Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan join forces on a ghostly love story

On the surface, author Nicholas Sparks and filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan seem like unlikely collaborators. Sparks is a master of the “earthbound” love story like “The Notebook,” while Shyamalan, the Oscar-nominated director of “The Sixth Sense,” is known for his fascination with the supernatural. It turns out they’ve admired each other’s work for years, and now together have produced “Remain,” which arrives on bookshelves next week and lands in movie theaters next October.

Sparks is known for pulling at readers’ heartstrings with cinematic love stories — 11 of which have made their way to the big screen, and several of which Sparks produced himself. But with “Remain,” the bestselling author has forged a singular partnership that takes him well outside his comfort zone. For one, the romance that transpires is between a living male and, let’s say, a ghostly woman. The lovers have otherworldly sex, although they can’t actually touch. In other words, it’s a love story only this pair could concoct.

In early 2023, Sparks says someone on his team approached him with an idea. “Hey,” Sparks recounted, “wouldn’t it be neat if you did something with M. Night Shyamalan?” Sparks, who The Times interviewed over Zoom from his home in New Bern, N.C., had been a Shyamalan devotee for decades. Of course, he loved “The Sixth Sense.” “Who didn’t, right?” he laughs. But he’s also been a fan of every Shyamalan production since. There was even a near-miss between them decades ago. “When ‘The Notebook’ was being adapted into a movie way back in the late 1990s, one of the filmmakers the producers approached was M. Night. He turned it down because he was working on another project.” Sparks pauses, then smiles slyly, “I think it was called ‘The Sixth Sense.’”

At this stage of his highly successful career — more than 115 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide — Sparks can pick and choose among projects. And he’s also now enough of a Hollywood veteran to know that getting from concept to screen can be challenging — though Sparks’ track record is pretty remarkable. So while he was open to a partnership with Shyamalan, Sparks was skeptical it would get off the ground. To Sparks’ surprise, a month or two after the idea was first floated, he received a call to arrange a meeting between the two the following month — in May 2023 — in Shyamalan’s Bucks County, Pa., offices. They agreed that each would propose his own storyline and together they would decide which to go forward with. The competition was on.

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It became clear within moments that Shyamalan’s concept would win the day, though Sparks is reticent to say why, except that “mine was pretty dark.” Once Shyamalan characterized his vision as a “supernatural love story,” Sparks thought, “I can do that. It’s not so wildly outside what I do. Something Lovecraftian with different dimensions.” The more he thought about it, the more Sparks realized that, “in the end, novels come down to character, writing and plotting.” All of those were in his toolbox. They got what Sparks describes as “the fangirling stuff” out of the way, and then took a hard look at how well they could work together. “It came down to chemistry,” Sparks says.

The pair spent the next several hours honing the central idea and spitballing about plot and character development. It was eventually decided that the male protagonist, Tate Donovan — to be played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie — would be an architect who is grieving the loss of his sister. She tells him on her deathbed that she’s able to see spirits “still tethered to the living world.” Both novel and film would be set in Cape Cod, Mass., and there would be a mysterious woman named Wren, which is where the supernatural element would come in. They loosely agreed on the outline, but no firm deal or timeline was put in place. Sparks returned to his home in New Bern. More than a year passed, during which, Sparks says, “I didn’t hear anything from him at all. I thought, ‘OK, he’s busy. I’m busy. Whatever,’” and turned to another project.

In August 2024, Sparks was surprised to receive a call from Shyamalan, who had already moved forward on the idea. “Our story is going to be my next project,” Sparks recalls Shyamalan saying. “He told me he intended to write, direct and produce the film.” Sparks says it then hit him, “Oh my gosh. This is going to be an M. Night movie!” The mood shifted from excitement to reality: “I guess I’d better get started on the novel!” Sparks recalls telling himself.

After that call, it took only six weeks for Shyamalan to complete a first draft of the screenplay, which he sent to Sparks for comment. Typically, the book would be written first, and the screenplay would follow, though, for “Message in a Bottle,” Sparks finished the novel after Gerald Di Pego had completed the script, with Kevin Costner attached. Sparks knew the drill. He immediately recognized, “Wow, this is going to make a great film,” but to work as a novel, he told Shyamalan, “We’ve got to tweak some things.” By October, they’d smoothed out the rough edges and Sparks began writing in earnest.

Sparks’ career is the stuff of fairy tales, much like the romances he writes. It was his mother who first suggested he write books to “stop him from pouting” after he was sidelined with an injury from the University of Notre Dame track and field team. The first-ever novel he wrote was “truly terrible,” Sparks says, and has never been published. But the seed was planted. Many years later, after marrying, having kids and working as a pharmaceutical sales rep, he thought back to his mother’s advice, and spent evenings writing a novel he named “Winter for Two.”

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He sent off the finished manuscript to 25 literary agents. Only one — Theresa Park — responded. She was enthusiastic, but urged him to retitle it “The Notebook.” At Park’s request, he printed 20 or so hard copies to be mailed to publishers. One of those landed in the hands of Jamie Raab, who was then executive editor at Warner Books in New York. Raab instantly saw its potential and rushed a copy to her boss’ apartment, asking her to drop everything and read it as quickly as possible. Raab’s boss was sold, and instructed her to “take the novel off the table” in a preemptive deal that would prevent other publishers from bidding. “I knew it had a lot of heart. It made me cry. … I had an instinct that many would feel the same way,” Raab recalls. In 1996, “The Notebook” hit No. 1 on bestseller lists; in 2004, it became a box office hit starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams; and in 2024, it was turned into a play that was nominated for three Tony Awards. Raab ended up editing 18 more of Sparks’ books.

Sparks says he and Shyamalan worked well as a team. “He gave me a very long leash to write a novel based on the story the two of us came up with,” Sparks says. “I would call him and say, ‘Can I make the ending different?’ or ‘How about this twist instead?’” They spoke three or four times a week during this period. They had “a wonderful time bouncing ideas off each other,” Sparks says. “The only tricky part was that I couldn’t make all the decisions about the novel on my own, as I normally would.” He says, “Night got to pick the rules and I had to write within those rules. His story determined what I needed to do, but it was still up to me to figure out how I was going to do it.” Their teamwork, Sparks says, produced “a great movie,” hitting theaters Oct. 23, 2026, and a book he hopes readers will be surprised and delighted by.

For anyone who’s shocked that Sparks would stray off the beaten path of traditional love stories, that first book, the one his mom prompted him to write but never saw the light of day? It was a horror novel inspired by Sparks’ literary hero, Stephen King. Who knows where Sparks may venture next.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.