M. Night Shyamalan takes stand to say "absolutely not" to plagiarism accusation

M. Night Shyamalan took the stand on Wednesday in the $81 million plagiarism trial over his Apple TV+ series Servant. Director Francesca Gregorini has accused Servant of copying her 2013 film The Truth About Emanuel. Asked if he copied anything from the movie for Servant, which he produced, Shyamalan repeatedly said “Absolutely not.” He added, “This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent” (via Variety).

The main element Servant and The Truth About Emanuel both share are a traumatized mother who copes with the death of their child by replacing it with a doll, and then drawing a young nanny into the delusion that the doll is a living baby. Servant writer Tony Basgallop testified last week that he had been working on the script since 2005 and had never heard of The Truth About Emanuel before the lawsuit. However, Gregorini’s lawyer argued that Basgallop didn’t add the element about the doll until 2016, at which point he may have been desperate enough to see his work produced that he would steal the idea from somewhere else. 

Shyamalan—who directed the first episode of Servant in addition to producing—told the jury he hasn’t watched Emanuel until earlier this month. Gregorini had claimed that Servant copied direct shots and sequences from her film; on the stand, Shyamalan observed that “everything” in Emanuel “has come from other movies.” Shyamalan and his lawyer played parts of Gregorini’s 2013 movie and pointed out similarities to his own 1999 film The Sixth Sense. This wasn’t plagiarism, Shyamalan explained, because “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.”

Gregorini initially sued Apple, Shyamalan, and others involved in Servant in 2020. The suit was tossed out after the court determined that Servant “did not copy protectable elements of Emanuel.” However, the case was revived by the Court of Appeals in 2022 and ultimately sent to a jury trial. Shyamalan testified on Wednesday that the copyright dispute is “clearly, 100 percent, a misunderstanding.”