Paul Haggis: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Paul Haggis confers with actor Don Cheadle on the set of Crash.


PAUL HAGGIS: CRASH COURSE
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December/January 2005-06 issue of Venice Magazine.

Paul Haggis is the living definition of a writer who has paid his dues. After arriving in Hollywood from his native Canada while still in his 20s to pursue his dream of being a screenwriter, Haggis initially found work at the bottom of the television barrel: writing for Saturday morning kids’ shows like Scooby-Doo. After working his way up the food chain, penning scripts for 70s stalwarts like One Day at a Time, The Love Boat, Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, Paul Haggis’ talent was recognized and he soon found himself one of TV’s top “prestige” writers, working on upscale titles such as Thirtysomething, and L.A. Law. In 1993, he created the Chuck Norris hit Walker Texas Ranger, which ran for eight seasons, all the while working as a writer-for-hire on other television series of varying quality.
In 2000, at age 47, Haggis had a revelation: that he “didn’t want the epitaph on his tombstone to read: ‘Creator of Walker Texas Ranger.’” A lifelong movie buff who had always dreamed of writing and directing features, Haggis walked from his very lucrative position in the world of television, and decided to write two scripts “on spec” (for no pay): Crash (co-written with Bobby Moresco) and Million Dollar Baby (adapted from two short stories in F.X. Toole’s book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner). Baby, of course, swept last year’s Academy Awards (although Haggis lost in a very tough race to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for Sideways) and Crash, a Picaresque story of racism and life in contemporary L.A., is creating strong Oscar buzz of its own. He most recently finished the screenplay for Eastwood’s latest film: the WW II drama Flags of Our Fathers.
Paul Haggis sat down in his Santa Monica home (one of the shooting locations for Crash: it was Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock’s house. “We couldn’t afford to rent a real house,” Haggis says with a smile) to speak with us about his new, very successful career shift.

I’m very jealous that you’ve now gotten to work twice with Clint Eastwood. I got to spend a day on the Million Dollar Baby set last year, and I learned more in that day than I did in four years at USC.
Paul Haggis: Isn’t it amazing to watch him work? I actually finished shooting Crash before they began work on Million Dollar Baby, and so unfortunately I didn’t get to learn those same lessons until afterwards. But the next thing I directed was this TV pilot I recently finished which I also wrote, with Bobby Moresco in 1996. NBC suddenly decided they wanted it, which was great. I took a lot of those lessons I learned from that set: I shot in shorter days, got better performances, and it was an easier, quieter set because of it.

What were those lessons that you took away?
Well, Clint’s been working with the same people for years, and while I haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, I was able to work with James Muro for the second time, who was my D.P. on Crash. I earned his trust, so he immediately came to mind, but once you have a rapport with someone it’s much easier to have that kind of shorthand. Jimmy’s such an artist with the camera. So I would definitely like to have a “team” in place like Clint does, that I can work with consistently.

One thing I liked about Crash was that I didn’t notice you or the D.P. until the third time I saw it.
Good! Thank you for saying that. It’s funny, I love cranes, and love crane shots, and movement, and there was one great crane shot I had at the end of the film. It started at the skyline, then it came down to Don Cheadle, then it came up and around and back and forth…it was just a breathtakingly beautiful shot. Then I looked at it and said ‘Ah, it’s too fancy.’ So I used the beginning and end of it, but the rest of the time, I stayed on Don’s close-up. My editor--Hughes Winborne, a great editor--and I finished cutting the whole movie, and he turned to me and said “You made a huge mistake: you have to put that shot back in. It’s just too fuckin’ beautiful, man.” I said “Fine.” So we put it back in, and we cut the negative. Now on a low budget film like this one, we had $6.5 million, so we didn’t have anything to cut other than the negative. So when you do that, you destroy frames. When I saw the entire crane shot put back in the film I said ‘I can’t do that. I have to put the close up back in.’ Hughes said “You destroyed the negative! You cut it out!” I said ‘I know,’ so we went back in and digitally created those frames, which you can do now, and we put Don’s close-up back in, because that told the story, and didn’t scream “Look at me, I’m a director!”

You directed television prior to this, but never a feature. Is television as fluid a medium as film for a director?
No, not at all. You have a great freedom in film, especially independent film, to express things the way you want. There are a lot of great directors in television, and I got to work with many of them, and you soak in so much watching them work as writers or directors. In fact, if you look at a lot of the work on television today, it’s fabulous filmmaking. It feels more like you’re watching a film, instead of watching television.

Tell us about how Crash was born.
There were several jumping off points, one being when I was carjacked back in 1991. I was coming home with my then-wife after the opening of Silence of the Lambs. We were film junkies and one film was never enough, so we stopped off at the video store to get something else. We went to the video store and got some obscure Finnish movie we’d never seen. We were coming out to where we parked my first new, expensive car: a white Porsche, and suddenly two men with guns walk up. “We’ll take the car.” I said ‘Absolutely,’ and told Diane to get out of the car. Then they told us to walk towards this dark alley that was behind us. I thought that was a poor choice so I stood in front of my wife, shielding her, and pushed her towards Wilshire Boulevard. We got about 25 feet and I heard “Stop!” And I hear running behind me, and I feel a gun in my back. The guy reached down, and grabbed the video that was in Diane’s hand, turned around, hopped in the car, and they drove off. So the cops come, very quickly. I described the young men, the car and all the information. Then I decide to give them my theory of the crime. I said ‘I think those fellows have been here quite often. I get that feeling. I think they were here looking for that video. They’ve been here several times, and it was never in. They saw us coming out with it, felt it was too much to take, and they took the car to make their getaway.’ (laughs) Of course the cops are just staring at me as if I’m in shock, which of course I am. They were nice enough to drive us home. Then we called a locksmith, because they had our housekeys, and our address, and our locks got changed at 2:00 in the morning. Over the next ten years, I thought about those two kids a lot, and they wouldn’t let me alone. They kept popping up in my head, mostly late at night: who would do that? What did they think of themselves? Did they think of themselves as criminals? Were they best friends? What did they do with the car? 10-12 years later, I woke up in the middle of night again, thinking about them again. I went ‘Fuck!’ So I finally decided to sit down, and write about it. But I decided to use them as my protagonists, rather than my villains, and tell the story from their point of view. I recently had become intrigued by how we affect strangers. You and I, driving down the streets, I yell at you, you flip me the finger, you go right, I go left. What happens to you? Do you go home and do the emotions that the incident has caused you to carry cause you to have a tiff with your wife? Or do you stop two or three blocks later and save someone’s life? But we judge people so quickly, based on so little evidence. So I asked myself those same questions: What did we do after we had the encounter with those two young guys? We went home and changed the locks. Then I asked myself, how would I have felt if that kid had come to change the locks at two in the morning? What if he was Hispanic? What if he had buzzed hair and what looked like gang or prison tattoos. Would I have felt safe? Being a liberal guy, you’re always spouting off on these things, would you have felt safe in that situation? ‘Fuck! I hate that! I hate asking that question!’ So I decided to put Sandra Bullock’s character in that position of having to admit it. But then wait, what happens to that kid who comes to change the locks? So I followed him. And by ten in the morning, I had the whole story completed, with all these characters who’d come to me over the years.

At first you tried to do it as a TV series, right?
Yeah, and the networks weren’t particularly interested. Then I went off to write Million Dollar Baby, after I got the rights from F.X. Toole, and I wrote it on spec, so when I was finished, I was still unemployed. I decided to take a pass on television for a while, called my friend Bobby Moresco and said ‘I’ve got these pages here, and I think it’s a movie. I also know two things: no one’s going to pay us and once it’s done, it’s probably never going to get made.’ He said “Sounds cool.” So we got together and wrote the script in two weeks. It just flew out of us, unlike Million Dollar Baby, which I struggled with for eight months.

Why was it so much harder to adapt Million Dollar Baby?
Well, it was culled from two short stories from Toole’s book, Rope Burns: “Million Dollar Baby,” which was just about the relationship between Maggie (Hilary Swank) and Frankie (Clint Eastwood), there was no Scrap (Morgan Freeman) character, no priest, no deep belief in Catholicism, no estranged daughter and nothing he was haunted by. It was just Frankie and Maggie, and him trying to train her. The other story was called “Frozen Water.” So I had to take those beautiful short stories and somehow surround them with a world and find a way to tell it. I knew I had to have narration, but I usually hate narration, because it’s such an easy tool. I knew I had to come up with some emotional way to justify it. I had a situation when I went through a very long, painful divorce and I was estranged from my youngest daughter for some time. It was horrible. So I took those feelings and experiences I had and put them in the story as something that maybe Frankie couldn’t forgive himself for. I decided on not telling the audience what that was, so that’s when I said “Ah ha!” and I got the hook, and was able to write it. It’s always an emotional reason that you get the story’s hook, never an intellectual one. If there’s not an emotional reason for an element to be in a script, then it doesn’t belong there.