Volatile stories make him Hollywood’s hot writer

It’s always nice to be an overnight sensation, even if you’re bald, on your second wife and family and old enough to have been inspired to become a fashion photographer after seeing Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up” back in the ‘60s. Just ask Paul Haggis, the Canadian-born writer-director who’s so hot right now that he has Steven Spielberg pitching him story ideas and Dustin Hoffman taking him to lunch. What makes the 52-year-old’s success so satisfying is that he earned it the hard way.

After years of toiling in relative obscurity in TV, where he was beloved by critics but spurned by audiences -- the show he considers his greatest achievement, “EZ Streets,” was canceled the week it debuted -- he has suddenly emerged as Hollywood’s go-to guy for dark, difficult material. His adaptation of “Million Dollar Baby” for Clint Eastwood won the Oscar for best picture. He just wrote Eastwood’s next film, “Flags of Our Fathers,” the troubling true story of the six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. He’s also writing a script with Spielberg for Haggis to direct at DreamWorks and has a movie he’ll direct in pre-production at New Line. He’s also writing “Death and Dishonor,” based on a Playboy article about a career Army officer whose soldier son is murdered by members of his platoon after returning from Iraq.

He’s a filmmaker with a knack for hitting a nerve. “My agent showed the story to me after I told her, ‘If you read something political and volatile that will never get made anywhere else, send it to me,’ ” Haggis explained over lunch the other day.

As he put it: “If you’re not provoking somebody, what’s the point?” After conservative critics attacked “Million Dollar Baby,” painting it as a right-to-die movie, Haggis jokingly apologized at an awards banquet for “turning Clint Eastwood into a communist. I only tried to turn him into a socialist and overshot a bit.” But if he provoked ire on the right with “Million Dollar Baby,” he may box the compass on “Crash,” a provocative drama he co-wrote and directed that will be released May 6.

A caustic portrait of Los Angeles as a melting pot boiling over with racial and ethnic strife, the film is about the thing that most defines Los Angeles -- its contradictions. Populated with an ensemble that includes Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Ludacris, Brendan Fraser and Larenz Tate, it views L.A. in much the same way that David Milch sees “Deadwood,” as a town given over to rough talk, seething resentments and the unsettling specter, as Haggis says, of “wonderful people doing horrible things and horrible people doing wonderful things.”

Co-written by Haggis and Bobby Moresco, the film captures the raw language and underbelly of multicultural L.A. that rarely shows up on the local news, much less in Hollywood films. A petty thief arrives at a chop shop, eager to sell a stolen van, only to discover a huddle of Asian immigrants padlocked inside. The shop owner, a Russian immigrant, says he’ll take the refugees too. “You want to buy these Chinamen?” the hustler says incredulously. “Don’t be ignorant,” the Russian replies. “They’re Thai or something.... How much you want for them?”

The movie picks at the scabs of a city vexed by ethnic dread. A Mexican mocks a Korean’s fractured English. Arguing with an Iranian man, a gun shop owner growls, “Yo, Osama, plan the jihad on your own time!” When a black man, making love with a Latino woman, is interrupted by a phone call from his mother, he says, “Ma, I gotta go, I’m having sex with a white woman,” later telling his lover, “I would’ve said Mexican but it wouldn’t have [ticked] her off as much.”

Built around a dozen or so interlocking characters and story lines, the film owes its genesis to an incident in the 1990s when Haggis’ Porsche was carjacked at gunpoint by two young thieves after he and his then-wife were leaving a video store.

Years later, the encounter still stuck in his head, Haggis awoke in the middle of the night and wrote until dawn, creating a group of characters all linked to the incident. In the film, the carjacking victims are a district attorney and his wife, played by Fraser and Bullock, the Porsche replaced by a Lincoln Navigator.

“I didn’t sit down and try to write something profound about racism or intolerance,” he says. “I just kept thinking about the kids that jacked my car. Who were they? What did they do when they weren’t stealing cars? They were all things that had been troubling me, which is usually what I write about -- things I can’t explain.”

Many of the other story lines were inspired by incidents drawn from real life. The Matt Dillon character, a white cop enraged by the way his father, a small businessman, was destroyed by racial politics, was based on an angry letter Haggis got while writing the TV show “Family Law” from someone who felt that Hollywood always portrays black people as heroes and white people as villains.

“Growing up in Canada, I lived in an all-white town where the only real tension was between the Catholics and Protestants,” he recalls. “So I only started to see racism on a subtle scale when I first met the supposedly liberal people in Hollywood. I was on a studio lot one day and saw two white producers with a black director, and I realized the white producer was telling a racist joke as a way of telling the director, ‘See, we can all say whatever we want now.’ And the black director had to eat it, because he owed his livelihood to those producers.”

It took Haggis years to establish himself in television -- his first produced script was an episode of “The Love Boat.” He also wrote for “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.” “I was a really bad writer for a long time,” he admits. The first script he took pride in was for “thirtysomething.” After Marshall Herskovitz, the show’s co-creator, read the script, he asked Haggis, “What’s it about? What are you writing about from your life that has some meaning?”

Haggis remembers thinking, “Oh, you’re supposed to do that?” He began creating shows that had substance, though the ones he cared about the most rarely lasted more than a season. The only show he was involved with that became a big hit was “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

During the long process of getting “Crash” and “Million Dollar Baby” made, Haggis often woke up in a cold sweat, thinking, “I can’t have it say on my tombstone, ‘Here lies Paul Haggis, the guy who helped get “Walker, Texas Ranger” on CBS.’ ”

Haggis originally pitched “Crash” to CBS as a TV series. When CBS passed, Haggis gave it to HBO, which passed too. Unable to let go, Haggis worked with Moresco, a writer friend, transforming it into a film script. In 2002, an agent got the script to Bob Yari, who was financing independent films. When producer Cathy Schulman came to Yari’s company, she became the script’s champion.

Haggis’ TV credentials meant little in the film world. “It was a negative,” he admits. “It would’ve been easier if I’d had no track record at all.”

His big break was getting the script to Cheadle, who took the part of a police detective. “Don gave me status as a director,” recalls Haggis. “People would say, ‘If Don’s in it, he must trust this guy.’ ”

Not everyone has been enamored by Haggis’ dire portrait of post-Rodney King Los Angeles. When the film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, Variety’s Todd McCarthy said it “seems to promote an ideology of victimhood, and shoves race-based thinking to the fore of every human exchange.”

Haggis defends the film’s ethnic acrimony, saying “we’ve all segregated ourselves in this city, not just whites but blacks, Koreans and everyone who walls themselves off in their own communities. To me, it’s as much about xenophobia as about race. But I’m not promoting victimhood. These are people, for good or ill, who make decisions they have to live with.”

Even though Haggis is outspoken about his lifelong involvement with progressive politics -- “I was probably the only kid in Canada getting Ramparts magazine” -- he sees himself as a dramatist, not a polemicist. In fact, he’s just as ambivalent about showbiz activism as he is about the characters in his scripts.

“People in Hollywood, including myself, are more comfortable telling other people how to live their lives without doing it ourselves,” he says. “It’s easier to get people to give money to save the rain forest than get solar panels on their own house.”

He jokes that his brief moment in the spotlight will fade fast enough. “I may be hot now, but don’t worry, I’ll be cool by June.” But he wants to tell stories that not only challenge an audience but challenge himself. “I love presenting a character we think we all know -- a stereotype -- and then twisting it around till you’re not sure what you really know anymore, who’s good and who’s bad. It’s always more interesting to write about something that you don’t have the answers for.”