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“I’ve gotten darker...” grins M. Night Shyamalan when Teasers meets him to discuss his new low-budget thriller. “I feel like, making smaller movies, I’m allowed to push the boundaries.” It’s September 2016, and it’s only a few days since Split premiered to strong reviews at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. Following horror The Visit, Split feels like the second step in Shyamalan’s comeback story after a string of critically savaged pictures.

The film stars James McAvoy as ‘Kevin’. When he kidnaps three teenage girls and locks them in his basement, it soon becomes clear that there’s more to Kevin than meets the eye, as the young women are gradually introduced to his other personalities, from young Hedwig to haughty Patricia. Kevin has dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder), and the 23 players in his head collude to keep the girls captive ahead of the imminent arrival of ‘the Beast’.

The part requires a tour-de-force performance from McAvoy, who Shyamalan spotted at a party sporting his X-Men: Apocalypse buzzcut, as there are no major physical changes for any of the personalities McAvoy inhabits. “When I saw James is when I started to think of it more and more like that,” recalls Shyamalan. “Just an internal performance, and a blank slate. When I saw him with his buzzed hair, it all went ‘click’ to me.”

“I think your instinct guides you, to begin with,” says McAvoy of portraying so many different characters. “Sometimes you come up with a pretty much fully formed character, just instinctually. But then other characters don’t come to you so easily.”

Shyamalan calls Split’s lean, mean shoot the toughest of his career. “It was an ambitious movie for a low budget,” he admits. “Super-ambitious, because it certainly didn’t feel like it was low budget when it was done. You have a lot of characters. It’s a very complicated screenplay structure.” It certainly kept McAvoy busy. “Because usually, you get to do the really good stuff as an actor every third day or fourth day, if you’re playing the lead,” the Brit actor smiles. “This one, it was like, ‘OK, I’m doing this character’s good stuff this minute, then two hours later, I’m doing this character’s good stuff this minute, then two hours later, I’m doing that character’s good stuff.’ It was really interesting for me to get to do that.”

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer.

She is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King’s College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women’s higher education.

Having been home-schooled for the most part of her childhood, mostly in English classics and Victorian literature, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915, through the Hogarth Press, a publishing house that she established with her husband, Leonard Woolf. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room Of One’s Own (1929), with its dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

James Wong Howe, A.S.C. (28 August 1899-12 July 1976) was a Chinese American cinematographer who worked on over 130 films. He was a master at the use of shadow and was one of the first to use deep-focus cinematography, in which both foreground and distant planes remain in focus.