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"Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert" was M. Night Shyamalan's pitch for Trap, a pulsing new thriller that marries big-screen concert staging with a deadly game of cat and mouse. From the director of The Sixth Sense, Split and The Visit, we've come to expect the unexpected.

Starring Josh Hartnett, with cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Challengers, Call Me by Your Name) and musical performance by Saleka Shyamalan, this is irresistible, big screen summer spectacle filmmaking.

Writer, director and producer M Night. Shyamalan joins us for our podcast, The Love of Cinema, to talk about that killer trailer twist, putting the impossible onscreen, and keeping family at the core of his work.

Read on, watch or listen below. 

I wanted to say right off the bat that I had my first ever press junket a couple of weeks ago, talking to Ishana, your daughter, for The Watched. She was so warm, she was so kind, she just made me feel so comfortable.

No way. Oh, that's so sweet.

And you are here to talk about a film showcasing another brilliant daughter, which must be a wonderful part of your job.

Oh, I know. It is. It's kind of a wonderful second chapter for my career, working with them, or being beside them when they're doing their careers. It's lovely, it gives it more meaning, you know?

It's movie sixteen, and it's what motivates you to do something at the highest level, and they do that for me now. Reminding me…they're looking at me, I'm not going to do it the easy way. They know my belief system inside and out, so they would be able to smell if I did something that was safe, or I wanted you guys to like me, or if that drive went away…they would be able to see that it was fake.

I feel like this was a trailer that got such an excited response. I think some people maybe would have this association that you want to surprise people…what was the decision to go straight in with that reveal?

 You know, it surprised me that you guys were surprised. I guess it didn't even occur to me, because it's more the premise of the movie, you know?

I guess it's the equivalent of Split, where James [McAvoy] walks in and he's in a dress, and he says "Maybe let me talk to him, he'll let you go," and then you realise why, you know you're being held by someone with this disorder. That's the premise of the movie.

It's also surprising and I get that. I understand I'm titrating the idea that he's The Butcher through the movie, but I'm not giving you a lot of information, so that format's kind of interesting… but that's what makes it delicious.

I was so happily surprised by the response to the first trailer and the second trailer, and how excited everybody got with this premise, because that's why I wanted to do it. It's that point of view of going, "oh, I'm with him, and I'm rooting for him". That's wicked.

I'd love to talk about the genesis of this premise. I know that you did have a real life inspiration, a sting operation?

You know, that part kind of came last in the process. It really was Saleka and I talking about a movie where music was critical to the movie, that the characters are watching all the songs. It's a different form of a movie than we're used to, and Purple Rain was kind of our inspiration…you've seen movies, let's say A Star is Born or something, where you sing two or three amazing songs, but a full, full album from beginning to end, where the characters are watching. That was the goal, it started that way.

And I've always loved serial killers, I love them. That's a subject I've always wanted to write something about, it's always been an obsession: can I make a serial killer movie, a different kind of serial killer movie. I was like, maybe he's a serial killer, or maybe one's loose, I was trying to dance around these concepts.

Then I remembered this thing from the 80s, when I was a kid. These police officers trapped these criminals by pretending they were going to the Super Bowl, and they were cheerleaders and everything. It was very funny.

How do you think the concert setting lends itself to this genre of the psychological thriller?

It's kind of that it doesn't belong there. I love doing something scary in the daytime. It's an intensified version of what we're used to. I wanted to kind of go, "hey, nothing to worry about, it's bright, it's happy, everybody's singing," and the darkness keeps growing.

The concert - how on earth do you go about putting something like this together? I mean, not only are you staging this entire thing but then, you're also shooting it on film.

I'm going to answer in an odd way. The goal for me is always to do something you could never duplicate. Me and the actors and the crew just couldn't do it again if we wanted to. And I can honestly say, sitting here, this is impossible. What we did, if you asked me to do it again, I'd be like, "that's impossible."

And to some extent, it is. Movies are kind of magic that way. What Saleka did, the writing of the 14 songs, performing it, us doing live while we were shooting the thriller, doing it in order, in the time frame we did, with Josh killing the performance, over his shoulder Saleka singing, the kids are going crazy…it was all real.

You have to kind of not look down to realise how far the drop is. It's a Herculean task. The crew was extraordinary, Saleka was extraordinary.

I definitely want to ask you about working with [cinematographer] Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who we've recently seen with Challengers. What made you think he was the right choice for this?

What a great question. It has a heightened quality to it, the movie, the humour and the absurdity and all that stuff, and what I like is naturalists. With cinematography, be natural, let those colours play themselves against the naturalism. Wow, that's a real hallway, and those kids feel real, everything's lit in in a more natural way.

Sayo lights very naturally, and he understands film, almost everything he's ever shot is on film. He knows how to expose it just right, so Josh's eyes are dark and then the light from the screen comes, and you see his expression, and it goes dark again, all of those things that you don't realise are happening because it feels very natural in that space. He's very good with colours.

It was the boldness of his choices that really drew me to him, like Call Me By Your Name, that they shot the entire movie with one lens. That tells me how audacious he is, that he's comfortable taking huge risks with naturalism. I loved working with him.

You have Josh Hartnett in this kind of double bill leading role: as loving dad Cooper, but then also this character of The Butcher. What made you feel that he was going to be the right choice for this? I heard that you two had lunch in Ireland.

We did. It was so sweet, I still remember the feeling. Now, Josh is like a brother, so I'm remembering a Josh that I didn't know. But it's the same guy, he's just genuine. He came, and he was so open and genuine, talking about his life, we talked about our kids and our families. And our fears, the things that make us not feel great about ourselves.

With a director actor relationship, it's gotta be that vulnerable, that trusting and I was like "wow, we already have this". And he was game, he was like "I'm ready to do anything"...and then it played out to a ten. Normally I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know, where is the limitation of that, and it never came.

You didn't find that place where he wouldn't go.

Yes, exactly. Or where there was a kind of him protecting himself - "I can't do that, or I won't do that," a resistance - but there wasn't. It was always open. Say we got to a scene that he didn't quite understand: he would ask questions, but it was coming from "I'm going to get there," and then we got there.

Then obviously there's this very important father-daughter relationship. Ariel Donoghue plays Riley. Something that I really loved about this film is that her experience of the concert is really important to us. In a weird way, her experience at the concert is as important as his.

Yes. It's a great thing you're bringing out, because the overt people to think about are obviously Josh and Saleka, and so everybody's attention would go to those two characters as the anchors of the movie.

But really, really, the base of the movie is Ari's character, the child, and what her experience is. What is reaction to the realisation that her dad's acting weird? Her joy, that we fall in love with her, is so important to the thriller of this. It creates a problem for him. We love them, and that's why we're rooting for them, and he loves her, so how do I get out of here without her finding out?

We have to talk about Saleka, who obviously plays a major role within the film, but then also has this huge creative presence offscreen.

The score was done by Herdís Stefánsdóttir, who's an Icelandic composer, so when you hear the thriller music, that's from Herdís. But the diegetic music in the movie, from the concert, that's all Saleka. She wrote and composed and performed and produced every song in the movie. Fourteen songs. It's just a Herculean task.

The movie is very much her and me. It's a triangle, it's her and me and Josh, when you think about the colour of Trap. It's the three of us, blooming that way, about how we feel about this subject.

Some I've always loved about your films is your willingness to do these dark, twisty, kind of discomforting stories, but they always have a base in something real and emotional. I think in this one it's family and parenthood.

I mean, all about family. Ultimately…in a lot of my movies, now that I'm thinking about it, there's always a threat to the family in some real or existential way.

Sometimes there's a kind of superhero, the villain kind of pulls on the family, in Unbreakable, the superhero pulls against the family. So the dynamics of "how do you keep your family intact?" is one of the major themes in my movies.

What's the experience that you want people to have with the film in the cinema?

The intention has been for it to be a very joyous experience. You're laughing, and enjoying a full concert, and the buoyancy of a thriller, and then it gets to the shocking stuff and it's a roller coaster.

It's not meant to be seen alone, it's meant as a big group. We've shown the movie now a bunch of times… we had a thousand people watch it in New York for the first time, and the place was screaming and applauding. It was so fun. They got caught up. It feels like an extension of the concert with the people in the room, which is kind of beautiful.

We'll have to do sing-along screenings someday.

Yes. Exactly.

 Lucy Fenwick Elliott

Trap is in cinemas from 09 August — Book Now!

Hosted by Picturehouse's very own Sam Clements, The Love Of Cinema podcast goes deep on the best new releases, with a little help from some of our favourite film critics, plenty of special guests, and you, the audience!