c. 2008 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ As a filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan likes to ask the big questions. His new film, “The Happening,” is just his latest to take on questions of science and faith, and the “gaps” _ as he puts it _ where the two uncomfortably meet.

“Where are we headed? Are we going in the right direction? Is it too late to change course?” the writer/director asked during a recent interview in Manhattan, before adding self-deprecatingly:

“I never thought I was all that serious a person, but when I sit down to write, I guess more adult things come out.”

“The Happening,” which stars Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo, purports first and foremost to be a scary B-movie about a mysterious airborne virus that wipes out the population in most of the Northeastern United States.

“One of the things I said to everybody, the cast and crew, I said, `Let’s get ourselves straight here. We’re making a B-movie. We’re going to have a lot of fun. It’s a paranoia movie. We just need to pound away, that’s our job,”’ said Shyamalan.

But the filmmaker admits there’s more to the movie than that, as often happens with his projects, from “The Sixth Sense” to “The Village” to “Signs.”

“You know, they’re all a little bit like therapy, all these movies, about something that’s bothering me or family things,” he said.

“It’s interesting with this slew of end-of-the-world movies today. I think everybody in our generation is starting to worry about these types of things right now. There’s an anxiety in the air.”

One reason Shyamalan cast Wahlberg as a high school teacher was the biography about Albert Einstein the director was reading at the time.

“He rejected religion and was kind of atheistic and did all these wondrous things in his 20s and got really into it,” said Shyamalan of Einstein, “and then in the gaps in science he started seeing a hand, in his point of view the hand of God. His life struggle was finding a kind of overall formula that could define the design of things.”

Shyamalan cast Wahlberg because the actor is a man of faith.

Said Wahlberg, “We’d do a take and he’d say, `Oh, my God, I really like that. What were you thinking about?’ I’d go, `Jesus, baby.’ And he was like, `Oh, we’ve got to do it again.’ I didn’t understand that at all.”

Unlike Wahlberg, Leguizamo, who plays a math teacher in the film, had yet to see the movie when interviewed.

“I don’t know why, probably because I’m a pagan. People who have no faith weren’t allowed to see it,” joked the actor.

“It will convert you, baby. You’ll be touched by the hand of God, trust me,” said Wahlberg.

“I’ll be touched by something,” said Leguizamo, laughing. “What I loved about the screenplay, it had that message that’s missing in so many big Hollywood flicks that don’t have a point of view. I loved that it wasn’t afraid of that.”

“The first thing I wanted to do, literally it was an agenda and I know it sounds silly, but it was to pick the most likable cast I could possibly put at the center of the movie,” said Shyamalan.

“They don’t know it, they don’t know why they do it, but that’s their gift,” he said of his actors. “They come from a place of light, all three of them.”

As dark as “The Happening” may be, at its center is a disquieting calm as the source of the virus turns out to be something we’re accustomed to seeing as benign. This is a nod to the faiths rooted in the natural world.

“The Native American culture, that’s all it’s about. My middle name, Night, is actually an American Indian name. That’s what I felt so attached to as a kid, the relationship to nature and worshipping the sky, the Earth, the rock, the bear over there,” said the filmmaker.

“That relationship felt correct then as a kid, and it feels correct now as an adult.”

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Shyamalan opens the movie with a scene in which Wahlberg’s character is talking to his students about why honey bees are dying off in such large numbers today, in what is being called colony collapse disorder.

“When I was writing it the bees thing came up and I was like, `Oh, this is perfect. We can open the movie with the bees,”’ he said.

“Then I was like, `What if they figure it out before the movie comes out? Then the whole point will be lost and it’ll turn out that it was a Verizon cell phone tower.’ But they still haven’t figured it out, it’s still a mystery. We’ll never figure it out. Again, it’s in the gaps.”

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Shyamalan acknowledges that “The Happening” may be a heavy film, but he finds that appropriate, perhaps sadly so. And that’s why he ultimately decided to give the movie a happy ending.

“Nothing has changed except for fear, and the fear builds on itself until your fear has been realized. You’re all alone. But art, I believe, has the ability to convey that we’re not alone.”

(Todd Hill is the film critic for The Staten Island Advance.)

KRE/RB END HILL

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