M Night Shyamalan chats about his family outing in Trap

Onscreen in the new M Night Shyamalan thriller Trap, a serial killer father (Josh Hartnett, Wrath of Man) and his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) attend a sold-out concert to see pop sensation Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), while police secretly surround the stadium and lock it down. It was a father-daughter outing behind the scenes, too.

Now writer-director-producer M Night Shyamalan and his musician daughter Saleka tell us how they created a full album and coordinated a live concert before even shooting the first scene of Trap.

Stream Trap on Showmax now.

Let’s put on a show!

“It started us thinking about doing a music movie together that would also function as a thriller,” explains M Night. “I thought we could experience that music the way you would if you were at a concert, and then intertwine that with a thriller. Could those two things coexist?”

Twenty-eight-year-old Saleka adds, “It was an idea that my dad and I had a long time ago – to bring music and film together, which are things that go together very much in our culture from Bollywood films. But we wanted to do it in our way. Something that felt more ‘Shyamalan.’ Then, he came up with the idea of a serial killer at a concert, where the concert is a trap. He wrote the script with spots for songs, and I ended up writing an album for it.”

Creating Lady Raven

“The initial point was to figure out who this character was and where she was coming from,” says Saleka, who released her debut R&B album, Séance, in 2023. “She’s a pop artist, but this music is unique. It’s dark and it’s edgy, it’s fun and it’s carefree … We were considering a bunch of names for the character, but Lady Raven was my favourite. The raven is a symbol in our family of this thing that’s dark but beautiful, and also strong and majestic. She’s an artist who wants to teach her audience, and the girls that follow her, the strength to believe in who you are, and not to be afraid to go for things.”

M Night adds, “I said, ‘This is who I think this fictional character is. She feels this way to her audience. This is who loves her, and why. This is her latest album. Can you write with this angle on this character?’ We would continue these discussions, and then one song after another, Saleka would write them. Every time she said, ‘I have another song,’ it would be like Christmas and I couldn’t wait to hear it. And every time, I was in awe.”

“When I first read the script, well, it was shocking, because it was the first time I was reading a script and thinking of myself as a character,” Saleka admits. “It was just so enthralling. I couldn’t stop turning the pages … As we got into rehearsing, we started working on the differences between me and Lady Raven, how I might say something and how she might say something. My dad wrote this character to be a braver, more confident version of me. I think it’s his way of urging me to let go of some of the insecurities I have.”

A two-for-one deal

“I’m not a big CGI guy, so I kept telling everybody, ‘We’re going to put on and shoot a real concert, and we’re not going to cheat.’ And by cheating, I’m a very point-of-view driven filmmaker. Our main characters are watching this concert from not great seats. So that’s where we’re going to stay,” explains M Night. “I ended up directing the live show of what you’re seeing on the screens on each take. What’s onscreen at the moment that Cooper (Josh) and Riley (Ariel) are speaking, is what was happening.”

That meant intense planning. “The songs, the costumes, the choreography, the show lighting – it was a Herculean effort to put on a concert and nail it right as we’re shooting a thriller. A scene going on between Josh and Ari, while there’s a whole group of people dancing in a musical performance with light changes … It was a beautiful thing to create this whole art form and then put that at the centre of this art form,” he says.

“We basically prepped a stadium tour,” agrees Saleka. “There was no detail left out. There were the songs, full choreography, full costumes, full screens, all the transitions, multiple different sets. A lot of time was spent putting that together. It wasn’t the normal production design for a movie. It was, ‘What is this character’s tour like? What’s the opening song? Where does it go from there? What are the points where the audience is surprised, having fun – the ups and downs? What is the order of the songs to create an arc for the show within the movie?’”

The songs are spoilers!

“As I was writing the songs, they needed to function as storytelling, in what was going on with Cooper as he’s trying to escape,” Saleka reveals. “The tension escalates as Cooper tries crazier things to get out of this situation. At the same time, the songs are rising in energy and getting a little bit more extreme, as are the sets, the dancing and the costumes.”

“At one point, Cooper scams a guy to get his daughter onstage – so what does that feel like? He’s plotting, he’s having fun, so the song has a bit of mischief. Then, when the situation gets more intense – he’s grabbed a walkietalkie and he hears how things might be closing in – the song is more rhythmic, dark and searching. I was always thinking about music as an amplification of the story,” adds Saleka.

Trap’s choreographer Cora Kozaris punched through the message using Lady Raven’s backup dancers. “The concert scenes are playing to an arena that holds 15 000 people, so all the movement has to be extremely exaggerated. The dancers are coming with huge pulses of energy. In the same breath, the choreography also takes on very intimate details and blinks at what the characters are going through off the stage. And the soundtrack really pulls from Lady Raven’s personal/relationship experiences or her traumas, and also builds the intensity of the lead characters and what they’re experiencing off the stage,” reveals Cora. 

And the twist is…

As with any M Night Shyamalan project, M Night found that working with Saleka came with an unexpected twist – a reawakening of the filmmaker he set out to be.

“I look at my daughters (M Night’s other daughter, Ishana, directed The Watchers, which he produced) and think that the one thing they’re not compromising is authenticity. They’re teaching me that again. I think that as soon as you have success, you unconsciously want to be accepted. You might lose sight of yourself.”

M Night’s reawakening lent Trap a sense of playfulness. “There is quite a bit of humour at the center of it. It’s a combination of tones that is really unusual,” he hints. “It’s very different from my other movies. It was a particular moment of how I was feeling… a kind of mania, that was coming from joy. Trap is a little mischievous.”

Saleka offers a final word: “When we were kids, he used to make up scary stories and tell them to us over months, with every night being a different chapter. He’s a storyteller. What’s interesting to me is that he tells such dark stories, because I think he is such a positive person. He thinks the universe is good. And I think this is another example of that. It’s beautiful to watch.”

Stream Trap on Showmax now.