Ishana Night Shyamalan talks debut 'The Watchers,' her iconic dad and his 'cheeky cameos'

For almost as long as she's been alive, M. Night Shyamalan has been watching movies with his daughter Ishana. And early on, he found that when she watched something, she would feel it profoundly.

"She's always been a super-sensitive kid," the iconic filmmaker says. "She would watch 'Shrek' and when Shrek hits the wrong guy, she was inconsolable. She would start screaming and crying. We'd be like, 'Ishana, it's OK! Keep watching, hang in there, it's going to work out.' "

A lifetime spent behind the scenes of her dad's storytelling has led to Ishana Night Shyamalan, 24, crafting her own dark yarns, from the domestic terror of Apple TV+ series "Servant" to the horror fantasy of her directorial film debut “The Watchers” (in theaters Friday).

"I think my relationship with art is just that it's something I do to survive," says Ishana, a 2021 graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She worked alongside her Oscar-nominated dad writing, directing and producing episodes of “Servant,” plus directing secondary units on his movies “Old” and “Knock at the Cabin.”

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She's a yin to her father’s yang when it comes to filmmaking: “He is just an incredibly disciplined, precise person, and I feel very much that I am not that. By nature, I'm just a bit more frenzied than he is.” But the same intensity still exists from when she was a youngster, "which as a filmmaker is such a great weapon," says M. Night Shyamalan, a producer on "Watchers" and a proud parent alongside Ishana at recent red-carpet events.

It’s a big summer for the Shyamalans, starting with "The Watchers,” about a young woman who finds supernatural spookiness in the woods. Then Ishana’s twistmaster dad releases his newest thriller “Trap” (out Aug. 9), which features Ishana's older sister (and singer) Saleka. Meanwhile, “my mom's chilling. She's doing her thing,” Ishana Shyamalan says with a laugh. (She also has a younger sister, Shivani.)

"We're just so lucky that we have such a strong family unit where we can be there for each other," she says. Making a movie "takes a level of confidence and assuredness that I feel like all young people struggle with, but that at moments I really don't feel. My journey is learning how to stay assured and go for what I want in the right moments."

Here’s what else to know about the latest Shyamalan storming Hollywood:

Ishana Night Shyamalan recognized herself in the struggles of Dakota Fanning's character in 'The Watchers'

In “Watchers,” Mina (Dakota Fanning) is an American living in Galway, still haunted by a childhood trauma, whose car breaks down in a remote forest and she becomes inescapably lost. She happens upon a strange building and is taken in by a group of people, but she learns this is no safe sanctuary: They’re visited every night by strange creatures who watch them through a one-way window.

When adapting A.M. Shine’s 2021 novel of the same name, Ishana Shyamalan realized she shared Mina's struggles coping with "guilt and solitude."

Fanning found the role of someone “running from the broken parts of herself” appealing and adored Shyamalan’s vibe as a young woman "at the start of her adventure." One day while filming in a forest in Ireland, Fanning noticed everybody else throwing on coats and hoods during a deluge, but not her director. “Ishana’s hair is like fully soaked, barely has a jacket on, and she has a big smile on her face,” the actress recalls. “I was like, ‘You are meant to do this.’”

M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter embraced her dad’s love of storytelling and rules of movie watching

On her Instagram page, Shyamalan has a picture of herself as a little girl in her father’s arms, looking through a camera on the set of his 2006 movie “Lady in the Water.” Even back then, she was fascinated with his job: “As a kid, that's the dream, that you can imagine something and it becomes real. So to have my dad be doing that magic thing was something that has always stuck with me."

A big fan of Hayao Miyazaki, she grew up a “total nerd” for fantasy novels and films but loves horror because "it's a language that I feel most connected to and feel I can express myself best through." M. Night Shyamalan introduced his daughters to all sorts of films, including scary movies, from a young age. Only the good stuff, though: “If they saw a mediocre movie, that would be because they went over to a friend's house.”

Plus, they had to watch movies from beginning to end, and no starting it in the middle. “It's sacred. It sounds silly, but that's the way we were,” he says. “There was a great appreciation for the art form because that art form built our house.”

Don’t expect any ‘cheeky' acting cameos from Ishana Shyamalan

By the time she was 16, after years of watching her dad work, Ishana Shyamalan “started to have the inkling that it might be possible for me to do that same thing once I got a bit older. He says he always felt he knew, which I don't know if I believe or not,” she says. (For the record, M. Night Shyamalan says he knew after their post-screening discussion of the 2015 horror movie "It Follows." "I could feel like, 'Oh, wow. Her mind just gets it.' ")

Six years training as a ballerina gave Ishana Shyamalan a "knowledge of movement, of how to flow, into everything I do.” Growing up, she also played piano, painted, did film photography and even made clothes. One thing that didn’t take was acting, outside of some middle-school plays. “I enjoy being in solitude and sort of like not being looked at,” she acknowledges. So while she loves her dad’s “cheeky cameos” in his movies, “I’m totally cool staying off-camera.”