M. Night Shyamalan testified Wednesday that he and his collaborators on the Apple TV+ show “Servant” did not steal from a 2013 independent film about a delusional mother and her baby doll.
The director told jurors that the copyright dispute with “The Truth About Emanuel” director Francesca Gregorini is “clearly, 100%, a misunderstanding.”
“This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” Shyamalan said.
Asked repeatedly if he had copied anything from the film, he said, “Absolutely not.”
Gregorini sued Apple, Shyamalan and others involved in “Servant” shortly after the show debuted in 2019. She alleged that the show clearly borrowed key elements of her film, which depicts a nanny who colludes with the mother in her delusion that the doll is real.
The federal trial got underway last week in Riverside, Calif. In testimony last Thursday, Gregorini said she was “shocked” when she first saw the trailer for the show.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I could see basically they had taken my film and… redone it.”
She alleged the show took “the beating heart and skeleton of my film,” while also mirroring individual shots and sequences.
She said her agents and industry colleagues discouraged her from suing, but she decided to take a stand because such copying is “prevalent in my industry.”
“I realized that in doing the suit, I would be fighting for myself, for what happened to me, but also for the other people who perhaps, for whatever reasons, were not able to get their day in court,” she said. “You cannot take someone else’s work, repurpose it, call it your own, and not give credit or compensation to the person who made it.”
Shyamalan, who produced “Servant” and directed the first episode, testified on Wednesday that he had never even seen Gregorini’s film until earlier this month.
When he viewed it, he said he discovered that “everything in it has come from other movies.” His attorney, Nicolas Jampol, walked Shyamalan through a series of shots in “The Truth About Emanuel” that resemble shots in “The Sixth Sense,” Shyamalan’s 1999 breakthrough.
Shyamalan said that he is not accusing Gregorini of stealing from him, just noting that all filmmakers share a common language.
“I don’t own them. Anyone can do these shots,” he said. “We’re all in a long line of learning from each other, from Hitchcock and Kubrick before us. And they didn’t invent it. It goes before them, and it keeps on going after that.”
“Servant” originated with writer Tony Basgallop, who testified last week that he began working on the idea in 2005. He said he drew on his own life experiences, and had also never seen or heard of Gregorini’s movie until the litigation began.
Gregorini’s attorney, Patrick Arenz, has noted that Basgallop did not incorporate the doll element until 2016. At the time, Arenz has pointed out, Basgallop was struggling professionally and was desperate for money. Arenz has argued that the doll was critical to selling the scripts and getting them produced — and that it came from “Emanuel.”
In his testimony on Wednesday, Shyamalan said he was “blown away” when he first read Basgallop’s scripts in 2017. He said he was also excited to learn that dolls are used in therapy for grieving mothers.
“I was over the moon,” he said, saying that it’s important to ground supernatural stories in real life. “Having that ladder — like in ‘The Sixth Sense,’ when your hair stands up, that’s a ghost — that’s something to ladder you to the mythology.”
Arenz sought to get Shyamalan to admit to a series of alleged similarities between the film and the show. At various points, Shyamalan offered additional context that distinguished the works, to the point where Arenz said he was going “off on tangents,” and directed him to answer the questions directly.
Arenz noted that the mother character in “Servant” doesn’t “wake up” and discover what happened to her child until nearly the end of the series — similar to structure of the film.
“The mystery — what happened to Jericho — I wanted to save,” Shyamalan said. “It’s an important engine.”
Under friendlier questioning from his own lawyer, Shyamalan told the jury about his experience in film school, his early career, and how he “figured out my language” with “The Sixth Sense.” He said he was interested in the challenge of applying his signature filmmaking style — which he described as “contained,” “family-centered” supernatural thrillers — to TV.
“I like insinuation… keeping the sentence incomplete. You ask the right question and don’t answer it,” he said. “We’re sushi makers. We’re doing the least amount of ingredients and the highest quality.”
He said he has found the infringement allegations “confusing.” He said he did not watch “Emanuel” earlier because he knew he did not borrow from it, comparing it to being accused of a jewelry heist.
“I don’t need to see the jewels,” he said. “I didn’t steal them.”
Later on Wednesday, the plaintiffs called a damages expert to testify about the revenue Apple earned from “Servant.” Apple’s lawyers asked to close the courtroom, noting that the testimony would touch on trade secrets, such as the show’s viewership data and the defendants’ compensation. Judge Sunshine Sykes ordered the public to leave for that testimony.
The case is expected to go to the jury later this week.
