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When it comes to twists, turns and the supernatural, M Night Shyamalan is one of the best in the film business.

His body of movie work includes The Sixth Sense, Signs, and more recently the meme-inspiring Old.

While he's not been so prolific on television, his creepy psychological horror Servant, about a grieving family and their nanny, has been well received 鈥� getting renewed for a fourth series before the third was even released this week.

As well as acting as show-runner, Shyamalan also sometimes directs, and the new series kicks off with an episode he helmed.

It sees young childminder Leanne left in the house on her own while battling fears that someone from her past is coming to catch up with her.

Shyamalan told Sky News' Backstage podcast why he wanted to direct this particular episode.

"Each year I look at the episodes and decide which would be best for me to direct 鈥� and it's not normally the ones you'd think," he said.

"I haven't, up to this point, directed one of the end episodes for this reason. I find what it is needed, and on this season I thought, let me launch the season for the actors and the other directors in this tone, in this way, in this very claustrophobic, repulsion-like episode of her being left alone and thinking she's hearing things and trying to trick herself into not thinking that somebody is in the house.

"And also because Nell [Tiger Free, who plays Leanne] is a young actress. I wanted to work with her and really have her give a really complicated performance; let's shoot this season off with her and doing something really new and fresh - that was the thinking."

The vast majority of Servant is filmed inside a large, aspirational yet chilling home, making for a tense, haunted house-style atmosphere.

This series, for the first time, the audience gets to see the characters spending time in a park located at the back of the house.

Shyamalan says it was always the plan to expand the characters' world 鈥� and that rather than finding it restrictive to keep the bulk of the action inside, he works better within boundaries.

"My mind works the reverse - if it's too sprawling I can't see it, I don't even know what dish I'm making for you guys.

"When you're like, here's every ingredient in the supermarket - what do you want to make? I'm like, I don't know! I would be much better if you said, here's cheddar cheese, here's beef, and here's this and tomatoes - what can you make?

"Then my mind starts working and so the limitations are great, but when we first were designing the house I knew there was a park behind the house and I said, at one of these seasons we're going to open that door and let the umbilical cord go stretch out there and come back again. And so this is that season."

The third series of Servant has become something of a family affair, with Shyamalan's daughter Ishana also working as a director on the show 鈥� leading the second episode as well as the cliff-hanger finale.

He says he is not surprised she has followed in his footsteps.

"I always suspected that she was going to be the filmmaker of the children. I could see it because she loved to draw and she's a great writer, she loved to dance - she trained in ballet for a long time... what does that have to do with [directing]? She understands movement because of that, how to block actors.

"And she's a painter, and then she loves costumes, and I'm like, 'well you can do all of this in one job and that job is directing movies, if you want, or directing shows, you can do all these art forms together'."

Despite seeing her potential, Shyamalan insists he didn't turn pushy parent when it came to his daughter's career.

"She's been on the set for so long, it was a really organic thing.

"I didn't say, 'hey, you should be a filmmaker'. She came to me and said, 'hey, you know, I think I want to go to film school'. And I'm like, 'great, that sounds great, go to my old film school'."

The third series of Servant is streaming now on Apple TV+. Hear our review in the latest episode of Backstage, the film and TV podcast from Sky News

On the day of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, Valentine's Day 2018, like many, actor Fran Kranz found himself trying to make sense of the senseless.

Fourteen students and three teachers died in the massacre, which came after so many before: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Just a few weeks ago, four students were killed after a fellow pupil opened fire at his high school near Detroit in Michigan.

Kranz, probably best known at that point for his portrayal of Topher Brink in the science fiction drama series Dollhouse, as well as films including Cabin In The Woods and The Village, went online to order books on the mass killings. Having become a father for the first time in 2016, the Parkland shooting affected him so deeply, he couldn't not do something, he says.

The tragedy became the catalyst for his directorial debut, Mass; a raw and painfully intimate story of two sets of parents meeting in the aftermath of such a shooting. Starring Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd and Reed Birney, it is set almost entirely in one room; just four people, sitting around a table, talking.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021 to critical acclaim, and in December received the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award - an accolade presented to the ensemble cast, director and casting director of a film, and previously won by the likes of Oscar winners Moonlight and Spotlight.

Kranz tells Sky News that through Mass he wanted to explore the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation; feelings that to those faced with the darkest of situations might seem impossible to come by.

"I wanted to believe they were possible - they were possible in my own life and in my family's life and in the world," he says.

"We have these shootings in our country so frequently that it was on my mind and troubling me, as this new parent. What would happen? And so I was trying to with this film, in many ways, just to work through my own feelings on the subject of forgiveness."

Kranz was also inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice body set up in 1996 to investigate human rights abuses after the end of apartheid, chaired by the late Desmond Tutu, and The Forgiveness Project.

"I felt like I wanted to do something with these stories," he says. "But I'm not South African and did not know how I would participate in something like that... [then] the day of the Parkland shooting, I was so overwhelmed I went on to Amazon and just ordered several books on mass shootings in America. I just thought, I need to understand what the hell is going on here.

"That's what started this kind of two years, essentially, of reading nothing but the subject. And it did get to a point where there was a moment, particularly around reading about the tragedy at [Sandy Hook], because of the age of these children... it was so emotional, crying in front of a laptop."

Kranz wrote and rewrote scenes for Mass, he says, realising the dialogue at first was "too decent, too polite... too rote". But it was something he felt he had to do, and knew he had to get right.

"I've tried to write things before and I never really had the guts or the sort of follow-through to make something. But there was a moment where I felt, I have to make this movie because what's the point of all this? What's the point of all this emotion? What's the point of reading all of this and learning about the personal lives of so many families, children, teachers, parents... I just had to do something with it."

As part of her research, Dowd (The Handmaid's Tale, Hereditary, Compliance) read A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

"She had lived the unimaginable story of [my character] Linda's life, essentially, of her son being the shooter, shooting many others, taking his own life. So I read it [but] didn't dwell on it, because the script was powerful and enough."

Despite the fierce arguments over gun laws in the US, there is no politics in Mass. "It can't be a polemic and I have to approach it just from a human perspective and tell the story of human beings working through pain to try and get to a better place," says Kranz.

"If we can focus on the empathetic connection to people, we might find another way, or we might find ourselves in a place where some of these problems feel easier to solve because we're approaching it from a place of compassion for one another, as opposed to the adversarial approach of: you're doing something wrong and need to stop."

"FOUR PEOPLE ENTER A ROOM - IT FEELS LIKE SOMETHING TERRIBLE OR WONDERFUL COULD HAPPEN"

Mass star Jason Isaacs

Plimpton (The Goonies, Beautiful Girls) and Isaacs (Harry Potter films, The OA, Hotel Mumbai) play Gail and Jay, the parents of one of the victims.

"At the time I read [the script] first, it was clear the world was incredibly divided," Isaacs tells Sky News.

"Trump was president in America and was using blame as a tool, and Britain was divided by Brexit. [Mass] is a film about people whose lives have ground to a halt because they're so crippled by hatred and blame and resentment, and they're poisoning themselves for that. And it was kind of a plea for human connection.

"It's such a brave and bold subject to want to tell a story about, but it was made so personal and human; [it] had, at the same time, that gripping element of, I was desperate to find out what happened next. Four people enter a room; it feels like something terrible or wonderful could happen."

It's a film, essentially, "about four people talking", he says. "It doesn't have special effects or mountains or aliens. It's four human beings interacting at their most raw."

Isaacs says he hopes audiences aren't "misled" into thinking Mass is a film about a school shooting. "It really isn't anything to do with that," he says. "That happened many years before the film. We're a couple whose marriage has ground to a halt, our lives have ground to a halt, and we want to be able to move forward... I don't think it's about the people specifically to whom this has happened."

Plimpton disagrees. "We have a different perspective," she says. But they do agree that the central theme of the film is about moving forward in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

"It has the specifics of the universal, if that doesn't sound too pretentious," says Isaacs. "It speaks to anybody whose lives are held back by hatred or division or the notion that someone else is to blame."

"Grief," Plimpton adds.

Mass is about grief and moving forward: four people, sitting in a room, talking it out.

Mass is out in cinemas and on Sky Cinema now