Haley Joel Osment reflects on old Bruce Willis voicemails, preserving that twist, and more for “The Sixth Sense”'s 25th anniversary

"He did everything in such a cool way, and had such charisma," Osment remembers of Willis.

It's been 25 years since The Sixth Sense blew our minds in the summer of 1999, and Haley Joel Osment still remembers the film with nothing but fondness.

To celebrate the film's 25th anniversary and promote its forthcoming release on 4K home video, the actor, who received an Oscar nomination for playing the haunted youngster Cole, is reflecting on the process of making M. Night Shyamalan's signature thriller in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly. Below, Osment discusses the supportive voicemails he received from costar Bruce Willis, the similarities between Shyamalan and his A.I. Artificial Intelligence director Steven Spielberg, his disturbing performance in this year's Blink Twice, and much more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does it feel to be 25 years removed from The Sixth Sense?

HALEY JOEL OSMENT: It's a weird amount of time because a quarter century is objectively a very long time, but that experience was so memorable. I remember the experience of making that movie day-to-day and scene-by-scene in a way that is almost more detailed than some things that have happened more recently.

How did your experience on set differ from your prior projects?

I'd done a couple features, but nothing with subject matter that dark. And most of the stuff that I had done had been network comedies, so that's a really fun work schedule, but putting up a live show every week and the comic timing of that was just a completely different process than putting together this character and doing a movie where practically every scene is pretty heavy and has very intense things going on. So the amount of preparation that was required was on a different level than what I'd had before. But one of the luxuries we had on that movie was that we got to rehearse as a team for two or three weeks in Philadelphia beforehand. I think that made a huge difference with the quality of what we got to put on screen.

What types of direction did M. Night Shyamalan give you to guide your performance?

I think that one of the things he was most concerned about — and he brought this up in our very first meeting when we got to Philadelphia — was avoiding the trend of horror movies that play the jump scares in a really unnatural way, the type where somebody has a hand hit their shoulder in the hallway and it's like, "Oh, it's just their friend" or fakeouts like that. Night said, "We're not going to treat the audience that way. All of the frightening moments have to come from a very real place, and have to come from people's relationships with the characters."

Your character is obviously very haunted and emotionally vulnerable. How did it feel to play those kinds of emotions on screen every day as a young kid?

It was a challenge, because my life was completely different from that character's. He was a very young person having to deal with these really horrific things that became a part of his daily life. As you get older, you can use more of your experiences to play those kind of extremes just because you know more about the world. But at that age, it all has to come from imagination or studying other great horror movies and seeing examples of people who had played those kinds of characters. It sort of becomes this hybrid of trying to find things in your life that are the closest to the experience of the character, and also when there are just things that you obviously had not gone through, filling those in by just imagining what it would be like.

The movie is quite dark, especially for a PG-13 project. How aware were you of the totality of the darkness of the movie as you filmed it? 

Nothing went over my head. Even in reading the script for the first time, a lot of that was stuff that I had not thought about before. Munchausen by proxy is not something that I had thought about before, but in reading the script and working with Night, I was understanding the context in which everything was happening. And it's interesting because on the outside, I knew the backgrounds to those things that happened to ghosts from various historical periods that Cole would see — in a way that the character might not even have context for — because he's just trying to read or trying to play.

So you were completely aware of the twist going into the movie?

Yes. And now, we've talked a lot about after the movie came out, people keeping it secret, but it's also kind of remarkable that a lot of people read that script and the twist was not so widely known, and had not been spoiled by people who had had access to it before. We didn't have to shoot any fake endings or anything like that to throw people off.

Did you feel the weight and the heaviness of the thematic content while shooting?

No. It's kind of like how people really enjoy Halloween, and I enjoy Halloween as a holiday. It's got that freaky, spooky vibe, but it can be a fun thing. It was definitely a fun environment to go to work at, and creating something scary is something that a lot of people really enjoy. I think it's one of the reasons why horror is such a popular genre. We like to get scared, and we like to scare other people within reason, and so making that movie was kind of like that too. And it was Halloween: we shot it in Philadelphia in October, which felt appropriate.

What was it like working with Bruce Willis?

It was fantastic. I had worked with Tom Hanks before on Forrest Gump and other big name actors, but at that point I was old enough to have seen a lot of Bruce's movies, which added a lot of excitement to it. And that's something that lasts your entire career, where you get to work with people who you've enjoyed watching in other things. And it made a huge impression on me because that was the first gigantic celebrity that I'd worked with at an age where I was aware of his stardom. And he did everything in such a cool way, and had such charisma, and was the person that you want on set setting the tone for the sort of movie we were making, because things usually revolve around the No. 1 on the call sheet. It was a script that we all cared about so much and put so much effort into, and Bruce led the way on that.

Was there anything about his performance or his dynamic on set that surprised you?

There weren't necessarily any curveballs, but it was interesting because obviously I was more familiar with him as John McClane and characters like that. And this character is much more subdued and academic, and I think that is one of the things that makes it such a cool performance — you can sense all that beneath the surface, but it's this guy who's living kind of a buttoned-up life and he's restrained and aloof. So that contrast between the twinkle you can see in Bruce's eyes and this colder guy that he's inhabiting was interesting.

Have you had any contact or interactions with him since the initial heyday of the movie?

I heard from him a lot after it came out in those subsequent years. He'd leave voicemails at the house from time to time, just checking in. He would just call out of the blue, so sometimes it was in the lead up before travel. We went to Japan together twice, if I remember correctly, to open Sixth Sense in different cities. So he would call ahead of that, and then sometimes I would just come home from school and the answering machine would be blinking and it'd be him going like, "Hey, Haley Joel. Just saying hi." I need to find those old answering tapes. I know we preserved those. I know his daughters a little bit, but I have not spoken to him since the news of his health in recent years.

What was it like working with Toni Collette?

Her performance is amazing, particularly because at the time as a 10-year-old, everybody older than you is just an adult, but now at my age, I'm like, "Wow, she's only 26 years old playing that character." It's just a phenomenal performance. Within the rehearsal process, you had all these relationships that Night would meet with separately: Bruce and Olivia Williams, me and Bruce, and me and Toni. And it's just so fun to work on a movie that gives you those opportunities like that where the schedule's filled with lots of time with this one person, and then lots of time with this other person and developing all the flavors of those relationships. Everybody was a phenomenal actor.

Have you kept in touch with Toni or with Night in the subsequent years?

Yeah, I've seen Night a bunch — I was just at his birthday in Pennsylvania last summer or the summer before last, and we did the 20th-anniversary screenings at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It has been a longer time since I've seen Toni. We have not run into each other for a while, but I obviously really enjoyed watching the many things that she's done in these intervening years.

This movie brought you into the spotlight in a way that was presumably pretty new for you at the time. What did it feel like to experience so much attention and praise for this movie at such a young age?

That part was a surprise, firstly, because we didn't anticipate it being the gigantic hit that it became. And I had been working for a while, so I was used to people recognizing me from things, but this was on a completely different level. And also, normally when you work on something, it comes out and then that's it. But this was the first time I'd done the whole award show circuit and gone to a number of foreign countries and done premieres. So I just got to stay with the movie for a much longer period than I'd ever done before. And all that was very exciting. I think I benefited from it being a time where I wasn't online reading about myself, and it happened at a time where you could still feel a little bit of privacy and that all the craziness around the movie didn't necessarily impinge on my life very much.

What are your memories of that Academy Awards where you were nominated for Best Supporting Actor? I know you were up against Tom Cruise, and Michael Caine ended up winning.

Yeah, it was Tom and Jude Law and Michael Clarke Duncan and Michael Caine and yeah, Michael Caine ended up winning. It's a crazy night, and I think that was one of the longest ceremonies ever, like four or five hours long. And I don't remember being bored or restless because you're just surrounded by all this crazy stuff and by every actor you've ever recognized. And I was sitting in a row with Clint Eastwood, I think. It was nuts. And then going out to the afterparties and seeing everybody and feeling like all of Los Angeles was celebrating the night together. It was very, very memorable.

Was there any discussion of that Oscars night when you worked with Michael Caine on Secondhand Lions?

I'm sure he made some jokes about it, but no, I think it was just really crazy that right after we'd been nominated together, we went to work together the following year. He was really, really fun to work with, and very generous with his time and hanging out on set. So that was nice that we had those two different connections.

You also worked with Jude Law on A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

And that was immediately after too. Yeah. Wow. Unfortunately, Michael Clark Duncan has passed away. I've never worked with Tom Cruise, but if I work with Tom, I'll have almost the whole category. That's crazy.

In his early career, Shyamalan was hailed as "the next Steven Spielberg." You're one of the few people who worked with both Night and Spielberg. What's your perception of how they compare and contrast as filmmakers?

That's tough. They both have really individual styles, and they're definitely two of the greatest directors that I ever worked with. When I worked with Steve, he had decades of experience behind him, whereas with Night, that was only his third movie, so that was a big difference in seeing somebody who was just entering the industry — entering their prime — and somebody who'd been on top for a while. But I can see why people made those comparisons because, for one thing, they're working with a 10- or 11-year-old, and both of them were very good at working with children and shooting movies that take into account the viewpoint of a child and use that as a window into whatever fantastic world they're doing. I haven't really thought about that. It was a terrific experience with both of them.

What did you learn while making The Sixth Sense, whether it was from Night or Bruce or Toni, that stuck with you in your subsequent work?

Acting and my approach to it is so specific to the character and the scene that you're doing. So a lot of the stuff I absorbed from working with them is sometimes hard to put into words because the puzzle that you're solving is different from scene to scene. But with Toni, a lot of our scenes were super emotional, and she was just somebody who always had that emotion ready to go at any point in time. That made a big impression on me. Something she and Bruce both had in common — and it was, again, the product of the luxury of extensive rehearsals — is that they both were so generous in giving me whatever I needed to get my performance to where I needed to go. They always played along with me even when they were off-camera.

What was the most fun day or scene that you remember from shooting?

It's weird. They were all fun, and sometimes it was fun or exhilarating to do some of the darker and harder scenes because we knew we'd accomplished those scenes that had to be done successfully to make the movie work. Those are really happy memories. But I guess as an 11-year-old, I look forward to the times of the movies when there were other kids on set. So when Trevor Morgan was on set or working with Mischa Barton, those were fun days. For most of the movie, I was the only non-adult for miles around, so it was good to have another kid there to play with at lunchtime.

What was the most difficult day or scene?

The scene with me and Toni in the car. That was the only scene, I think, where we walked away from it wondering whether we had gotten it. It was this long steadicam shot from this car accident and following the flare and coming up to our car. So I think a lot of energy was watching that stuff, and then having to nail this really important moment in the movie. That was when we walked away going like, "Oh, I really hope we got it." And luckily, we went to dailies the next night and everybody was sitting in this theater watching the scene, and a couple takes in, we're like, "Okay, we've got it. We're happy with what went up on screen."

You recently played a supporting role in Blink Twice. How did that come about?

Zoë Kravitz just sent me the script in early 2022. That was another crazy script-reading experience, and there was a bunch of people that had already been attached to that movie, so reading that and then going, "Oh wow, there's Channing Tatum and Naomi Ackie and this big cast," that was a very easy one to say yes to. And the fact that we knew we were going to get to go off into the jungle and sort of live together on set for a couple months, that was a very rewarding experience too.

How did that compare to The Sixth Sense? They're like polar opposites in some ways, but they also have some similarities and are from filmmakers early in their directing careers.

It's interesting because they're both thrillers and they're both this mystery into what exactly is going on in the movie. Cole is an inherently good person, whereas in Blink Twice, I already know what the real deal is on that island, and my character is a little bit more complicated. It was fun getting to be on the darker side of things.

How did Sixth Sense impact the projects you made after it came out?

It definitely stands alone as a unique experience making a movie that we did not know was going to be a big hit after we made it, and now I seek out the experience of having a script and having material that you're confident in and you're going to be proud of working on. Everything that I work on has a little bit of that going: If we've got good material here, no matter what happens at the box office or in the process of making it, it's a decision I'll feel good making because it's good material. Everything starts from there.

What do you see as The Sixth Sense's cultural legacy 25 years on?

I think culturally, it is an artifact of a time before all of the spoiler stuff that is now such a big part of anything that comes out on TV and film. I think it's interesting because it has one of the most well-known surprise endings but came at a time where people could still go into the theater and be shocked by it when it happened, and it wouldn't be all over Twitter immediately. I think it really endures because Night crafted great characters and a story that I think everybody can connect with, because everybody's greatest fear is to lose someone before you've said everything that you needed to say, and to not be able to communicate with people that are still here. And I think that's a timeless story that goes back through our entire history as a species. So I hope people will continue to get something out of it for years to come.

The Sixth Sense releases on 4K UHD Blu-ray for the first time on Oct. 22.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.