M Night Shyamalan's latest movie Split is in cinemas now - it stars James McAvoy as a man with multiple personalities who kidnaps three teenage girls.

It's something of a return to form for the director, who made The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable to audience and critical acclaim, and went off the boil a bit (a lot) with After Earth and The Last Airbender.

Now the director's gone back to his roots - in more ways than one.

Digital Spy talked exclusively to Shyamalan about some very exciting future plans.

SPOILERS! SPOILERS ARE BELOW!

Universal

Still with us?

OK, so the end of Split has a very interesting post-credits sequence, which features none other than David Dunn (Bruce Willis's character from Unbreakable) with an additional mention of Mr Glass (Samuel L Jackson's character).

You can read more on the post credits sequence here.

We had the chance to have a lovely spoilery chat with Shyamalan after seeing the film so we could explore what the meaning of all this is, and he had some great revelations for us - namely that Split IS Unbreakable 2, that McAvoy's character Kevin Wendle Crumb was originally supposed to appear in Unbreakable, and that Unbreakable and Split form two parts of an intended trilogy.

He's writing the third part now and it's going to be an out and out superhero movie feature Dunn, Glass and Crumb. Oh, and we'll get to meet even more of Crumb's many personae.

Check out the interview below...

Universal

Will we see more of 'The Horde'?

The Horde references three individuals. I don't know if I'm going to introduce all of the remaining 13 but hopefully I'm going to introduce you to a bunch more. I'd like to but that's a lot of characters, that's a cast of 13. Even this movie, the first cut was three hours, there were so many characters!

I had other people in the movie that had to get cut out. It was too many people to introduce you to, to connect them to the story, and I was like, 'Why is this movie so long?' but it was because it was the most characters I'd ever had. It just happens to be one dude playing most of them.

Will James McAvoy be returning for the next movie then?

I hope so, yeah

Universal

This is now a shared universe with Unbreakable, is it possible this universe could be expanded and shared with other Shyamalan projects?

No. Kevin's character was from the original Unbreakable script. In the original script it was David and Kevin, and Elijah was advising David that he was a superhero in real life and he bumps into one of the altered personalities in a train station and then follows him back. You'd see both of those things happening simultaneously. That was the original format for Unbreakable and then I pulled him out - it was too electric, I couldn't get to the quiet movie I was trying to make. I'm not a big sequel guy - it goes against my engine - but it was fun to make this this way. A movie that you thought was this genre for the whole movie - a psychological thriller - but then it clicks over into origin story at the end, which is great.

My hope is to make a final movie from these two.

Disney

Is there any plan to extend it further than that?

I probably won't, but you never know... I just heard that JK Rowling wrote four new Fantastic Beasts movies! So who knows what inspires a writer. That would be unusual for me because what inspires me is new stories and there's another story that I've got and I'm dying to write that one. I couldn't spend my whole life writing the same characters over and over again but you never know.

We liked the idea that Cole from The Sixth Sense could also appear - because in a way he has a super power?

A common thread through all the movies is I genuinely believe there's extraordinary in the ordinary around us. So that's a common thing if you think about the movies. So there is a binding force between them and that philosophy is particularly true in Unbreakable and Split.

I'm going to tell you about grounded things in our world - dissociative identity disorder, osteogenesis imperfecta, and then I'm going to ask you a question of each of those. If someone's bones are that brittle, aren't there people walking around whose bones are hard to break, almost impossible to break, but they don't know it because they never get hurt? They must exist on this continuum.

If it is true that you can change your body chemistry with your thoughts, what if someone with this disorder thought they were a supernatural being, what would happen then?

Universal

How far are you with part 3?

I wanted to be completely done with the outline before I went on this press junket, but it was really hard emotionally because this story hasn't finished yet, meaning Split, meaning the story of its entrance to the world. You have so many emotional reactions to it. We showed the first screening of it 4 months ago in Fantastic Fest in Austin, we've been showing it at festivals, showing it to audiences, having sneak screenings.

The reaction has been so wonderful and so great, but I have a philosophy that you don't want to put your energy into that. The universe doesn't want you to. Put your energy into the story, the characters. What I should be doing this second is putting my energy into the story and the characters of this outline. I'm trying but it's very hard... you start to wonder about what's going to happen in a week. I think a week from now I'll be able to go back to that outline and be like, 'I've done everything I can for this movie, let it go and let's start this other film.'

Universal

Tonally, will it feel like a superhero film?

I think so. We'll be open about it - this is a movie about comic books, not a comic book movie, but a movie about comic books.

I just thought of something. One of the reasons I'm finding it a little confusing right now is that it's hubris to work on this before I know that we're good with Split. Whereas normally I'd be thinking about a movie that has nothing to do with this, this is its own thing. But these are related, this is related to Split.

Will it retain this feeling of a dark thriller?

The outline is almost 10 pages, it's very involved - it has its own special story. Unbreakable isn't in a sense a comic book movie - it's a movie about a guy who survives, the only person who survives a train wreck and doesn't have a scratch on him. It's a mystery and that's cool. And this one is three girls get abducted by a guy who believes he's all these people and he says another personality is coming to get them - that's a really cool idea. And then the third one should have its own cool idea separate from the fact that it's related to those two movies. That's the hope.

Split is in UK cinemas now.

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