Guardian interview at BFI Southbank

Paul Haggis

The director and writer of the Oscar-winning Crash talks to Mark Lawson about his new film In the Valley of Elah, calling up pal Clint Eastwood to help get it made and his fear of ruining Bond forever
Paul Haggis at BFI Southbank
Valley boy ... Paul Haggis at BFI Southbank. Photograph: Sarah Lee

Mark Lawson: Good evening, I'm Mark Lawson. More importantly, this is Paul Haggis, and you've just seen a screening of In the Valley of Elah, his latest film. He's the writer and director of Crash and we'll talk about those, scripts he's written for Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers and others and Bond 22, we may also talk about. To start with, I've had to fight this feeling all day that you must be Scottish, but I suppose that would be too neat. But in fact you're not, you're a Londoner by extraction.

  1. In The Valley of Elah
  2. Production year: 2007
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 121 mins
  6. Directors: Paul Haggis
  7. Cast: Charlize Theron, James Franco, Jason Patric, Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones
  8. More on this film

Paul Haggis: Yes, east end London. It was originally Aggis, which then became Scottish.

ML: And you're a writer/director, which means at the moment half of you is on strike.

PH: Yes (laughs)

ML: It raises the question of Bond 22, which is tantalisingly listed for you, and you have another film to direct. But at the moment Bond 22 is just not happening?

PH: Yes, it's happening.

ML: But the script. You just can't do any work on it...

PH: Yes, but it was just about finished. I was just doing the last few polishes and it starts shooting in a few weeks.

ML: And that was a surprising project for some people for you to take because you had been seen as an auteur writer - famously not a word changed on your script for Million Dollar Baby. Bond 22 is something different. It's a producer's movie.

PH: Well, yes, when they came to me with Casino Royale I thought they were out of their minds. I asked my agents, "have they seen my movies?" I said, "they know I am going to ruin Bond forever. They know that right?" But they said they'd like to take a chance and it was a collaboration with Michael and Marc and they asked me to work on this one, which I was more than happy to.

ML: And this one's different because there had been other writers on Casino Royale...

PH: There had been on this one as well but they decided to take the plot in another direction, which often happens.

ML: You are a writer/director and this seems facetious but if you were about to direct one of your own scripts could you claim that you had finished it and then direct it?

PH: I wouldn't direct during the strike. I just think it's immoral. It would be very difficult to direct a script and not change dialogue, not change something.

ML: How long do you think the strike will go on?

PH: I'm a cynical bastard, as you can tell by my films, and so I think it will be a very, very long strike, unfortunately, well into the summer next year.

ML: There seems to be no willingness by the studios to give in on anything at all, not even a relatively tiny payment on DVDs. They just won't do it.

PH: No, as you probably know, we get four cents on each DVD. We asked for four more and they said, "no, no, that's outrageous, it will bankrupt us." This is after making billions of dollars. They said this with a straight face. It's really quite remarkable. And as far as the internet and any movies or TV shows shown on the web we should be happy getting absolutely nothing. And we said, "Well, we're not overly happy". And they said: "Well you should be happy, it's for promotional reasons." This week they had a breakthrough in which they announced quite publicly that we'd be getting millions of dollars and should be very happy. Well we would get millions of dollars over many hundreds of years ...

ML: I don't know how much you can say about this for legal reasons but on the wires just before I left the office it came up: "Crash director sues producer over film profits." You are in legal action at the moment?

PH: Unfortunately so.

ML: And that's over the money from Crash?

PH: Yes. Our position is we should get a little bit. And they say "No". It did quite well and well, all producers are just a pack of thieves aren't they? Their cadging in Holywood is legendary, this corrupt nature ...

ML: Coming to In the Valley of Elah, critics will often reduce your films to an issue, they will say Crash is about race, Million Dollar Baby is about the right to die, this one is about Iraq. Do you ever have in your head an issue as simple as that?

PH: No, I don't think so. In 2003 I was thinking about Iraq and a lot of us in America were quite concerned about what was being done in our names and the fact that our president was telling us just to go shopping and not to think, let him do the thinking, which... if you've heard him is... (laughter). So I thought we could ask some questions and I went looking on the internet because we certainly weren't getting the truth from other media, which seemed to be in complete collusion with the administration. I live in Santa Monica, which is an incredibly liberal community, but in 2003 to 2004 every second car had the flag flying and a bumper sticker saying: "support our troops". But you can support the troops and not support the war, because most of them don't give a damn about the troops. So I went looking and started to find some really disturbing images which had somehow managed to bypass the Pentagon's censorship machine and were posted by troops on the internet. The first one I saw was a rock video which a kid of 18, 19 had shot. And at first it was just buildings exploding and tanks rolling by. Then there was an image of this young soldier with his arm around a burnt corpse. And then jeeps rolling by and bombs, guns, tracer bullets. And then a body on the ground, which had obviously been hit by a large rock, because it was in pieces. And one of the young men picked up the hand and waved it at the camera. And I thought: "My God, what's happening?" Because I have to believe these are good men and women who have gone mostly for the right reasons. So I knew I wanted to write something but I didn't know what. And Crash had finished so I went to meet with a new agency and I went to meet with their literary department. And you have to give them their marching orders. So I said go through everything you have, your books, your novels, your magazines and when you find something which you are completely certain in your heart will never, ever be made into a movie, bring it to me. So they brought me this article by Mark Boal, a reporter who had been in Iraq, who had found this story of a father who went searching for his son, a former military police officer, and then I knew I had a way in. Because I couldn't write from my point of view. I had to write from the point of view, like with Crash where I wrote from the point of view of two guys who stuck guns in my face and they were the characters who I just went off with. I had someone in mind that you could look at and think: "That's an American", whether you agreed with his politics or not. And so what came to me slowly was that this man's sin was the same as ours as a nation, which is pride. And of course there's a reason why it's one of the seven deadly sins, because with excessive pride comes blindness. And so I thought I'd do a story about a blind man who slowly opens his eyes and sees. But I realised very quickly that I had to mask that as a murder mystery to fool people into going to the cinema to see it.

ML: And you say a huge amount of people at the time were concerned about Iraq and wanted to write about it. It turns out a number of films were made at the same time: Lions for Lambs, Rendition ... Were you aware of what other film-makers were working on?

PH: No, none of us were as far as I know. My project was just a small project and I was going round town with it. And in Hollywood they just "yes" you to death. They say "yes" we'd love to work with you. We hear Crash is terrific and I really want to work with you. Let's set up some meetings. And then just nothing happens. So after seven or eight months of that I knew I didn't have enough clout to get the story made. So I called Clint Eastwood, because I can do that now, isn't that great? (laughter) And I said: "I'd like to send you a magazine article. I'd like you to read it." Thinking that he would call me and say: "You commie bastard. Never talk to me again." And so he read it and called me a couple of days later and said: "Wow, that's really tough material." I said: "Yes, but I think it's the truth of what's happening in Iraq." He said: "Yes, I'll help you get it made." So he called the chairman of Warner Bros and asked them to take it seriously. And they optioned the life rights from me and I was going to write it.

ML: Do you call him Clint or do you have a special name?

PH: I call him Clint. The first meeting I had was with him and Steven Spielberg, which was to direct Flags of Our Fathers and I knew I wasn't going to get the job but I knew I'd never be in this meeting again, so I asked if I could record the meeting. They said yes and so I did and I was calling them Mr Eastwood and Mr Spielberg and they were feeling really uncomfortable, as if I thought they were really old or something. So after a while you end up using first names.

ML: It's interesting that you needed the intervention of Mr Eastwood because there was a strong feeling after Crash that you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. But that turned out not to be the case?

PH: No, I could do any studio movie I wanted. But something like this, something which was a passion piece, I guess no.

ML: The image, the symbol of the American flag in the film, is crucial. One of the things which separates British and American culture is the reverence for the flag in American culture. Political careers have been destroyed because of a picture of them burning a flag and so on. It seemed to me very brave in its treatment of the flag - was there any nervousness about that?

PH: No. I was roundly condemned in some circles in America. I was called Osama Bin Laden's best friend and these people are very serious. That was a tough decision, the way I used it, because I really truly didn't want to insert my politics into it. I wanted to make a political film, and I think I have made a political film. But I wanted it to be an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. I didn't want characters on stage making speeches about Bush and condemning this and condemning that. I like movies which sneak up on you and I imagined the experience of sitting in the audience and relaxing because it's just a murder mystery and Tommy Lee Jones is going to solve everything for you, so you don't have to really worry. And then slowly getting the feeling that a band is tightening around your chest until you can't breathe at the end. I actually went back and forth with the ending quite a bit and finally realised it wasn't my decision. It was what the character would do. So I left it to the character.

ML: The locations are very important: the bars and the fast food joints and the army premises, the sheer bleakness of it. Had you seen all that before you wrote it?

PH: No, we weren't allowed to shoot on an army base of course, the Pentagon wouldn't allow it. The army base was created out of about nine different locations. If you looked this way it was a fairground, this way was a park and this way was a scout camp. We pieced it together. But I went to Albuquerque to scout and just fell in love with it. Parts of Route 66 were still there and had been preserved and I figured this was an American tragedy. I really wanted it to be an American film and have the feeling that you are looking at America, so we then moved to Tennessee to shoot the segments at the beginning and the end of the film with Tommy Lee and Susan Sarandon's character Liv. And that was a big move, an expensive one. We shot in a little town called Whiteville. And then we finally went to Morocco to finish up for four days. It was a small budget film and it would have been a lot cheaper to shoot in a back lot or something.

ML: You said you wanted to make it look like a murder mystery but it didn't really work, did it? There was a lot of resistance to these films at the box office?

PH: No, it didn't work. It didn't fool anyone.

ML: But these were always going to be tough subjects, weren't they?

PH: Yes, it didn't do well at all, but where it did best was the midwest and south, exactly where I wanted it to do well. The kind of place where people think: "I like Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize, she's pretty. I think I'll go see this." These are the places where they are sending people to Iraq. We're not sending them from New York, LA or Philadephia. These are the children of the poor.

ML: You've been described as a liberal film-maker in the Guardian, favourably, but also less favourably elsewhere. Do you accept that?

PH: I don't think I'm liberal. It's a little right wing for me. I'm a little left of that (laughter). I don't like the tag, but I'm not offended by it.

ML: You are seen as having had a surprisingly lucky time as a screenwriter. We're going to have a look at Million Dollar Baby now and watch a clip. The legend is that not a word was changed of your script. Is that true?

PH: To a fault. I had written that script and was intending to direct it. I'd written Crash and saw it as a TV show and no one wanted to buy that. A story about race, intolerance and class in America, I don't know why. So then I got the rights to Million Dollar Baby on spec and no one wanted to buy that. And then we finally had the financing to make Crash and in the second week of filming that I got a call: we had Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman and we were looking to cast the role of Hank. My producer said: "Can we take it to Clint Eastwood?" I said: "He's going to want to direct." "Oh, no no". We took it to him and he said: "I like it, can I direct it?" To which my response was: "No, let him find his own fucking film." Then after a couple of weeks I thought, he's a really good film-maker and he'll make a really good film which people will see. And no one's going to watch a film about boxing and euthanasia if I make it. So I said: "Of course he can do it." I hadn't met him, and that's when I got the call to do Flags of Our Fathers shortly after that. You get those cellphone calls and it's: "Hi, this is Clint Eastwood". And you're like: "Yeah right". But going back to your question I told him: "You have my first draft in your hands, so let's get together and I'll take your notes and see what changes we should make." And he said: "No, script's good." "You don't want to change your mind?" "Script's good." And if you watch the movie, to a fault he didn't change anything. The description of Hilary Swank's sister and mother in the script was that they were enormous, 300 pounds. And Hilary Swank said: "Trouble in my family comes by the pound." Well, you cast a very thin girl! There is another scene in the hospital where Clint is supposed to have a week's worth of stubble, hasn't shaved. And she looks up and comments on the fact. He says he thinks it will work with the ladies and she says: "doubt it". Well, he shot very quickly and didn't bother to put on any stubble. He's completely clean shaven in that scene. It's lovely, he didn't change a damn thing. He changed the cursing, he didn't think it was necessary, perhaps wanted to get a PG-13 for teenagers.

ML: I remember seeing it for the first time and it seems as if it is one type of film and then becomes another. Here is a scene from Million Dollar Baby. (Audience watches clip)

ML: I remember the shock of thinking I was watching the feminist Rocky and the intelligent sporting movie. I thought: "Oh God, they're going to have an hour where they get her fit again to go and win the title. and it's a completely different movie. It's a very rare example of a film which is able to disguise the film which it is.

PH: Yeah, it's wonderful that it does.

ML: There are numerous rules about screenwriting and three acts and don't introduce a new character after page 87 and all that. I sense watching this and Crash that you don't really care about those things.

PH: I care really deeply. I'm just not very good at following rules. It really upset me that I was doing that, but it was the only way to tell the story in Crash. With In the Valley of Elah two thirds of it is a murder mystery and then I say: "That doesn't matter any more". Another thing you're not supposed to do is take the crisis out of the protagonist's hands, and as Elah progresses people just start coming forward and handing him things and confessing. You don't do that in murder mysteries and you don't change a movie three quarters of the way through it. But I think the rules have to be made up by the story.

ML: The other thing you're supposed to do is write it all out on 350 index cards before you begin.

PH: I do that. I use index cards a lot and then I ignore them. I go through and try and plot everything out. I'm a big structuralist. I change it as I go through, but I know exactly where it's going.

ML: Until Million Dollar Baby you had been a TV person. Did you think of it in terms of hierarchies: moving out of TV into movies, "which are superior".

PH: Well I just kept failing in TV. I finally got fired for the second time from a TV show and had a year in which I didn't have to work, so I decided to write Crash and Million Dollar Baby.

ML: Which was the show?

PH: Family Law, was the show I created. It wasn't a very good show. I did my best, I had good writers, good directors, good actors ...

ML: It happened relatively late, your big success, particularly in American terms. Did something change in your writing?

PH: Well yes. I was a very bad writer for many years. And then around when I was working on Thirtysomething, I was working with Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick and I was the right hand man. I turned in my first script and I remember them looking at me and saying: "Really, really good script Paul. What's it about?" And I said: "Well, it's got this clever plot turn, this clever dialogue. They said: "Well, yes, but where does it come from within you? What's within you that you're trying to solve on the paper?" And I said, "It's supposed to do that?" So slowly I started asking these questions over a number of years and learning. And it took me a long time.

ML: But Thirtysomething, which a lot of this audience will be too young even to remember. It's not even available on DVD. Looking back in TV history a lot of the stuff now taken for granted: dream sequences, multi-layered plots and all the rest of it, surrealism, was in there in Thirtysomething.

PH: Yes, they actually let you do anything you wanted. In one episode I had these three characters called Fear, Dread and Anxiety, which followed this main character around throughout the episode. In another episode one of the characters fell in love for the first time and kept picturing himself in various Hitchcock movies in which people were trying to kill him. It was great fun.

ML: And I asked about the hierarchy of TV and movies. Recently you went back to TV.

PH: Yeah I wrote a TV series with Bobby Moresco, with whom I did Crash, in '96 called EZ Streets. We wrote a pilot and after Crash somebody called up and said: "Would you like to make it?" So we said yes, of course. And that one failed too.

ML: You talk in a very sanguine way about things failing. Is it ever possible to know why something has succeeded or failed?

PH: It's all relative and I only really care what I think. I have things that I'm really proud of and other things that I'm not so proud of. With Crash, I couldn't watch it until about a year and a half after the Oscars. I got trapped at a film festival in Italy and my wife forced me to watch it. And I thought, you know it's not a bad film. But it took me that long. You're so close to these things, you know. When I first saw it at the Toronto festival it was on this screen, 40ft tall, and all I could see were my mistakes, 40ft tall. That's why I like it on small screens, where my mistakes are smaller.

ML: We're moving on now to Crash from Million Dollar Baby and that's from you as a writer to you as a writer/director. I was interested in the fight sequences in Million Dollar Baby. Are you thinking: I'll leave that to the director?

PH: I try not to. I try to be fairly clear with what I want. Even things which are unexplained in the script. In Million Dollar Baby there's a plotline about something that he can't forgive himself for, this relationship he has with his daughter. And I never explained it. And the first note I got said: you have to do a scene about that. And I said: "I don't think I will." And so Clint got it and didn't ask me for one but he wanted to know what it was that he couldn't forgive himself for, so I told him and he said: "Oh yeah, that makes sense." So I think it needs to be clear, and then the director can do what they like with it.

ML: And given that Crash was career-transforming in an unusual way, where did that come from, how did that start?

PH: Just from things I had seen over 10 years in Los Angeles that really troubled me. I had had my car stolen 10 years before and I always asked myself what happened to those two kids. I was fascinated with how you affect people without even knowing it and can sometimes change people's lives. They collided with us and then we went home to change the locks. And I like asking really hard questions of myself. So I asked what would you have done if the kid who came to change your locks was Hispanic, and he had gang tattoos and baggy pants and white T-shirt. Would you have felt safe? And I realised, no I wouldn't have felt safe. I would have masked it but I wouldn't have felt safe. So I put those words in Sandra Bullock's mouth. And then I said, "OK, that kid who changed the locks, I wonder what happens to him." So I followed him. And I just kept following these characters and by 10 o'clock in the morning I had a story, all these characters I had bumped into. Terrence Howard's character, the director, came from a scene I had seen which was similar to that and Matt Dillon's character came from some hate mail that I had received. It was an episode of Family Law about an interracial marriage. And I got hatemail from this guy who said, why is Hollywood always vilifying the white people and making the black people look like heroes. Let me tell you a story. And he told me this story of his father who had had a janitorial company, with all black employees and paid them well. And then the city changed the rules to give minority companies preference. And he lost everything, he lost his business, he lost his wife, everything. And you think that intolerance and racism are passed from one generation to the next. But here is a guy whose father was a good guy, from his description, and his son learned the opposite lesson from that. It was fascinating. So I wrote back, because I answer all my hatemail, and talked about how proud he must be of his father, but that stuck with me, and that formed the story that Matt Dillon tells to Shareeka.

ML: Was there hatemail after In the Valley of Elah?

PH: Well yes. Crash was a tiny movie, it was small budget. We had no expectations and then after it was released it started doing OK. And then Lionsgate came to me and said: "I think we're going to go for an Academy campaign for best picture". And I said: "Please, don't, you'll humiliate me. I'll be the laughing stock of Hollywood." And they ignored me. But after it won, suddenly it was well hated, and probably for good reason. I don't like this idea of "best picture". I mean I really love the statuettes, don't get me wrong. I really loved being nominated, but the idea that you can pit one film, one director, one film-maker against another and decide which is best I think is really odd. People say, "How dare they say this is a better picture than Ang Lee's film?" And I say: "I didn't say it!"

ML: There are a lot of people who, if the studio rang them up and said: "We're going for best picture" would feel that they deserved it, but you genuinely thought ...

PH: I was so happy to make that film. It was a piece of passion. And everyone waived their fees.

ML: You used your own house and car in it.

PH: We used everything. We had to, to make it. But it was such a great gift, to be able to make that film.

ML: Let's have a look at a scene from Crash.

(Audience watches clip)

ML: It's always struck me, perhaps it had more resonance in Europe but there was another movie with the title Crash, but it just didn't bother you?

PH: I'm really bad with titles and I came up with this knowing it would be changed. I was looking for a better title and then we made the thing and they said: "We're going to use it". They looked and there were nine films called Crash and David Cronenberg's was one. He's still quite upset with me about it.

ML: I read in an interview that he is really very upset about it.

PH: Yes, yes I know.

ML: I suppose what is revealing is that they never expected your film to be heard of again ...

PH: Indeed.

ML: A lot of writers are terrified of writing on the subject of race, but you don't have that?

PH: I was terrified. I thought I would either be hated by one community or another. My nightmare was becoming a poster boy for the KKK. I asked Terry George, who had just done Hotel Rwanda, where did he find the balls to do that. And he said: "Well, no one else was doing it". And that was the case. Well, Spike Lee is doing it, and really really well. But it was just something I wanted to talk about. I think if you know the circumstances of the character's life you can write anything. I'd researched this for a year after coming up with the storyline. And then I felt I could write it.

ML: And did any of the African American actors say of the dialogue: "I can't say that, I won't say that, they wouldn't say that"?

PH: No, I gave them terrific freedom, especially the two kids that were the carjackers, in how they said things. When I met up with Don Cheadle for the first time I wanted an actor who was an actor magnet. I realised that if I was going to get a cast I had to put someone in who all the other actors wanted to work with. We have a handful of actors like that in America and Don Cheadle is one of them. And I'd always admired his work so much. So, without knowing him, I sent it to his agent, and his agent said, "He wants to meet with you". He didn't say he liked the script. So I didn't know what he was going to say. Was he going to say: "You racist son of a bitch" and spit in my face in person? So he came to my house and sat on my sofa and said: "I want to do it". So I said: "Great, what role?" And he said, "any role". So he signed on as a producer and went back and forth for six months between the role of the TV director and the cop. He'd call me and say: "I'm going to be the director". And I'd say: "Great, you'd be great as that." And then he'd call me and say: "I'm gonna be the cop". After six months I said, look Don, we have to offer the other role to somebody. So he said: "OK, OK, I'll be the TV director." So I offered the role of the cop to Forest Whitaker, who said: "I like it, but I'd rather play the TV director". And Don said: "Great, I'll be the cop!" And then Forest couldn't do it due to the movie he was doing, but Don had started researching that part and decided he wanted to keep it.

ML: OK, let's take some questions from the audience.

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