James McAvoy stars in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest psychological thriller ‘Split’, which follows a man with 23 different personalities. James had to play 9 of them which he admits was a lot of work, but that work was helped by the director’s determination to stick to his script to the very end.
James McAvoy stars in M Night Shyamalan’s ‘Split’
Often during filming, a screenplay is changed as the story comes to life, usually only slightly but sometimes very dramatically. It’s not always easy to translate a vision on paper to live action, but M Night Shyamalan knows enough about the process to be able to make the first draft count.
‘He’s one of the few people that I’ve worked with that is committed to the original vision he has in his mind and doesn’t really want that to alter too much during the filming process’, James McAvoy explained. ‘You end up in a situation where the thing that you read months before you see the final film, it’s pretty much exactly what you see in the final film.’
Watch the trailer for ‘Split’ here:
In fact, according to James, it was all about ‘getting exactly what he wanted on the page’ so that they never got carried away with an idea on set. ‘That shows a lot committment to his unique storytelling and his original storytelling which is something that’s fairly rare these days in the film industry’, he added.
‘Split’ sees Kevin Wendell – a man with dissociative identity disorder – take hostage a group of girls as the many personalities within him work against him to unleash a powerful and dangerous 24th persona that puts them all at risk.
More: James McAvoy broke his hand on the set of ‘Split’
James McAvoy has also completed filming on a number of other projects including the ‘Watership Down’ mini-series, romantic thriller ‘Submergence’ opposite Alicia Vikander and Cold War thriller ‘The Coldest City’ with Charlize Theron. He’s currently recording his voice for ‘Gnomeo & Juliet: Sherlock Gnomes’ and is rumoured to make a return in ‘X-Men: The New Mutants’.
‘Split’ is released in cinemas today (January 20th 2017).
