During a hearing before Pennsylvania’s House Democratic Policy Committee, Willistown Township resident and filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan testified in support of film tax credit, writes Peter Crimmins for WHYY.

Shyamalan was catapulted to stardom in the 1990s with The Sixth Sense, which he filmed in Philadelphia. Over the next two decades, he used his fame to keep making movies in the area.

However, during the hearing about Pennsylvania’s film tax credit, he said that if he did not have the celebrity to force companies to film in Pennsylvania, they would refuse to do it.

In Pennsylvania, the Film Production Tax Credit offers a 25 percent tax break if a film production spends a minimum of 60 percent of its budget in the state. The credit has a $70 million cap across all productions for a fiscal year. Meanwhile, other states either have much higher caps or no caps at all.

Shyamalan urged the legislators to change this.

“There are 500 shows being made now, with streaming and all that stuff,” he said. “We can’t have any of them that I don’t direct.”

Read more about the state’s film tax credit at WHYY here.

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