bvim-qt.vitalstream.com/2899/..._year_0300.mov

WMP high
mms://media.vitalstream.com/bvbp_sitestream_com/TheVillage/Village_BTS9012_0300.wmv?media=1849136&package=1818851&event=0
WMP low
mms://media.vitalstream.com/bvbp_sitestream_com/TheVillage/Village_BTS9012_0056.wmv?media=1849136&package=1818851&event=0

[Rufus]

Thanks, ZUBi .. here's a poster ..
<IMG SRC="http://www.latinoreview.com/films_2004/touchstone/thevillage/image/Village_Onesheet.jpg">

[Stormwalker]

I heard that they are really living in the present and the monsters are construction workers...

anyway because of the above rumour.. supposedly the ending is going to be reshot.. who knows

[TwoThumbzUp]

Here is the story about the reshoots- not sure if it is about the ending - but I guess now no one knows what the ending is

Posted on Sat, May. 22, 2004
Dan Gross| 'Village'

still shooting in Chesco

M. Night Shyamalan and crew quietly set up shop in Chadds Ford, Chester County, this week to shoot additional footage for his movie, "The Village."

Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, and Bryce Howard were present for a three-day shoot, which, several crewmembers say, was the filming of a new ending.

The Gladwyne-based director's sixth film is scheduled for a July 30 release and had filmed in Chadds Ford last year, from October through December.

It also stars Adrien Brody and Brendan Gleeson.

The film is set in 1897 in a small town called Covington, which is surrounded by woods where a group of mythical creatures live.

There's an agreement between the humans and the beasts to leave each other alone, until one day, Phoenix's character wanders into their sanctum.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Shyamalan has said the movie was inspired by "King Kong," "Alien" and "Wuthering Heights."

A spokeswoman for the filmmaker said that while the shooting took place, it did not involve a new ending.

[bondish]

This is gonna suck. Take a read of this.

This review is based on a 2003 production draft of the script's original title, The Woods.

It’s sad to report that The Village script, as written, marks a new low point in M. Night Shyamalan’s screenwriting career. Sad only because everyone knows he has great talent, but somehow seems not to have brought it to this draft. While many of its blemishes will be cleaned up by the film’s release, even a thorough scrubbing couldn’t possibly wash way all of the deep-rooted story problems here. The Village script fails because it features poorly realized characters, dialogue, and story. This is the sixth script that Shyamalan has written and directed, and it seems he’s fallen too much in love with his own material to put the hard work necessary into elevating it- common ditch that most auteurs eventually fall into, and only a few ever managed to escape.

The Village begins in the year 1896 with the death of a child that we later learn might have been saved if proper medicine had been available. But the villagers aren’t allowed to enter the nearby forbidden Covington Woods and head into town for feat of attack from mysterious creatures known only has “Those we don’t speak of.” This Amish-like society fears cities and considers them equally as dangerous as the beasts that lurk the woods. Eventually the protagonist, Lucius, suffers a near-fatal injury and his blind fiancée, Ivy, makes the dangerous journey into the woods so that she can procure medicine from the nearest city to save him.

Yes folks, you guessed it- there’s a twist at the end. Shyamalan seems incapable of writing anything that doesn’t include an outrageous final twist, and The Village produces his weakest ending to date. The Sixth Sense ending wowed audiences worldwide because very few of them had ever seen Jacob’s Ladder or The Twilight Zone episode “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” (also Best Short Subject Academy Award winner in 1964). Even though the concept had been popularized in those previous films, Shyamalan’s moody script and steady direction made his film successful and deserves credit.

But he’s become a victim of his own success and now employs twists for twists’ sake at the end of all his films. In Unbreakable we learn that Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson are respectively real-world superheroes and super-villains. Many people rejected that twist, as absurd as it was, it had more honesty than Shyamalan’s subsequent turns. In Signs the twist relied on a Highway to Heaven-styled schmaltzy message from beyond the grave as Mel Gibson’s remembrance of his dying wife’s final words helped his family defeat the aliens invading their house. Forget the fact that these aqua-fearing aliens invaded a planet covered with 90% water- one special family learned how to believe in God while battling aliens!

With The Village Shyamalan tries to pitch his best twister at you, but you can see it coming if you’ve been paying attention. And you’d have to be paying attention because Shyamalan forgot to mask his twist under any sort of compelling narrative or characters. Think about it- a backwards society that’s cut off from the rest of the worlds that repeatedly mentions their hatred of modern cities and clings to beliefs of simpler times-one that forbids its youth from exiting the village’s borders for fear of an attack by forest bests. It practically telegraphs the ending series of twists. For the first fifty pages these beasts are never seen and only spoken about. Then on page fifty a sentry triggers an alarm, and we see nothing but shadows and folks hiding and crying. This repeats a few times until the beasts mysteriously skin all the villager’s animals and hang them around town. You’d hope it’s leading to confrontation, but the changes of that are bleak.

Then Shyamalan makes the biggest blunder a writer can make in handling suspense: he tells you the answer to one of the script’s mysteries. Tells, not shows. The first twist occurs on page 96 (out of 125) when the blind Ivy is told by an elder that there are no real beasts, and that it’s all been a part of an elaborate scheme by the elders to keep their happy community cut off from the rest of the world. This was done in order to preserve their innocent way of life. The guilt-ridden Edward tells Ivy so she can save her true love. By telling, rather than showing, Shyamalan takes away any sense of discovery and drama that the audience might have enjoyed after being led down a dead end for 90 minutes. While The Sixth Sense ultimately contained real ghosts, and Signs had aliens, it’s a letdown to learn there are no real bests here. Still, it’s expected because the script does such a good job of hiding them that by page 96 they’re too boring and unbelievable to really exist anyway.

When the final question is raised about how none of the elders skinned the villager’s animals and maybe there are actually beasts, it’s clear that the script doesn’t bother with that subplot. After sending a blind girl into the woods to find a nearby town for medicine, the script lowers itself again by having its secondary beast turn out to be the mentally retarded character Noah, who childishly longs for Ivy’s unrequited love. He’s apparently found the elders’ beast costumes and runs around causing his own ruckus trying to scare Ivy.

Ivy should know it’s Noah because she claimed to be able to see people’s auras earlier in the script, but now suddenly Noah’s bad costume hides his aura? It’s inconsistent. But even after outwitting Noah, Shyamalan’s game of Twister hasn’t ended yet. As Ivy blindly stumbles around, we’re left with plenty of time to think about where she’s going, and all evidence suggests that this cultish, backward society probably isn’t stuck in 1896, leaving little surprise when Ivy stumbles onto a highway in 2004. It’s just another bad twist for twist’s sake, seemingly an apologetic one, because maybe Shyamalan (subconsciously) knows how weak the previous two twists were.

Shyamalan constantly attempts a Hitchcock style but has sadly forgotten the most classic Hichtcockian lessons: don’t telegraph your twist, cover it up with a Macguffin- the plot device used to distract your audience from the hidden truth. In this script the Macguffin is the mysterious group of beasts. They’re what should focus attention so completely that we could never imagine a Truman Show-type reveal. But Shyamalan did such a lazy job of only suggesting the beasts that there’s plenty of time to let one’s mind wander through various monologues and the clunky “old speak” employed throughout. If The Village had any sort of action, adventure, discovery, horror or real romance rather than restrained romance maybe we might have been invested enough in the story to attain a feeling similar to the end of the original Planet of the Apes when Heston realizes he’s been on Earth the whole time. But since Shyamalan forgot to construct a real story behind his twists, that entire house of cards has already fallen long before they occur. The Hitch-cockian protagonist switch, a la Psych, from Lucius to Ivy kind of works, but both characters read so blandly that it ultimately doesn’t matter. The silliest reveal comes in the final pages when one of the elder’s locked wooden boxes is opened to reveal a pair of blue jeans. The boxes weren’t too important in this draft, but hopefully something better than blue jeans will emerge from them by the final film.

Is this the end of M. Night Shyamalan? Of course not. His past successes will continue to provide future opportunities. Shyamalan is still a talented writer who has written a very readable script, but one incapable of ever getting produced unless someone of his stature fell in love with it. But who could fall in love with a faux horror script that lacks the honestly-earned scares? This draft was devoid of a strong protagonist, strong secondary characters, or compelling character motivations. Narrative experimentation is always encouraged, but never fruitful, when the writing behind it remains lazy. Hopefully Shyamalan has done an inspired rewrite and all the scripts flaws have been erased. But as for this particular draft, if it were a spec from an unknown writer, it wouldn’t sell, because the writer has forgotten how to entertain and has become transfixed with finding the next chic twist.

[Matt]

M. Night Shyamalan Interview (QT)
http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2645211_200.mov

"On The Set" featurette (QT)
http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2645155_200.mov

Bryce Dallas Howard interview (QT)
http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2645210_200.mov

Joaquin Phoenix interview (QT)
http://download.ifilm.com/qt/portal/2645209_200.mov

[editman]

Q.C.!

The iFilm featurette is the same as the Yahoo! "Don't Cross This Boundary" featurette posted in this thread.

[Matt]

Damn them! They said it was exclusive!