Paul Haggis

October 2006

By Mansha Daswani

Last year, a little
independent movie about race relations in Los Angeles became a sleeper
box-office success and then went on to win the Academy Award for best picture.
Crash was a labor of love for Paul Haggis, the director and writer, who began
his career writing for television, before being catapulted to international
success after penning the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning Million
Dollar Baby. Haggis has not left his television roots behind. His new project
is The Black Donnellys for NBC.

WS: How did the
idea for The Black Donnellys
come about?

HAGGIS: It
was 1995 or ’96 and I had hired Bobby Moresco to work on EZ Streets with me and we worked well together. Bobby had
been telling me stories about his childhood and I said, “How would you like to
take these stories and twist them around and make a fictional neighborhood?” So
we wrote it. CBS said, “This is wonderful but we’re not going to do this
because it’s like EZ Streets,”
and EZ Streets had just failed.
So I pulled it out and took it back to them every couple of years. And it was
always, “This is the one we love but we’ll never do.” Finally our agents at CAA
asked if I wanted to put it out again and they sent it over to Kevin [Reilly,
the president of NBC Entertainment]. We sent it to him on Friday and on Sunday
he called and said, “Let’s do it.”

WS: How do you
relate to these characters?

HAGGIS: What I
try to do is find out everything I possibly can about the circumstances of a
person’s life and then I put myself in their place without judging them. That
is the real key because often the research will tell you that these are quite
horrible people—they’re murderers or car thieves or drug dealers. You
have to see the world through their point of view and see how everything they
do is justified. Once you do that, then the characters come to life. It is a
schizophrenic experience.

WS: NBC has
very high hopes for the show. Do you think about that pressure as you’re
producing the series?

HAGGIS: I don’t. Bobby and I just try and do the best jobs
we possibly can. You don’t think of your time slot or the pressure—that’s
with the gods. The gods of television are mercurial motherf**kers. [Laughs] They’re wicked, there’s nothing you can do about that. You just put out the
best show you possibly can.

WS: How does
the television experience differ from working in film?

HAGGIS: It’s
much the same. My style is anti-television in many ways. A lot of shows in the
last 20 years have gotten this format down, of starting off with a big bang.
Mine is antithetical to that—it’s a really slow, long burn and you don’t
get involved with these characters for the first 20 minutes and then all of a
sudden you realize you’re in their hip pocket.

This story [in The
Black Donnellys], this slow
descent into hell, is about a good kid who is doing his best to help his
family, and every step he takes to do that is a step in the wrong direction. It’s
a tragedy that we’re writing. So I guess it’s different from some shows where
everyone thinks things will work out in the end. Ours, you get this terrible
feeling right at the beginning that things are not going to work out.

WS: How did
your early career in television sitcoms influence what you do today?

HAGGIS: I
started writing suspense thrillers and dramas as movies but they weren’t
selling, so I then wrote spec scripts and it just so happened that the comedies
got me my first job. I was very fortunate because I really learned how to write
over many, many years. I was a terrible writer when I was first employed. When
I was doing thirtysomething I
was still a pretty darn bad writer. I had a lot of good people, like Marshall
Herskovitz and Jim Brooks, who had a lot of patience with me and slowly taught
me to ask difficult questions of myself. From asking those questions, I was
able to finally write a decent scene.

WS: Given the
pressures the networks face today, are they less willing to give a show time to
develop?

HAGGIS: They’ve
always done that with me. EZ Streets didn’t last a full week. It was aired on Sunday and was cancelled on
Thursday. That happened 15 years ago. Nothing has changed since then. The
pressures are enormous to succeed and often success has much more to do with
marketing and time slot than it has to do with the quality of the show.

WS: What do you
love most about what you do?

HAGGIS: It’s
such a collaborative event, making a movie or a television series. I love that
collaboration. You sit in a room with your partner and come up with a script
and once you’ve done that and given the blueprints to the actors and the
technicians and the creative folk to pull it together, it’s cliché to say, but
it really does take on its own life.