On the occasion of the release of his latest directorial work, “Trap,” M. Night Shyamalan took part in an interview with GQ magazine in which he discussed his career in retrospect. He recalled that the studio bosses did not want to market 2000’s “Unbreakable” as a comic book adaptation. How times have changed. Shyamalan and his star Bruce Willis had just celebrated a huge success with “The Sixth Sense,” which grossed $672 million worldwide and received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. Shyamalan recalled that the studio wanted to market “Unbreakable” like a horror thriller, even though it was a superhero film.

“If you deny what it is because you’re afraid it’s different, you rob it of all its power,” Shyamalan said. “They said, ‘We had one of the greatest movies of all time and the same two people are making another movie. Let’s make it look like that movie,’ as opposed to what it was, which was the beginning of a whole genre. They didn’t recognize it because they were too afraid to say the word ‘comic book.'”

“That was literally the thing that was like, no one would see a movie about a comic book,” he recalled the studio saying. “That was literally like, you can’t do that. And I thought, ‘I love it! Maybe there are other people who would look at this as a myth and enjoy it.’ In my mind, it was a movie where it was like, ‘The guy has an accident where everyone dies but him, and he doesn’t have a scratch on him, and someone says, ‘I know why that happened. You’re a real superhero.'” That’s the movie, but that’s never said or sold.”

Since the studio did not want to market “Unbreakable” as a comic book adaptation, fans were very disappointed when the film did not live up to “The Sixth Sense.”

“Other people would come and go and say, ‘That wasn’t scary,'” Shyamalan said. “And I thought, ‘Who said it was going to be like that? Who said it was going to be scary?’ And so (I learned) a really interesting lesson: If I want to be the purveyor of original stories for my life, I have to find partners who understand that we’re going to reinvent ourselves every time, and we should celebrate that.”

“Unbreakable” hit theaters in the fall of 2000, a few months after the first “X-Men” film popularized the comic genre in Hollywood. It wasn’t until “Spider-Man” in 2002 that the genre experienced a real box office hit.

“Trap” is now in theaters nationwide. Watch Shyamalan’s full retrospective interview with GQ magazine in the video below.