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Paul Haggis The Kanbar Award The Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting in its inaugural year acknowledges the crucial role that strong screenwriting plays in the creation of great films. What Really Happens to People by Margarita Landazuri Paul Haggis has not taken the conventional road to Hollywood success. He comes not from film school, but from Canada, and from episodic television. He writes about complex characters, rather than cartoon ones, and about difficult subjects even when he believes they’re uncommercial. This last year was a heady one for Haggis. His feature film directing debut, Crash, a multicharacter drama focusing on racial and ethnic tensions in Los Angeles, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to critical acclaim. And Million Dollar Baby, which he wrote on spec, was on everybody’s ten-best list, was nominated for Writer’s Guild and Academy Awards for best adapted screenplay and won the Oscar for Best Picture. But Haggis didn’t write either film with an eye toward the box office. “These are stories that really moved me, really troubled me. With Million Dollar Baby, I put up the option money knowing it would never sell, because no studio (executives) in their right minds would do these projects. Thank God for Clint Eastwood. If not for him, it would still be sitting unmade. And for Bull’s Eye (the production company which financed Crash), which said, ‘We’ll make this film about racism and xenophobia.’” Haggis is savoring the acclaim, but he’s been around long enough to know it’s fleeting. “It’s only going to last another 30 days, three months at the most. But during that time you’d better use that to do one of two things: Get your next movie that’s going to make you a billion dollars, or do something you really care about that you wouldn’t have been able to do three months before. I used it to set up this movie about the Iraq war that I really wanted to do.” It’s one of three projects he has in the works with Eastwood. First up is Flag of Our Fathers, about the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II. Haggis wrote the screenplay based on the book by James Bradley. Eastwood will direct and Steven Spielberg will produce. The Iraq war story will be directed by Haggis; Eastwood will star. The two will also produce another film about the Iwo Jima experience, from the Japanese point of view. Heady company for the 52-year-old London, Ontario native, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and worked as a Sears photographer and furniture mover to support his family while he wrote scripts. He began getting work on such shows as Three’s Company, The Love Boat and The Facts of Life, but was fired as executive producer of the latter when he suggested a major innovation: Make the show funny. In 1987, Haggis was hired as writer and supervising producer for thirtysomething, which won him two Emmys and several other awards. In 1993, Haggis created the short-lived, fondly remembered Canadian-Mountie-meets-streetwise-Chicago-cop TV series, Due South. Haggis’ best television work was a short-lived series, EZ Streets, which was cancelled after just ten episodes in 1997. The dark and layered crime drama, focusing on a tormented cop, a sadistic mob boss and an ex-con who’s resisting a return to a life of crime, reinvented the genre and still has a cult following. The New York Times recently named it one of the most influential television series of all time, saying, “Without EZ Streets, there would be no Sopranos.” The turning point in Haggis’ career came when he optioned F.X. Toole’s book of stories, Rope Burns, and wrote the script for Million Dollar Baby. “It’s a story about losers who don’t stop fighting, because they’re unaware that they’re losers,” Haggis says. “I really loved those characters, but I didn’t know how to tell the story. It took me nine months to figure out how to do it.” But he knew that if he wanted to change career direction, he had to take matters into his own hands. “Oh, you have to. Nobody’s going to say, ‘Let’s get the guy who wrote Facts of Life to do the next Clint Eastwood movie.’” A social activist who works for human rights and environmental causes, Haggis brings that viewpoint into his work. “I think as the government goes further to the right, you’re going to see more and more people taking risks,” he says. It’s a controversial stance these days. In a New York Times article about how right-wing groups are attacking Million Dollar Baby for supposedly endorsing euthanasia, Frank Rich praised the film because it “challenges America’s current triumphalist daydream.… It has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending.” Paul Haggis doesn’t like Hollywood endings. “That’s always been something I wanted to explore—what really happens to people—rather than what happens in movies to people.”
Copyright
© 2005 San Francisco Film Society
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