A change of the old order in Hollywood is long overdue, according to Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning film-maker behind the hit films Crash and Million Dollar Baby.
The Canadian screenwriter and director said many of the established rules of big-budget showbusiness should be re-examined in the light of falling box-office receipts and the recent scandalous claims and revelations about the enduring influence of the casting couch.
“Los Angeles is a town run by a group of powerful corporations, the studios, and they inevitably want to make what they know they can sell. This means they often lag a few years behind creatively,” he said this weekend.
A reliance on sci-fi and youth franchise reboots is not enough, he added. “I love comic-book movies, but do we want a diet of only that? It is about money, of course. The studios have to make more than they did last year, so we have Fast and Furious number whatever.”
Haggis, who wrote the screenplay for Casino Royale (2006), as well as Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, and whose exposé of gritty Los Angeles life in Crash earned him international plaudits in 2005, said a desire to make grown-up films had led him to leave Hollywood. The insular nature of Los Angeles both concealed bad behaviour like Harvey Weinstein’s and inhibited creative risk-taking.
“LA is pretty much a one-industry town and conversations become quite circular. In New York I talk instead to neuroscientists, bakers and restaurateurs,” he said.
The film-maker hit the headlines seven years ago when he cut ties with the Church of Scientology, a powerful force in Hollywood, and began to speak out against them after 35 years inside the movement. He appeared in the Emmy-winning documentary Going Clear in 2015, revealing the disappointment he felt once he had seen through the mystical hierarchy of the church.
Now Haggis, 64, who is working on a documentary about the early days of the Aids epidemic in San Francisco, said he enjoys greater artistic contact with the outside world, including at international film festivals. “I look forward to the cross-pollination and the fact that film-makers in New York and Europe have a completely different approach,” he said. Next weekend he will receive the inaugural Vision Award in recognition of his career at the Evolution Mallorca film festival .
“People have been hoping for a new trend of more serious American film-making for a while,” Haggis said. “I remember when I was Oscar-nominated for Crash in 2006, the other contenders were all serious films, Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich, so I thought Hollywood had turned a corner. But people told me, rightly, that it was just an anomaly.”
It was a hunger for films with greater depth that established the success of Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s Miramax and then The Weinstein Company.
“It is really hard for their innocent employees in New York, who worked hard and may well lose their jobs, but a lot of people are compromised by Harvey’s alleged actions,” said Haggis. “Although everyone thinks it is vile behaviour, you have got to focus on those who may have colluded and protected him. For me, they are as guilty as he is and in some cases more so, if I can say that. I mean, he was a predator and a predator is a predator. But what about those who would rather look the other way?”
Haggis does not think sexual harassment and abuse are endemic in Hollywood, but admitted it is a “fairly sexist” town. “It is not an innocent place and never has been. Most of this behaviour has been aimed at women, but I am sure that former child stars such as Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, who have both made allegations in the past that no one took seriously, are worth considering, too.
“Were people covering for paedophiles, too? We have to think that may have happened as well, because no one speaks out about being abused just to benefit their career. I find it particularly terrible that people had their dreams held to ransom in that way.”
Hollywood, Haggis believes, always invites newcomers to sell their souls. “People make compromises, but you don’t have to. I did sometimes, of course, especially in my early TV days. But then I made a conscious decision: if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell.
“I hawked the screenplay for Crash around the studios for the longest time. They all turned it down. But I felt I couldn’t keep selling little pieces of my soul, and now I have earned the right to the final edit on the films I direct. Sometimes people won’t work with me because of that, but there you are. How many academy awards have they won?”
This December, London will host a fundraising event for Haggis’s charity, Artists for Peace and Justice, which since he founded it in 2009 has raised millions of pounds to fund education in Haiti. “We can’t solve poverty there, or anywhere else, but at least we are giving them the right start so that they can come up with their own solutions,” he said.
