May 5-11, 2005

movies

Chain Reaction

Interview: Paul Haggis

by Sam Adams

Perhaps Paul Haggis should thank his carjackers. In 1991, he and his wife were robbed at gunpoint, but rather than indulging his anger, Haggis found himself wondering about their attackers. "I kept thinking of those kids over the years," Haggis says during a stop in Philadelphia. "We all have justifications, and I wondered what theirs were."

The script of Crash begins, like the experience that created it, with a carjacking, then spirals outward to take in victims and perpetrators, exploring the ripple effect of violence both overt and implied. Sandra Bullock's carjacked society wife vents her suspicion on a Latino locksmith, who takes out his frustrations on an Iranian storekeeper, who sits behind his register with a gun, and so on. "I was interested in exploring how we affect each other in small and large ways, without even knowing it," Haggis says, pointing up the power of film to tell such chain-reaction stories. "If I say something that upsets you, I don't know what happens when you leave the room, but my camera can follow you."

A native Canadian who has lived in Los Angeles for decades, Haggis sees Crash as a particularly L.A. story, or at least one that addresses the balkanization made visible in the city's far-flung ethnic enclaves and insular car culture. "We've separated ourselves from strangers," he says. "We've moved into areas where you can go through the whole day without meeting anyone who doesn't look like you, whether you're Korean, or African-American, or white."

Haggis, who created the TV series EZ Streets and Due South before turning his attention to films (his first script in many years was Million Dollar Baby — not a bad start), says the script for Crash practically wrote itself. As he tells it, 10 years after his carjacking, he woke up at 2 a.m., thinking again about the kids who robbed him. In his mind's eye, Haggis simply followed each character until he or she met someone else. "I didn't set out to write this script — I like strong protagonists, really strong three-act structures. I don't know what kind of structure this movie has."

Above all, it's Haggis' gift for empathy that drives the movie, especially when his characters' racial antagonism leads them to say things he never would. "I was sort of shocked by what was coming out of their mouths," he says. But allowing the characters to speak even in racist terms was "liberating" — for him and for his actors. The same goes, he feels, for the country at large. "We can't have those discussions when people are afraid to talk to each other."