Sixth Sense director in documentary hoax

Hollywood’s favourite mystery man M Night Shyamalan and an American cable network got a bit carried away with their secrets in the build-up to the director’s latest thriller, The Village.

Star Adrien Brody’s own agent wasn’t even allowed to read the script and trailers have been playing at cinemas for weeks promising the audience one of Shyamalan’s trademark twists.

But now the Sci-Fi Channel has been forced to admit it lied when it claimed it was at war with The Sixth Sense director over an unauthorised documentary that revealed the filmmaker’s own “buried secret”.

Some of America’s biggest media outlets, including the prestigious Associated Press agency, were taken in by the story and reported that Shyamalan objected to the programme. But it turned out the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up as part of “a guerilla marketing campaign” that went too far.

The lies included a bogus claim that the director’s interest in the supernatural was piqued when he witnessed the drowning of a child in a lake near his boyhood home.

Shyamalan was apparently in on the joke from the start and is probably still laughing about all the publicity the affair has won for his new scary movie, which features Sigourney Weaver as leading lady, but will make a star out of Bryce Howard, daughter of another top director, Ron Howard.