Nicholas Sparks, a master of romance, teamed up with filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan on the supernatural love story “Remain.” (Justin Jun Lee / For Time)
At first glance, author Nicholas Sparks and filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan seem like unlikely collaborators. Sparks is a master of “earthly” love stories 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 they’ve produced “Remain” together, which arrives in libraries next week and in theaters next October.
Sparks is known for touching readers’ hearts with cinematic love stories – 11 of which have been brought to the big screen, and several of which were produced by Sparks himself. But with “Remain”, the successful author has forged a unique partnership that takes him well outside his comfort zone. On the one hand, the romance that occurs is between a living man and, say, a ghostly woman. The lovers have supernatural sex, even though they can’t actually touch each other. In other words, it’s a love story that only this couple could concoct.
In early 2023, Sparks says a member of his team approached him with an idea. “Hey,” Sparks recounted, “wouldn’t it be cool if you did something with M. Night Shyamalan?” Sparks, whom the Times interviewed over Zoom from his home in New Bern, North Carolina, had been a Shyamalan follower for decades. Of course, he loved “The Sixth Sense.” “Who hasn’t, right?” he laughs. But since then, he has also been a fan of all of Shyamalan’s productions. There was even a near miss between them decades ago. “When ‘The Notebook’ was made into a film in the late 1990s, one of the filmmakers the producers contacted was M. Night. He declined because he was working on another project.” Sparks pauses, then smiles slyly, “I think it was called ‘The Sixth Sense.’
At this point in his highly successful career – more than 115 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide – Sparks can take his pick of his projects. And he’s also now enough of a Hollywood veteran to know that going from concept to screen can be a challenge — even if Sparks’ journey is quite remarkable. So while he was open to a partnership with Shyamalan, Sparks was skeptical that he could get off the ground. To Sparks’ surprise, a month or two after the idea was first floated, he received a call to set up a meeting between the two the following month — in May 2023 — at Shyamalan’s Bucks County, Pennsylvania, offices. They agreed that each would come up with their own scenario and they would decide together which one to move forward with. The competition was on.
Learn more: Nicholas Sparks is a master of romance
It became clear within moments that Shyamalan’s concept would win out, although Sparks was reluctant to say why, except that “mine was pretty dark.” Once Shyamalan called his vision a “supernatural love story,” Sparks thought, “I can do that. It’s not that wild outside of what I’m doing. Something Lovecraftian with different dimensions.” The more he thought about it, the more Sparks realized that “ultimately, novels come down to characters, writing, and plot.” This was all in his toolbox. They eliminated what Sparks describes as “the fangirling stuff” and then took a hard look at how well they could work together. “It was all about chemistry,” Sparks says.
The two spent the next few hours refining the central idea and discussing plot and character development. It was ultimately decided that the male protagonist, Tate Donovan – who will be played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the film – would be an architect grieving the loss of his sister. She tells him on her deathbed that she is able to see spirits “still linked to the living world.” The novel and film would be set in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and there would be a mysterious woman named Wren, and that’s where the supernatural element would come in. They vaguely agreed on the outline, but no firm agreement or timetable was put in place. Sparks returned home to New Bern. More than a year passed, during which time, Sparks says, “I didn’t hear anything from him. I was like, ‘OK, he’s busy. I’m busy. Whatever,'” and I moved on to another project.
M. Night Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for the film “Remain,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, while Nicholas Sparks wrote the book. (Gérald Matzka / Getty Images)
In August 2024, Sparks was surprised to receive a call from Shyamalan, who had already moved forward on the idea. “Our story will be my next project,” Sparks recalled telling Shyamalan. “He told me he intended to write, direct and produce the film.” Sparks says it then hit him: “Oh my God. This is going to be an M. Night movie!” The mood shifted from excitement to reality: “I guess I better start the novel!” » Sparks remembers saying to himself.
After that call, it took Shyamalan only six weeks to complete a first draft of the script, which he sent to Sparks for feedback. Typically, the book was written first, and the screenplay followed, however, for “Message in a Bottle”, Sparks completed the novel after Gerald Di Pego completed the screenplay, with Kevin Costner attached. Sparks knew the principle. He immediately recognized, “Wow, this is going to make a great movie,” but to work as a novel, he told Shyamalan, “We need to tweak some things.” By October they had ironed out the rough edges and Sparks began writing in earnest.
Sparks’ career is like a fairy tale, just like the novels he writes. It was his mother who first suggested he write books to “keep him from pouting” after he was sidelined due to injury from the University of Notre Dame track and field team. The very first novel he wrote was “really terrible,” Sparks says, and was never published. But the seed was planted. Many years later, after marrying, having children and working as a pharmaceutical salesman, he thought about his mother’s advice and spent his evenings writing a novel which he called “Winter for Two.”
Learn more: Reese Witherspoon’s debut novel with Harlan Coben is a fun adventure about the super-rich
He sent the completed manuscript to 25 literary agents. Only one – Theresa Park – responded. She was enthusiastic, but urged him to rename it “The Notebook.” At Park’s request, he printed around twenty hard copies to send to publishers. One of them landed in the hands of Jamie Raab, who was then an editor at Warner Books in New York. Raab immediately saw its potential and rushed to send a copy to her boss’s apartment, asking him to drop everything and read it as quickly as possible. Raab’s boss was sold and asked him to “take the novel off the table” in a pre-emptive deal that would prevent other publishers from bidding. “I knew there was a lot of heart. It made me cry. … I had an instinct that many would feel the same way,” Raab recalled. In 1996, “The Notebook” reached number one on the bestseller lists; in 2004, it became a box office hit starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams; and in 2024, it was made into a play nominated for three Tony Awards. Raab ended up editing 18 more 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 we had both imagined,” 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 exchanging ideas,” Sparks says. “The only tricky part was that I couldn’t make all the decisions about the novel on my own, like I normally would.” He says: “Night had to choose the rules and I had to write by those rules. His story determined What I needed to do it, but it was always up to me to figure out how I was going to do it. Their teamwork, Sparks says, has produced “a great movie,” released in theaters Oct. 23, 2026, and a book that he hopes will surprise and delight readers.
For anyone who is shocked that Sparks is straying from the beaten path of traditional love stories, that first book, the one his mother urged him to write but which never saw the light of day? It was a horror novel inspired by Sparks’ literary hero, Stephen King. Who knows where Sparks might venture next.
Get the latest book news, events and more delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.
