Ishana Night Shyamalan, the American director of the new Ireland-set supernatural thriller The Watched, has told RTÉ Entertainment she would be "so happy" to come back and make another film here.
Shyamalan, the daughter of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable director M Night Shyamalan, makes her feature debut with The Watched, her adaptation of Irish author AM Shine's book The Watchers.
Filmed in Co Galway and Co Wicklow, The Watched tells the story of Mina (Dakota Fanning), a troubled American woman living in Galway who becomes lost in the woods while on a road trip - and soon discovers she has an audience.
The cast of The Watched also includes Irish actors Olwen Fouéré and Oliver Finnegan alongside British actor Georgina Campbell - with the Irish landscape also playing a major role in the film.
"I literally just fell in love with the place," Shyamalan told RTÉ Entertainment. "I'm so happy to have shot my first movie there."
Admitting that she knew "truly very little" about Ireland and just the "general kind of sense of it" before making The Watched, Shyamalan said AM Shine's source novel had a profound effect on her.
"I was so enamoured with how AM Shine wrote about Ireland and how much of a presence it had in the book and then [I] did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people about what it was like," she recounted.
"But it was really when I came there and started to understand the nuances of what life there is like and the people there that I felt I could start to put it into a film a bit."
Shyamalan said there was "never even really a conversation" about relocating the story from Ireland to the US.
"I think it's such a distinctive part of AM Shine's book and this particular mythology and ideas that it plays with are very specific to Irish culture," she continued. "I really enjoyed that idea of focusing on one kind of community of people with a very universal story - it felt to me like it connects to everyone."
Shyamalan said she plans to stay in the supernatural genre for her future films.
"I'm really interested in sort of expanding it and pushing the boundaries of what that means," she explained. "I really like playing with form in that way. My hope is that I can create a fresh take on it in whatever projects I do."
When asked if those projects could also include another film in Ireland, she laughed: "I would so love to! The crew there is incredible. I would be so happy to come back and shoot another movie there."
The Watched is in cinemas from Friday 7 June.
