M. Night Shyamalan denies copying idea for ‘Servant’ as trial begins: “This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do”

nme.com:

Servant as his plagiarism trial gets underway.The director testified yesterday (January 22) that he and his collaborators didn’t copy a 2013 independent film, The Truth About Emanuel, about a delusional mother and her baby doll, directed by Francesca Gregorini.

She filed a lawsuit against Shyamalan in 2020, not long after the Apple+ TV show made its debut.Gregorini’s film depicts a nanny who feeds the mother’s delusion that the doll is real.

Shyamalan told the jury, per Variety, during the federal trial in Riverside, California, that the copyright dispute is “clearly, 100%, a misunderstanding.”“This accusation is the exact opposite of everything I do and everything I try to represent,” Shyamalan said.

When asked if he’d copied anything from the film, he said: “Absolutely not.”In testimony last Thursday (January 16), Gregorini said she was “shocked” when she first saw the trailer for Servant, which she alleges took “the beating heart and skeleton of my film,” and even supposedly mirrored individual shots and sequences.“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said. “I could see basically they had taken my film and… redone it.”Later, she said: “I realized that in doing the suit, I would be fighting for myself, for what happened to me, but also for the other people who perhaps, for whatever reasons, were not able to get their day in court.