When you think of ’90s horror classics one of the movies that will inevitably pop up is The Sixth Sense. It’s all out and out classic and cemented director M. Night Shyamalan as one the freshest visionaries in the genre. However, turns out a good writer is a good writer regardless of genre because we’re learning he also had a hand in writing another classic, albeit tamer movie: She’s All That.
In 1999, the same year as The Sixth Sense came out, a tonally different movie aimed at teens also debuted. It starred Rachael Leigh Cook, Freddie Prinze Jr., Anna Paquin, Paul Walker and ’90s movie everyman Matthew Lillard.
In an interview back in 2013, Shyamalan said “I don’t know if I want to tell you which movie I ghost-wrote,” adding that it was indeed the movie in question. Shyamalan said he worked on the screenplay for She’s All That while he around the same time he was working on The Sixth Sense.
This is also noted in the film’s commentary by director Robert Iscove, according to the Digital Fix. While the credit for the screenplay goes solely to R. Lee Fleming Jr., Miramix head of development in the ’90s said Shyamalan’s rewrite is what actually got the film greenlit by the studio, even though they had already purchased the film. Check out the trailer below.
Shyamalan’s script changes were used to help “enormously with the relationship between Laney (Rachael Leigh Cook) and her father (Kevin Pollak),” according to producer Richard N. Gladstein. Shyamalan said his writing process involves being “strangely, creatively monogamous” meaning that at one point he was pondering the outcome of a romance between Cook and Prinze Jr. and how often they would need to kiss to make things believable.
He must’ve liked the movie to some degree, however, because he did presumably spend a good chunk writing it. He explained his process for saying yes or no to movies in the interview.
“I guess in the history of things, when they’re considering a movie or offering me a movie, I’m immediately saying yes or no – and if it’s a yes, it’s a, ‘Yes! Right now! Let’s go!’ It isn’t a ‘Let’s see,’ or ‘let’s horde it.’ I’d probably be much wiser to do that, so I could have some stuff ready to go for a few years from now or when I felt something was appropriate, but so far my MO, and I don’t [know] if it’s good or bad, has been to say yes or no. It makes me lean more on my original fare, stuff I’m writing for myself, and that’s always really fun and rewarding and scary. You never know.”
Shyamalan’s latest project is a thriller called Knock at the Cabin, scheduled for release in Feb. 2023.
