Top 30 Paul Haggis Quotes

All my work is partly biographical. I mean, ‘Crash’ was absolutely that, absolutely. But you just wouldn’t recognize me in most of those characters. But I was in every single one of those characters in ‘Crash,’ because those were all fears that I had felt. Things that I had thought in my deepest, darkest heart.

I like it when an actor is secure enough to ask questions, and the director is secure enough not to be threatened by that.

I miss my mother very, very much.

Irish and Italian are my two favourite people.

We give you characters we’d feel very comfortable judging, and then go: ‘Oh yeah? Watch this’.

I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It’s too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.

Even a modicum of celebrity is hard to deal with. You see it with actors and directors all the time.

Unless I’m really uneasy with what I’m writing, I lose interest very quickly.

There’s nothing more painful than writing.

I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally.

I don’t know if ‘Crash’ is a good movie or not because I didn’t set out to make a movie. Really, what I wanted to do is more of a social experiment.

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ I said, ‘Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax.’ And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

‘Crash’ was incredibly personal to me. So was ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ There were things in ‘The Next Three Days’ that were questions I was asking myself but couldn’t answer, like how far would you go for love? Can you believe in somebody who can’t even believe in themselves? But this is highly personal.

I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn’t get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.

I made a very good living as a bad writer. I wrote a lot of comedies, ‘Diff’rent Strokes,’ ‘Facts of Life,’ while all my friends were doing the good shows, like ‘Cheers,’ but I loved it because I got to be a working writer in Hollywood.

I just figure if you have a modicum of celebrity, you need to use it, and you need to use it for more things than just promoting yourself or your film or your image or your product.

I was trying to talk about where we are right now as a society, and talk about the fear we all live in, and certainly since 9-11, how it’s affected us and the world.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that’s the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

I try not to think of actors as I’m writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they’ve already done.

I don’t think it’s the job of filmmakers to give anybody answers. I do think, though, that a good film makes you ask questions of yourself as you leave the theatre.

I moved to Hollywood when I was 22. I was married. I had a kid right away. And I had worked as a furniture mover amongst various other jobs, and I’d work eight, ten hours a day to support my family – and I’d come home and write for two hours a night or two and a half, or three hours a night.

Every 10 years, I know less about love and relationships. The smarter I get, the less I know.

For me, the most interesting people are ones who often work against their best interests. Bad choices. They go in directions where you go, ‘No no no nooo!’ You push away someone who is trying to love you, you hurt someone who’s trying to get your trust, or you love someone you shouldn’t.

Film is an emotional medium; it’s not a logical medium. It’s not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything.

I’m a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.

You don’t make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

I thought ‘The King’s Speech’ was great.

The worst thing you can do to a filmmaker is to walk out of his film and go, ‘That was a nice movie.’ But if you can cause people to walk out and then argue about the film on the sidewalk… I think we’re all seeking dissension, and we love to affect an audience.

I have so many questions about love. How do you win at it? Especially if you’re in a relationship with an impossible person? What if you believe in someone who’s completely untrustworthy, who at their core can’t even believe in themselves?