Straight off his success from his four feature films for Walt Disney Pictures, M. Night Shyamalan changes his tune slightly with his first feature for Warner Bros. Pictures, "Lady in the Water." "Lady in the Water" stars Paul Giamatti as Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment complex who finds a mysterious girl (Bryce Dallas Howard) swimming in the waters of his pool. Cleveland finds himself caught in a world between fantasy and the supernatural as he slowly learns the truth behind the girl's appearance.

Below, Night talks about the movie in an interview below.

Q: Were you trying to poke fun at your critics with the snobby film critic character in the movie?

NIGHT: Oh, I was just goofing around with that. You know, I kid because I love those guys. It was really a movie about storytelling, so the assumption is that the stories have all been told. There's a kind of non-religious quality to the idea that we know everything about the world - about life, where it comes from, what's in the water. Kind of boring for me. There's no love there. My brother in law's very much like, I know everything, you can just explain everything away kind of thing. I find off these are the guys that need the most magic in their life. So in a way, in this movie, the characters had to believe in stories again.

Q: Can you talk about the evolution of how this film started out as a bedtime story for your kids and how that became your next film?

NIGHT: Often, I tell stories and they always want me to tell them something scary, and then we decide what level of scariness to make. It's 1 to 5 and they always say 5, and you give them 3 so they can go to bed. So when I told them this one, it had a kind of magic about it. This became like an epic in the house, this movie, this story, and we kept telling it, and they kept asking more and more questions about it, and I told it again and it got deeper, and then I decided to make the movie. I decided to have the main character [Cleveland, Paul Giamatti's character] told this story the way I told it to the kids. And then he has another adventure. He kind of realizes whether this is true or not or whether you can believe in kids stories any more. But one of the things that I realized what I was doing in making "Lady," which made it such an unusual movie for me in the making, was that the mechanisms of making a movie needed to change for me. Because I was starting to get into [this routine of] go to the factory, make my movie on the factory line, and then you go and you put it on and you do your thing, and that's what I do for a living: write, direct, do it again and do it again. But when I tell kids stories to the kids, there's something very dangerous about it, because I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth, and I don't know where it's going. And you can feel it in the room. It's tangible. The kids know I don't know where it's going and what's kind of odd to me about it is they're in there, and it's electric and there's magic and sometimes and not sometimes. But every single time, it ends up somewhere revelatory. And I don't know what it is about that process of just freeforming.

Q: Did your own parents tell you stories?

NIGHT: No my parents didn't tell me any stories. That's probably why I tell stories.But the Indian culture has a lot of stories in it, so I heard about those stories but not necessarily through my parents. They didn't sit down and say - other than trying to get me to eat when I was like four - that kind of thing. "The Giving Tree," that's totally my story-telling style. You just see a foot in the corner — this is a boy — you know, a boy was playing and you see a foot running out of frame — I love that, you know. Very, very poetic. I mean talking about picture books and stuff like that. But when I was doing "Lady," I started reading a lot of children's fantasy books, just to get into the head space of it. Of course the Potters and all that stuff. And I read Eragon . . . I love those books.

Q: Was the genesis for this movie different from the previous four stories?

NIGHT: The feeling of the storytelling, the technique - what I was trying to maintain was that line of "you're about to fall apart, you've got all these balls in the air, where is this going?" You just somehow from telling stories so much to the kids, you realize that the god of storytelling will come down and give you the idea right when you need it. There it is and it comes out of your mouth . . , and I wanted that for the movie and the making of it so I could feel — I don't know — kid-like again.

Q: Like "The Village," this movie has a very closed community type of feel to it...

NIGHT: Yeah. I tend to like confined spaces for a movie but in a lot of ways I guess "The Village" and "Lady" was in the same kind of space and they were both opposite reactions to the same issue which is the world is in a kind of crappy place. What are your two reactions and "The Village" was a very kind of dark fear to protect your family reaction. And Lady was, we can make a difference, we all can have a significant influence, and we all have a part and purpose in life, so it was very very much the same subject, and I tend to use the closed environment to magnify the issue that we're talking about.

Q: The movie is very much engrained in a fantasy world that you created. Are you afraid that some people might not react to it because there is little reality to it?

NIGHT: I always approach it as reality-based filmmaking, but the tonalities of it were in this kind of fantasy world. But definitely all those are valid conversations to have and I certainly had them on the movie.

Q: Your movies tend to be very spiritual in nature and this one specifically talk about redemption...

NIGHT: I find that very poignant. Yeah. The idea of redemption. I was just on vacation. I got back yesterday. And we went to see a Buddhist monk out there. Really cool experience. In the moment, are you seeing the miracle of what's happening around you, your potential, your capability? I think there's always some spirituality to the movies, even if it's not overtly about religion.

Q: Do you forsee a time when you think you will get away from the supernatural element of your films?

NIGHT: I try. I really try but creeps its way back in. To me, they're just metaphorical conversations about fate, something I'm struggling I'm with. So it always comes in. My wife has the same conversation with me.

Q: What happened with "Life of Pi"? You said a few years ago that was going to be your next movie.

NIGHT: You guys happened.

I got caught up — I don't know if you read the book. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it has a surprise ending. And so it's not a surprise as soon as you put my name on it. it's not a surprise ending. And so something about it is less organic as soon as you out my name on it. I felt struggled by this kind of expectation that comes from the name. I was struggling with it, and they needed to have a decision, and I said I can't — I'm going to go and make "Lady." I can't say yes right now .

Q: Do you feel like you've become a name brand in that way?

NIGHT: Yes, it's a great thing and a bad thing. you know what I mean? Because I wonder how these movies would be seen if each and every one of them was my first movie. If this was my first movie, or if "The Village" was my first movie, and no one had ever seen a movie like — this would be wonderful experiences for me to have. And only one movie got that which was "The Sixth Sense."

Q: There's a lot of negative press out there, like the LA Times story and the Entertainment Weekly article, about your acrimonious break with Disney. Are you worried about that press?

NIGHT: Well, not really, because it was a great relationship with Disney and you never know what the future's going to be. And they weren't bad to me at all. They're really good people, and we had a great time. It's just sometimes there's a moment to grow up and step out of the house and come back. It just felt right. I just felt this very important thing. Alan [Horne at Warner Bors.] had a real effect on me and for some reason, he and I — I don't know whether it is that we both have two daughters and we both love martial arts. But whatever it is there's something, some connection there. It's a quirky movie and I didn't take the movie to any other studio. I went to him and said, "Do you get this?" And he got it.

Q: But you've made it clear that the dinner meeting with Disney about "Lady in the Water" was a pretty devastating evening...

NIGHT: Yeah. Definitely. The writer Michael was with me. It was supposed to be a book about my fifth movie. It wasn't intended to be anything other than that, and yeah, that was a sad moment. But as an artist, my wife can tell you a lot more about this than I have, there are a lot of ups and downs on a movie that I care about like a child. I wish I could be more detached. I just had this conversation this morning, where I said, "Every single one of them is like life and death to me." So the decisions that are made about them are so so important, and you live and die with that. You get great joy from it but you also get great sorrow from it.

Q: What makes you tick as a filmmaker? It seems like there is a little bit of therapy going on.

NIGHT: Oh definitely. Absolutely. I guess any artist that is really trying to make art. I'm really trying to talk to you guys about things that are bothering me or things I believe in or things that upset me or struggles about our purpose and believing in eccentric unusual things. I don't even know if I can articulate. I remember telling my agent that I had this idea for a movie and I just felt so irrationally about its heart, the chi of the movie. I'm happy for me that the chi did come out eventually. By the time we finished it the chi of the movie was there. And so the thing that makes me tick, I think, is danger, so I really make it very dangerous for me, so I feel threatened in some way, everything is heightened, and I'm working at a kind of life and death feeling creatively. So I really try to — a friend of mine said I was like Opus Dei a little bit [laughs].

Q: What are you working on next?

NIGHT: I might have some thoughts. I have two unfortunately, and they're battling each other. I had one — I was like, this is definitely it, and I went to France and a second one came into my head, and I scribbled all these ideas about it .

Q: Can you tell us anything about them?

NIGHT: One is very kind of Agatha Christie, which is the one I thought I was going to make right away, and the other one is kind of — it's a big movie with a big movie star, so I'm trying to decide what to do.