HOW M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

The filmmaker weathered some of the wildest hype and harshest backlash that Hollywood has to offer. Then he found a different path.

- DAVID SIMS

John du Pont, heir to the eponymous chemical fortune, lived on an 800-acre estate west of Philadelphia known as Foxcatcher Farm. Du Pont was an eccentric: He collected stuffed birds and mollusk shells and patrolled his property in an armored tank. His great passion was amateur wrestling, and though he was largely cut off from society, he would invite wrestlers to live in guesthouses on the Foxcatcher grounds and pay for their training. One such guest was Dave Schultz, who won a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. On a January afternoon in 1996, du Pont pulled up to Schultz’s guesthouse in a silver Lincoln Town Car, rolled down his window, and fired a .44-caliber Magnum revolver into Schultz’s chest. Schultz collapsed, bleeding, into the snow. A motive for the murder was never established.

In 2002, the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan bought a farm down the road from Foxcatcher. Shyamalan and his wife, Bhavna, were living with their two young daughters in the Philadelphia suburbs. The new farm was only 30 minutes away, but its rolling hills and wide pastures made it feel like a different world. Shyamalan began going there regularly to write.

On his way, he’d drive past du Pont’s former home, its iron fence now rusted and covered in ivy. When Shyamalan learned of the grisly local history, he became fascinated by it. Foxcatcher seemed to him, he told me recently, like “a mythical land.” He started working on a new script.

A more conventional filmmaker might have written a psychological thriller about du Pont, the cosseted scion of enormous wealth who descends into madness and ultimately murder; later, the 2014 movie