You're probably wondering why anyone would try and improve "Lady in the Water" and "The Happening". Simply, I have a deep respect for M. Night Shyamalan. His film "Unbreakable" I consider one of the best films of the decade, and he proved his prowess with it. So how did he go from a brilliant movie like that to stinkers like "Lady in the Water" and "The Happening"?

After re-watching the films I knew what it was. The extra padding he included was poorly done, with excessive dialog and, in the case of "The Happening", an uninteresting subplot.

My goal was to cut each film down to 60 minutes and release them as a double feature. While I managed to do that with "The Happening" I couldn't quite achieve that running time with "Lady in the Water". I really wanted to cut out the Asian woman's fable, but Shyamalan used this as a crutch to explain what was happening in the movie. Because of this exposition I couldn't completely remove it for fear of confusing the audience. But with approximately 30 minutes cut the movie does flow a lot better.