M. Night Shyamalan has denied copying off the idea for Servant as his plagiarism trial gets underway.
The director testified yesterday (January 22) that he and his collaborators didn’t copy a 2013 independent film, The Truth About Emanuel, about a delusional mother and her baby doll, directed by Francesca Gregorini. She filed a lawsuit against Shyamalan in 2020, not long after the Apple+ TV show made its debut.
Gregorini’s film depicts a nanny who feeds the mother’s delusion that the doll is real. Shyamalan told the jury, per Variety, during the federal trial in Riverside, California, that the copyright dispute is “clearly, 100%, a misunderstanding.”
“This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” Shyamalan said. When asked if he’d copied anything from the film, he said: “Absolutely not.”
Trap director M Night Shyamalan. Credit: Getty Images
In testimony last Thursday (January 16), Gregorini said she was “shocked” when she first saw the trailer for Servant, which she alleges took “the beating heart and skeleton of my film,” and even supposedly mirrored individual shots and sequences.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I could see basically they had taken my film and… redone it.”
Later, she said: “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. 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.”
In his testimony, Shyamalan testified on Wednesday that he had never seen Gregorini’s film until earlier this month. When he watched it, he said he discovered that “everything in it has come from other movies.”
“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’s concept was created by 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 lawsuit was filed.
M. Night Shyamalan at a special UK screening of ‘Knock At The Cabin’ in London. CREDIT: Getty
Gregorini’s attorney, Patrick Arenz, observed that the doll element didn’t come into the script until 2016. At the time, Arenz pointed out that Basgallop was struggling professionally and financially at the time, suggesting that the doll element helped the script be sold and produced — and that it came from Emanuel.
Arenz attempted 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 find out what happened to her child until nearly the end of the series, similarly to structure of the film.
“The mystery — what happened to Jericho — I wanted to save,” Shyamalan said. “It’s an important engine.”
The case is expected to go to the jury later this week.
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