Interview: Third Person Writer-director Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis spent two decades in the trenches writing for sit-coms like Diff’rent Strokes, One Day at a Time, Who’s the Boss, and Facts of Life and TV dramas such as LA Law, thirtysomething, and Walker Texas Ranger.

But ten years ago, Haggis broke out big as a film writer, with back-to-back Best Original Screenplay Oscars for Million Dollar Baby and Crash (which he also directed).

Since then, he’s written more scripts for Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the rebooted James Bond franchise (Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) as well as written and directed In the Valley of Elah and The Next Three Days.

Haggis’ latest film, Third Person, returns to the multiple plot-line structure of the Oscar-winning Crash, with three seemingly separate stories unfolding in three cities:

• In Paris, an author (Liam Neeson) tries to write while juggling the emotional needs (and tragedies) of his ex-wife (Kim Basinger) and current lover (Olivia Wilde).
• In Rome, a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) is drawn to a gypsy woman (Moran Atias) and her dark (and sometimes darkly comic) quest to ransom her daughter back from a crime lord.
• And in New York, a once-popular actress (Mila Kunis) struggles to find even menial employment and regain custody of her son from his artist father James Franco.

I spoke with Haggis a few weeks ago in Chicago about writing about the writing process in Third Person; his own approaches as a writer and director; and writing about broken, “impossible” people struggling with love, forgiveness, and redemption.

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Nearly everyone in Third Person is a creative professional: a writer, an actress, an artist, even a fashion spy-thief.

Paul Haggis: I really wanted to talk about what it’s like to be a writer or an artist. How selfish we are, how much we steal from our lives, how we try to work our lives and our heart to explain ourselves, and how sometimes characters take us places we don’t want to go, to see things we don’t want to look at.

My journey is much like Liam’s character’s journey in that the characters take me, and I kept fighting them and force them into stories. Finally, only when I let them go, did they take me to places I didn’t want to understand and force me to look at my own feelings. In this case you see the characters literally lead Liam to things he doesn’t want to see or deal with, that he’s in denial about. He’s got these characters he’s writing, all these stories, and his own life that he’s writing as he goes, and yet something underneath that is haunting him.

I was also fascinated by the nature of love and relationships. I was asking myself how you survive in a relationship with an impossible person like me? How do you love and get through to a person like that, and how do we love and allow ourselves to be loved? Or if you trust someone who’s completely untrustworthy or believe in someone who can’t believe in themselves, do they rise to that? Do they become what we imbue them with in a positive way?

And did writing this script drag you to places you didn’t want to see?

Haggis: Absolutely: My own selfish nature and guilt I felt about my children that I didn’t know was that close to the surface. You write so much, work so much for any career, but especially writing is a solitary thing. I was married at 22 and had a baby right away and was working as a furniture mover 8-10 hours a day and then I’d go home and write for 2-3 hours at night. Even once I made it, I was doing the same thing; writing sit-coms 12, 14, 18 hours a day sometimes. Your children pay the price for that. That guilt is there.

Did you find any part of writing process that film really can’t capture?

Haggis: I didn’t actually try to do it, but if I had thought about it, it would be how animated we are when we write. You climb into each character’s head and they talk. I’d love to put a camera on writers sometime as they get lost and act it out in strange ways.

You get so excited by something, you have to stand up and walk away. The adrenaline is rushing and you have to force yourself to stay there at the desk and keep writing while something exciting is happening on the page.

You said in the New Yorker profile a few years ago [about Haggis' public break with and renunciation of Scientology] that when you set out as a young man to be a writer, your dad said you should move to either New York or Los Angeles and you chose LA and TV/film writing.

Is Neeson’s character who you imagine you might have become if you’d gone to New York and become a literary novelist?

Haggis: I admire novelists too much because I know I can never do that. I’m a film maker, and almost as a film writer you’re more architect than novelist. And since I’m also a director, I can say that the director is like a builder. Often we think of it as the other way around in film writing and directing, but it’s not true. A good screenwriter will give you everything you need to tell your story. My job as a director is fairly simple after that. But novelists, those are real writers.

You’re a very writerly film writer, though. How do you balance your roles as writer and then director?

Haggis: I’ve been very lucky in many of my writing jobs to work with directors who really respect writers. Clint Eastwood never changed a word in my scripts—I gave him the first drafts and he shot them. Same with Martin Campbell on Casino Royale. They take your work and interpret it their way. That’s such a gift as a writer, to have that level of trust. Other times, not so much.

Myself, as a director I’m so inside the script as I’m writing it that when it comes to directing it, I have to try to think back and remember exactly what where I was looking at that scene from when I wrote it. I close my eyes and picture it.

Often as director you go to the set and start to get influenced by the lighting and setting and staging, and you forget the important reasons that as the writer you saw that scene from a particular vantage point.

Do you ever create two scripts, one for the actors and a more detailed one for yourself as director?

Haggis: No, I don’t. I try not to put too many parenthetical descriptions in my scripts—I only do it if the actor really can’t understand a scene because its intent is completely opposite of what they’re seeing on the page, of what their character is saying. If an actor can understand a scene and what you’re really going for, then they can act it.

What draws you back to this sort of multi-plotline narrative structure?

Haggis: I like the fact that you can take a subject and tell it from various points of view that all reflect upon each other. You don’t have to have just one story that ends well or badly—there are several endings that all add up to one ending, but not necessarily the obvious one. For example, in this film by telling three love stories and making it seem like that’s all it is, I was able to make it into a puzzle that’s about something else completely.

At what point in this film’s writing process did you know that ending?

Haggis: I found it about halfway through the two-and-a-half-year process. And when I found it, I went back and rewrote it completely. I rewrote constantly to try and hone the themes because I didn’t initially write with those themes in mind. They came intuitively, so when I really figured out what I was writing I would go back and retool it.

How do you keep not just the plot and thematic puzzle working, but also keep one storyline from overpowering the others?

Haggis: You feel it. In this case I allowed the sections to get tonally out of sync because I was telling three different stories in three different styles.

For example, Adrien Brody’s story becomes incredibly farcical and so funny. When I was editing that I worried it was going too far, but I decided I loved it, it was that story, and I wanted to go with it: an American’s very stereotypical view of what Italians are like.

I find as I get older, I’m drawn more to stories like these, of broken people instead of heroes and villains.

Haggis: Early in life you think there are heroes and villains. Later in life you realize we are both villains and heroes in our own lives. As a storyteller, you want to be able to embrace those contradictions and have characters surprise you and do things you don’t want them to do and don’t like them for doing, but you somehow understand what they had to do.

And there aren’t always rewards or redemption for the protagonists.

Haggis: In this film, the ones who take the biggest risks are the ones who are rewarded. The ones who try to protect themselves usually lose. But then others take huge risks and open themselves up and be vulnerable, which is one of the hardest things to be in love, and they aren’t rewarded for it—they should have stuck with their suspicions.

Also, all characters want to be forgiven, but sometimes forgiveness is the hardest thing to accept. You have to be so vulnerable with somebody; you have to figure out how to allow someone to love you. It’s often easier to love someone else than to allow yourself to be loved.

There are characters in this film who trust and lose everything, and characters who trust and gain everything. Does that work, or do we just constantly project our own sins on one another?