It took writer Paul Haggis 25 years to achieve the status of Hollywood heavyweight but his perseverance has been rewarded with two Oscars, writes DONALD CLARKE
IT TOOK a while, but Paul Haggis eventually became a star. A serious-looking fellow – bald, with a steady, intense voice – the Canadian has been lurking around the entertainment industry for three decades. Like many other talented writers, he toiled away on modestly successful TV shows and unmade films without troubling the profile writers at Varietymagazine. Then, in the blink of a shutter, he found "player" status thrust upon him.
In 2005 Million Dollar Baby, a Clint Eastwood film based on his script, won best picture at the Academy Awards. The following year, against everyone's expectations, Crash, his second film as writer and director, also won the top award (and for best original screenplay). Suddenly Haggis was the most sought-after script surgeon in Hollywood. So do good things come to those who won't stop battering on locked doors?
“Yes, it’s perseverance,” he says, without quite laughing. “That’s all it is. It’s about writing a lot and failing a lot. It’s about believing that you have what it takes to make it. It’s about not giving yourself a time frame. Give yourself a year and you will fail within a year. It took me 25 years to direct a movie. There’s no trick.”
Haggis, 57, remains an enthusiast for old-fashioned, solid storytelling. In 2007 he directed In the Valley of Elah, a tremendous, though sadly overlooked, mystery. Cinema-goers were not quite ready for unhappy truths concerning the conflict in Iraq, it seems.
Now he has delivered an intense, if somewhat implausible, thriller called The Next Three Days, which is a remake of the French picture Anything for Her. Russell Crowe stars as an ordinary Joe who must break his wrongly accused wife out of prison.
Ask him about the mechanics of the plot and you will be treated to a screenwriting masterclass. “I don’t have a rule book,” he says. “But I do know that things have to get worse and worse for the protagonist until it’s excruciating. You have to tear the character apart emotionally, until he or she seems to have no way out.”
One aspect of the film that may trouble some viewers is its determination to reveal many tricks of the criminal trade. Watch as Crowe breaks into cars using just a tennis ball. Observe him picking locks with a “bump key”. Isn’t Haggis worried that his film might trigger a rash of burglaries and car thefts?
“With the tennis ball, it only works on specific makes of car. If you go on the internet they carefully don’t say what makes it works on. You have to find that out. But look, I just typed this stuff into the internet. That’s what the character would do – and anybody can do that.
“The bump key does work, but it’s really hard. I did try, but I could never get it to work. The props guy managed it though.”
Haggis speaks in a rigid, methodical fashion. You get the sense he is a man who values work and applies himself diligently. Though he spent a bewildering amount of time within the Church of Scientology (more anon), few traces of Hollywood superficiality attach themselves to his workmanlike exterior.
He is from vaguely theatrical stock. Haggis's parents owned and ran the Gallery Theatre in London, Ontario. Something of a budding existentialist, initially he dreamt of being a photographer. With thoughts of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, a thriller set in a photo studio, not far from his mind, he moved to England in the mid-1970s. His studio in Covent Garden, London, never took off, however, and after several other false starts, he ended up studying film at a community college.
“I did one year and couldn’t even finish that. So I just went to LA and stuck to it. I was determined to direct films,” he says.
His CV reveals that more than a decade before Crashhe directed Red Hotstarring Carla Gugino. At the mention of it, his face curls up into a squashed ball.
“That ended up being a TV thing,” he says. “I don’t count it. It was a terrible, terrible experience.”
Haggis is unsentimental about Hollywood. A decade after Red Hot,he had an unhappy experience with the James Bond franchise. His script for Casino Royalehelped to relaunch the franchise, but he admits no responsibility for the end product that is Quantum of Solace, though he is credited as screenwriter.
"I worked in TV for a long time and that is a writer's medium. But movies are a director's medium. On TV they need you to write next week's episode," he explains. "On Casino Royalethey shot every word. On Quantum of Solacethey began changing it immediately after I'd finished. What can you do? The director is in charge. He's always in charge. If, as a director, you let yourself be influenced, then that's your fault."
In recent times, Haggis has developed a fruitful relationship with Clint Eastwood. The writer had been hawking his script for Million Dollar Baby, the story of a female boxer and her elderly trainer, up and down Sunset Boulevard for several years. Haggis saw something of his own situation in the story. As he tells it, the protagonist has one last chance at success and, despite the risks, elects to "swing for the fence". Initially Haggis was ignored, but somehow the script landed on Eastwood's desk.
"At that stage, I still wanted to direct it," he says. "My first thought was, 'Let Clint find his own damn script'. But then I suddenly remembered who this was. He'd directed my favourite film: Unforgiven. He really is an extraordinary man."
From what I hear of Eastwood’s hands-off style, it is safe to bet that he didn’t mess too much with Haggis’s lines.
"That's right. I phoned him and said we must get together and exchange notes. He just said: 'The script's good.' That's all. Later, when we were working on Sands of Iwo Jima, I rewrote the script and I don't think he ever read it. He just filmed the first script. 'The script's good'."
Haggis is the only man to have written the scripts for two successive winners of the Oscar for the best picture. Million Dollar Babycrept up slowly on Oscar-watchers, but by the time the ceremony came round, quite a few tipsters had it at the top of their list. Virtually nobody expected Crashto beat Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountainto the top gong, however.
“Nobody thought we had a prayer,” he says. “I thought maybe the script had a chance. Perhaps the actors were in there. But the film? Not a chance. I had actually turned round to congratulate Ang Lee when the announcement came.”
That award established Haggis as a sober, trustworthy voice. So it was a major event when he publicly abandoned the Church of Scientology.
Haggis was prompted to leave and to issue a damning statement by noises from the church’s San Diego branch in support of moves to ban gay marriage in California. He remains unrepentant.
“Stupidly, I didn’t really know what was going on when I went in to the church,” he says. “I was in the middle of something and not aware of this stuff. A lot of my friends had walked away quietly and I thought: ‘That’s not me’. I wrote a letter and I was happy to take credit for it.”
Haggis says there are a great many people, notably John Travolta and Kelly Preston, still within the organisation for whom he retains respect and affection. But he remains hugely unnerved by the church’s apparent paranoia and by its attitude to homosexuality.
“When you start making excuses to yourself you know something has gone wrong,” he says. “I realised that’s what was happening. Look at what they do, not just at what they say. My daughter suffered some discrimination.
“My daughter, who’s gay, didn’t tell me at the time. I looked a little deeper and then looked at a few magazine articles and then did my own investigation. I didn’t want to believe any old journalist.”
Yikes! Who said all writers are misanthropes?
The Next Three Daysis on general release from today
