With M. Night Shyamalan's last film, 'Lady in the Water', I must admit that I vaguely recall the plot of the film or what the payoff was at the end. From 'The Sixth Sense', 'Signs' to 'Unbreakable' to 'The Village', Shyamalan always throws in the faith issue in his films, and such is the case with his latest film, 'The Happening'.

'The Happening' is a paranormal thriller in which a family must survive a global environmental crisis. The protagonist, a science teacher named Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), goes on the run with his estranged wife (Zooey Deschanel) and friends as hysteria grips the planet.

At a recent press conference, Shyamalan spoke about views on the film.

How closely does this storyline reflect your own world view?

M. Night Shyamalan: They're all a little bit like therapy, these movies, about something that's bothering me or family things. I'm always working them in, in a kind of like journal way, but it does represent the things that are on my mind. I think everyone in our generation is starting to worry about these kinds of things right especially during an election year right now. It's thinking about the future, and it's interesting with a slew of these kind of end of the world movies that there's a kind of anxiety in there. It's mimics the '50's where there was the same kind of anxieties about our future, where are we headed, are we going in the right direction, is it too late to change course – all of that. I never thought that I was actually all that serious as a person, but when I sit down to write I guess more adult things come out.

This is your first film with an R rating. How freeing was that? What did you get to do in this film that you couldn't do in your other films since they were PG-13?

Shyamalan: What's interesting is that I've gotten an R on two other movies, on 'Sixth Sense' and 'The Village'. I got an R rating on those initially for the intensity of certain scenes and then you just pull back a sound effect. We were right on the line and I could always just pull back a sound effect and resubmit it and they'd go, 'Oh, that's much better.' So all I would do is take out some sound FX. It's always a big impact because what you emotionally feel is different from what I actually showed. But this one, the screenplay that I wrote, there was just no other way to do it. Then when I thought about it, one of the movies that I was thinking of was 'Pan's Labyrinth'. I thought about that a lot when I made the decision to do this because I didn't want to make it as an agenda. I wanted to make an organic decision about what the material wants to do. When I thought about 'Pan's Labyrinth' which has some visceral moments of violence juxtaposed against the kind of softer things that are going on against the canvas it gave it authority and teeth. A PG-13 version of 'Pan's Labyrinth' for me wouldn't have that kind of impact and it wouldn't have stayed with me the way that movie has stayed with me. So it felt like the right balance of things. It was exciting then and it was disturbingly easy to shoot all of those scenes. I had such a fun time doing it.

Do you see this as a popcorn movie, and is it possible to have a popcorn movie with a greater personal theme and moral?

Shyamalan: Yeah, I do. One of the things that I said to everyone, to the cast and the crew, I said that we were making a movie about an important subject, but this is a B movie. Lets get it straight here. This is a great B movie. We're making the best B movie we can and that's our job. We're making a B movie. If the themes of the movie stick with you then great, but we're not going to put that in front of the movie. We're going to have a lot of fun. It's a paranoia movie and we just need to pound away at it. That's our job. So I was really clear about that. So in that way it was meant to be entertainment, but all of my movies are a little bit of that. One reporter yesterday was asking me, 'How come you just don't go make a pure popcorn movie and then go make an art movie because it seems like you want to do them both?' I think the problem is that they're both my instincts. So there's one leg in each place which sometimes pisses off one group and then sometimes pisses off the other group. My wife will say, 'Just make one or the other!' I wish that I could, but as it ends up I do think about all these spiritual things and I do love cheeseburgers and I do love 'Seinfeld' and I do love Coca-Cola and I do love Michael Jordan. This is just me. So if I took one side away, the side that really loves to read about philosophy and these kinds of things, if I took that away it'd be a lie. If I pretended that I wasn't jumping up and down watching the Celtics last night that would be a lie as well. So it's that balancing act of trying to be honest.

This film presents a nightmare scenario for most people. In real life, do you ever share your greatest fears?

Shyamalan: I think that all fear – I've changed my thinking in the analysis of fear – comes down to the factor of being alone. It's all based in versions of that. If you take random things that you're scared of, I'm scared of flying or scared of the new job that you have, it's all related to the feeling that you're going to have emotions and no one else will have those emotions and we'll be alone in some manner. So if you're on a plane and you're scared it's like, 'I'm scared of flying, but if I talk to the pilot –' or you talk to someone else you don't feel as scared. It's the human connection and you're not alone anymore. You have a commonality. I've said that I believe art is the ability to convey that we're not alone. That's the power of art and fear is the flip of that. It's always been in our genetics since we've been cave people or whatever that fear protects us. 'Don't go down that road. You'll be alone. We don't know what's down that road and you'll be alone.' It's that being alone isn't good, there's safety in this and he'll protect me and she'll protect me and together we're safer and the person that didn't have that didn't survive. It's now kind of flipped on us and become a limiting factor. Now we're scared to put our kids out in the backyard because our neighbors might do something, but neighbors are wonderful people. The assumption is wrong. It's the same stats that it was when I was a kid riding around on a bike, but yet we're so much more scared now even though nothing has changed. Nothing has changed except for the fear. The fear has built on itself because we get more and more isolated so that your fear has been realized and you're all alone.

How personal is it for you in a film to go outside of what you believe and how does that change you when you've done something like this?

Shyamalan: Constantly, one thing or mantra that I tell my kid, and I'm not sure I'm answering this exactly because the belief thing is a different thing than fear for me, but I always tell my kids that courage isn't not being scared. That's not what courage means. Courage is being scared and doing it anyway. That's a very important thing because they might say, 'I'm not courageous.' You have to go, 'No, no, no. Everyone feels scared, but you just don't let that stop you and go forward.' For me belief is everything. All the movies are about some version of testing faith, what faith you believe in. Do I believe in family? Do I believe in God? Do I believe in each other, in humanity? Do I believe that we're a good people? Is this working, this whole thing, these questions?

Do you see this movie as a critique of people who believe that science and technology are all you need in this world?

Shyamalan: It was interesting when I was writing this because the bees thing came up, I thought, 'Oh, this is perfect. We can open the movie with the bees.' Then I was like, 'What if they figure it out though before the movie comes out? Then the whole point is going to be lost?' They could be like, 'Oh, it turned out that it was a Verizon cell phone tower –' and I would be like, 'Ah! This is awful.' But they still haven't figured it out and it's still a mystery and we'll never figure it out. Again, it's in the gaps of it. I almost think that the most, not cynical, but clinical minds are the ones that need it the most. They need to see the proof the most. Maybe someone like Mark just instantly believes as a human being. He's had an interesting life and has done all kinds of incredible things and has had some incredible experiences, but his ability to believe is just right there. But maybe for the clinical mind that's just constantly needing the facts, the facts, the facts, the proof – it actually means more to them. It's such an important moment. My brother in law is actually one of these guys, a computer guy, all of this stuff – he debunks everything. We did a Ouija board once and he said, 'Can you guys try to get in touch with my Great Uncle Willy?' So we did it and we got in touch with Great Uncle Willy on the Ouija board and all this stuff and when we were finished he said, 'My Great Uncle Willy is alive. He's in Jersey.' He's that kind of guy. I was like, 'You want to know more than anyone.' He's just that guy, he's the science guy. He's into computers. That's what he does for a living and I tend to think that we all want someone one day to go, 'Here's the answer. There is something bigger going on. Isn't that incredible?' Some of us want to go on faith and some of us need to see it laid out on paper. It's interesting because in 'Signs', really, Mel [Gibson] played a man of faith who was became very materialistic in a way and said, 'No. It isn't that way. It's just what you see in front of you. That's it.' In a way he's the flip of Mel's character, a man of science who kind of believed the thing.

What has the basis of science in 'The Happening' allowed you to do that fantasy hasn't?

Shyamalan: I was talking to a science reporter actually, or well, let me go back for a second. When I came up with the idea I said to the research people, 'Give me every piece of information. I want to know from one to ten whether this idea is totally, totally possible, probably or completely impossible.' They came back with a stack of information about how the environment works and the plants work and examples of anomalous things that have happened in the world and how a cotton plant can send out a signal to the other side of the field to tell them that this insect is coming so that they'll send out poisons and send out toxins – all these things happening in a smaller form is that kind of thing. It's really fun. I talked to the University of Massachusetts and some other institutes about how the brain works, about toxins and how they effect each other. It was really fun to ground this in science. In a way I've done two movies where there wasn't any supernatural elements, 'The Village' and this. It's kind of fun to do that. In the process of the research there were all these cool scientific facts that came out about other cool shit to write about and make movies about. So it's really a fun source of finding more conversations about faith. Looking at science I found so many more wonderful things so that maybe that'll be a fun way to go in the future.

Were there any compromises that you had to make on this film as a result of what happened with your last movie?

Shyamalan: No, because I wrote it before 'Lady' came out. So that's my good answer to that.