Starting with his breakthrough classic The Sixth Sense in 1999, M. Knight Shyamalan's spent nearly a decade torturing audiences with suspense and his trademark plot twists, what the director calls "paradigm shifts." His newest movie, The Happening, is being touted as return to his tension-wracked routes after the disappointing Lady in the Water. Here, Shyamalan speaks about working with Happening star Mark Wahlberg and why the director (proudly?) refers to his latest effort as a "B movie."

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your new movie?

A: It’s called The Happening, and it’s a 90-minute paranoia movie. It’s meant to be an intense, intense experience. That’s it’s foremost thing, kind of a B movie, but the best B movie that you’ve ever seen, that’s the hope – and very, very scary. 

You know when I used to look at the kind of movies that were most effective to people, I used to go, "Wow, those are the best experiences that I’ve had in the movies."  And the goal was okay, we’re just going to make you feel like this couple and want you to, by the end of the movie, be paranoid about something that you were not paranoid about when you walked into the theatre.

Q: Did the R rating help?  When did you know that you could kind of go in that direction?

A: Well when I sold the script to Fox they said they’d buy it, but they wanted me to make it as a[n] R and go for it.  And I said, "Really?" and they said they’ve never made that call before, probably no studio has ever made that call before, and it will probably never be made again but go for it. And I said, "Alright, let me think about it." 

And I was kind of thinking about it, thinking about it and I said, "Wow, you know this could be really exciting," you know, to do it this way.  Because the screenplay, it was no doubt it was an R, if anything it was an NC-17, the screenplay, and...when I read it, I’d go, "Wow, I’d have to change it to make it PG 13.  To make this movie it’s an R."

Q: What was it like working with Mark?

A: Mark is, you know, he’s a friend of mine. He’s a goofball, that guy. I never see the tough guy side of him. I’ve only seen it in the movies, like when I see him as a person, he’s just so sweet and kind and kind of an innocent...I think the closet role he’s ever played was the Boogie Nights role where he was just an innocent; he didn’t know the things around him and he was hoping and dreaming.

And that’s why he’s so endearing to audiences, I think. It's because he gives that off, that kind of charming naiveté, and that’s what I wanted for the movie, at the center of the movie. [He's] a guy who is a high school science teacher, he’s not a hero, he’s not gonna save the day, nothing like that. He’s not gonna find the answer, just a guy trying to survive and trying to stay with his positive outlook on life, which is really, really hard given the circumstances.

Q: That’s great.  I like how you use, I think, the three characters to kind of symbolize...parts of humanity. Can you talk about that quickly, what you were doing?

A: Yeah, I mean, you know Mark and his best friend, [played by] John Leguizamo kind of represent guys who are in the academic world. John plays a math teacher, and then Mark plays the science teacher.  However, they see in their fields bigger things, and they see belief in them because there are things, they see patterns and excitement, and they just are inspired by those subjects.  And you know when you get a great teacher they are just inspired. They see in social studies or they see in science something exciting; you can see that they’re inspired.  What they don’t get, they love. They think it’s exciting, they are like that, they are in that world. 

And Mark, it’s a kind of an innocence really. They approach life as a kind of, "People are good, and life is good," and that’s kind of a naïve point of view in this day and age. 

And Zooey’s character Alma is a woman struggling, because she feels like to believe that about the world is naïve, it’s childlike, and that’s the conflict that they have during the movie, about whether it is naïve to be hopeful about humanity and to go around in life and say..."It’s gonna be alright. Things are gonna be good."  Would you shut up, you know? Which way is correct? And she is struggling over that.  And really, the movie is almost a fight for her soul, about which side of the line she is going to fall, and it’s really the thing I was struggling with as a human being.  Is it naïve to be the way I am?