Paul Haggis, the Director Success Didn't Spoil
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 13, 2007; C01
Paul Haggis, Academy Award winner, wants to help de-roach our apartment. This is after he's offered us a sip from his water bottle, the stash of cashews from his Ritz-Carlton suite, and after he's suggested we meet for drinks later because we didn't get through all of our interview questions. We say that would be great -- otherwise our biggest weekend plan involves pest control. So Paul Haggis says, "Oh, do you need help with that?" Staggering niceness. Decency overload.
Paul Haggis, what are you trying to pull?
Maybe it's because, as so many profiles love to point out, he's Canadian, pronouncing at all as uh'tall. Or maybe it's because he's still grateful -- having spent 30 years in television land's relative obscurity before landing at the Oscar podium in 2005 -- to be getting name recognition uh'tall.
You may know him as the baby-faced writer whose first two screenplays scored back-to-back Best Picture awards. "Million Dollar Baby" (girl boxing, euthanasia) swept four major categories in 2005. In 2006, his directorial debut, "Crash" (racism, intolerance), also won for Best Original Screenplay. ("In the Valley of Elah," his next writer-director project, opens Friday and follows a father -- Tommy Lee Jones -- on his lump-in-throat search for his missing Iraq vet son. Charlize Theron is the cop who helps him; Susan Sarandon, his long-suffering wife.) Entertainment writers were enamored of the outta-nowhere wunderkind: In 2005 the Los Angeles Times described him as an "overnight sensation."
Here's the thing, though. The wunderkind is 54. And he's actually been in the business for three decades as a television writer, churning out hard-to-stomach human story lines that struggled to find audiences. Without his quickly canceled series "EZ Streets," TV-philes postulate, there would have been no "Sopranos." He paid the bills with mass-market work -- gigs on "One Day at a Time" and "Walker, Texas Ranger."
"What can I say," Haggis says bashfully. "I've sort of failed my way upwards really successfully."
So how do you become a late bloomer in a youth-worshiping field? You start, Haggis says, by getting totally disgusted with yourself. "I'd approached some people about doing a really dark, complex show with lots of hard questions, and they went, 'Hmm. How about instead you do a law show?' " He agreed to develop "Family Law." Then, in 2001, a revelation: "I'd just been fired from [the show] and I realized that I'd started to do really bad work."
He dropped the backwards approach of trying to guess what would sell and instead used his sudden unemployment to write "Million Dollar Baby" on spec. Bada-ching. Insta-fame.
(For the three Haggis fans who saw his only pre-"MDB" attempt, 1993's straight-to-video "Red Hot," here's your tidbit: "We filmed in Latvia, there was no money, the sound guy called his wife back home and she said the check had bounced. In the middle of a scene he wrapped up his equipment and walked off. . . . Rent it only if you want a really, really bad movie.")
For both "Family Law" and "Million Dollar Baby," Haggis drew on personal experience. Episodes of the former were inspired by a nine-year divorce from his first wife. (Nine. Years.) In "Million Dollar Baby" Clint Eastwood's estranged relationship with his child was reportedly based on Haggis's with his daughter (they're close now). Even "Due South," a fish-out-of-water drama series about a Canadian Mountie in an American city, has wisps of Haggis: He moved to Los Angeles from London, Ontario, at 22 after his father told him he wasn't so good at the family construction business.
The small-screen power players he's now eclipsed say they bear no grudge against Haggis's sudden household-name status, citing the superhuman work hours and exacting standards that went into his success. Says Paul Gross, who starred in "Due South," "I always had this picture of Paul getting home to his apartment, immediately falling on the floor asleep, and then coming back the next day and whipping everybody."
And the big-screen power players seem to have welcomed him into their sandbox with open arms. Tommy Lee Jones says it was Haggis's reputation and writing that drew him to "Elah." Josh Brolin -- who had hoped for a role in "Crash" -- accepted a cameo as Theron's boss just for the privilege of a Haggis credit: "He said, 'It's not a big role. I can pay you no money.' With the hype he has he could basically do anything he wants and people will want to work with him."
So. You are Paul Haggis. You have lately bloomed. You have done so, apparently, just by damning the man and following your heart and living by those "After School Special" lessons that sound nice but rarely work in real life. And according to those who know you, you really are that "Oh, do you need help with that?" kind of nice. "Paul's never changed," says Stephen Nathan, a sometime collaborator who was best man at Haggis's wedding to his current wife, Deborah. "He realizes he's a servant of the work. . . . Any project he's in will be a quest for meaning in his life. That makes him humble."
Paul Haggis, what are you trying to pull?
He claims he avoids a massively huge head through frequent self-reminders of the precarious nature of success. Also instrumental: his wife's unabashed willingness to do an ego-block when he gets out of control.
"His family and I are all in cahoots to cut him down when necessary," says Deborah, who has now been married to Haggis for 10 years. Her husband recently bragged that three people had recognized him on a flight to Toronto. "I said, 'That's great, honey. Funny, though, no one knew you last night when I went to a screening' " at the Toronto Film Festival. Deborah's ticket was supposed to grant her VIP access but she was directed to the back of a block-long line -- the usher was not impressed with her "I'm Paul Haggis's wife" plea.
You can't help but wonder if it's all an act, a carefully constructed aw shucks mildness designed to bring Hollywood to its knees. What better way to coax A-list actors into accepting pocket-change salaries, and to get greenlighted the types of controversial films people wouldn't normally touch with a 10-mile pole?
You delicately touch on this subject with Haggis, expecting him to go wide-eyed, expecting the Canadian accent to go on overdrive. Instead, he nods gravely.
"I'm shameless when I'm trying to get something done . . . like the things that I'll tell actors during scenes. I'll tell the story of how I watched my mother die. And they go, 'Oh, oh, oh I get it now.' What a shallow [expletive] I am -- to use this moment of intense pain to motivate an actor ? I must be a deeply selfish person."
Is it bracing self-reflection? Or another layer of self-deprecating decoys?
Paul Haggis, whatever you are trying to pull, we think you pulled it off.
[分享]Washington Post interview of Paul Haggis
[分享]Washington Post interview of Paul Haggis
He is such a stereotypical Canadian. His TV series, Due South, is one of my all time favorite and is also hilariously stereotypically Canadian.
