JULINA TATLOCK: You know, one of the things that I love about your work is your ability to show the otherworldly within the everyday. And in Airbender, it’s almost the exact opposite.

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: Right, right (laughs).

JULINA: It’s the human relationships and the characters that you can identify with — that humanity in them is the everyday, but they’re within the otherworldly. This is common in fantasy and anime, but did you have concerns about the believability? Or was that a difficult leap for you in any way?

NIGHT: Yeah, I mean, it’s always tricky with a pure fantasy. You’re gonna have an advantage in a movie like Transformers where the baseline is still the contemporary world. The baseline [in Airbender] is not anything that we’re used to, so it’s very, very tricky. It’s all about the tone. And it took a long time to get the tone right; editing, re-editing, looking at it — and then just getting the CGI, because we’d been editing without [the] CGI [shots] for so long. It was a balancing act that took a long time because we also had the tonality issues that the cartoon played very young and very “slapsticky,” and slowly extricating the balance that was necessary to make it an appropriate representation of the source material, which was beloved, but my version of it and edging it up. The [TV] show is three seasons, and each of the three seasons gets darker and older. Substantially so, actually, and even the first season got older as it went on. I wrote the screenplay for the second movie already, and it’s so much darker and older and kind of in the sweet spot for these kinds of movies. So the balancing act has kind of grown, in trying to get the balance just right. It’s a very unusual movie. It has philosophical overtones, there’s a genocide, there’s a Shakespearean storyline, and there’s obviously lots of martial arts and CGI. It has a very one-of-a-kind tone, and it took a long time to find its personality.

JULINA: I’ve heard you say that before: the Shakespearean storyline. Can you elaborate on that?

NIGHT: I’m talking about how the labeled villain of the movie is a young man who’s been vanquished, basically, by his father. His name’s Zuko, and so it’s his whole family [that I’m referring to] and the Fire Nations. The royal family of the Fire Nation is just a very Shakespearean plotline over the three movies, with betrayals, usurping the crown, whisperings of evil people manipulating each other, relatives manipulating each other, unrequited love and the love of a father who’s evil, and all kinds of wonderful stuff like that. And that stuff really only starts coming out in the first movie, and you can see when the credits roll by the end of this movie, you’ll go, “Oh man! That’s gonna be a lot of the next movie.” Which it is.