M. Night Shyamalan Talks About His Pitch Meeting With Steven Spielberg in Which He Almost Wrote INDIANA JONES 4

Director M. Night Shyamalan is just coming off the release of his most recent thriller Old, and while he enjoys the success of the film, he recently opened up about the project that one might call “the one that got away.” In a recent interview with Collider, Shyamalan expressed his love for the Indiana Jones film franchise, and described the pitch meeting he attended with legendary director Steven Spielberg talking about directing the fourth film. This obviously didn’t happen, but Shyamalan talks fondly about the memory:

"Oh, my God. I mean, it was fantastic. Obviously, Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time, and so this was a dream, to be asked as a kid to go see a movie in a movie theater and then later to be asked by that person to write one of those in the future. I could faint at that moment. It was amazing. I do have my notebooks; I still have those with all my ideas for that movie. I did have a take. I talked to everybody involved and it was so nascent at that time, that movie. Everyone hadn't gotten into a room yet. They were bouncing ideas off of me. So everyone had different ideas of what to do. When you say that, I have in my head, it's a green notebook, and I had this idea. It was a darker idea.”

He was then asked if he knew what the MacGuffin would have been in his notes for his film, and he said yes, teasing it was a little darker.

"I did, I did, yeah. I had an idea. I hadn't pitched it to them or anything like that, but I had an idea."

It’s too bad that he didn’t get to make his vision come to life, especially considering that the fourth Indiana Jones film was a flop. Maybe one day Shyamalan will share his notebook, and we will get to see what that movie would have looked like.