Writer Paul Haggis says he is `not good at following rules`

His new film about Iraq has led to him being called 'Bin Laden's best friend'. Paul Haggis talks politics and Bond with Mark Lawson of The Guardian.

Ever since his name began to stand out in the credits, Paul Haggis, the first man to have written movies that took two successive Oscars for best picture, has tended to attract labels. For a start, the British viewer might assume Scottish roots, although it turns out he's descended from east Londoners with some French blood. "It was originally H'aggis," he says, "but they dropped the apostrophe and we accidentally became Scottish."

Harder to disclaim has been the tag of "liberal film-maker". In the brief period since he broke into movies after three decades in US TV, each of his major projects has fretted around a moral issue. Million Dollar Baby, written for the direction of Clint Eastwood and recipient of best film Oscar in 2004, seemed to be a boxing movie, a feminist Rocky - before revealing itself as a debate on euthanasia. Crash, Haggis's first film as writer-director and winner of the best picture Oscar in 2005, explored racial tensions in LA.

And now the UK is about to see In the Valley of Elah, in which Tommy Lee Jones tries to find out what happened in Iraq to make his soldier son behave catastrophically out of character. One US commentator, after seeing it, described Haggis as "Osama bin Laden's best friend", although most have employed the more polite tag, which seems to be sticking. "I don't think I'm a liberal," Haggis says, though. "It's a little right-wing for me. I'm a little left of that."

Although now established as a writer-director, Haggis, a slight and soft-spoken man of 54, still tends more towards the shabbiness and pallor of the writer than the sharp-suited sheen of the director. And the label of cinematic auteur is another he seems to be resisting: he made the unusual move, after his two Oscar wins, of signing up to write the final version of Casino Royale and the follow-up, still known only as Bond 22. "When they came to me with Casino Royale, I thought they were out of their minds. I asked my agents, 'Have they seen my movies? They know I am going to ruin Bond for ever?' But they said they'd take a chance."

Haggis's diagnosis was that Casino Royale faltered in its final third, so he created the sequence in which a series of betrayals reaches a climax as a building falls into the Venetian waters. He also supported the idea that 007 should be a darker, more agonised figure - and was continuing this process for Bond 22. But, since the beginning of the Hollywood screenwriters' strike last month, half of the writer-director has been unable to work ("Yeah. The proud half"). He believes that side may be idle for some time. Talks aimed at resolving the dispute, which centres on the writers' share from DVD sales, have just failed for the second time.

Though an expert at neat denouements, Haggis cannot see one here: "I'm a cynical bastard, as you can tell by my films, so I think it will be a very, very long strike, unfortunately - well into the summer next year. As you probably know, we get four cents on each DVD. We asked for four more and they said, 'No, no, that's outrageous, it will bankrupt us.' This is after making billions of dollars. They said this with a straight face."

Even if the strike ends and Haggis returns to Bond 22, his contribution is unlikely to include advice on the title. He admits to never knowing what to call his scripts and when writing Crash, only used it as a working title, assuming it would be changed. The director David Cronenberg, maker of a 1996 movie of the same name, is still, he acknowledges, "quite upset with me".

Until the industrial action, Haggis's time as a Hollywood writer had been almost spookily lucky. Most screenwriters, even famous ones, have endured embarrassing moments during interviews because the questioner has cited a line or scene that was changed by the director, improvised by the actor, or provided by an uncredited Tom Stoppard. The legend, though, is that Haggis's scripts for Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers - were filmed pretty much as written. "Yes," he confirms. "With Million Dollar Baby, I told him, 'You have my first draft, so let's get together and see what changes we should make.' And he said, 'No, the script's good.' It's lovely - he didn't change a damn thing. Well, he changed the cursing, he didn't think it was necessary."

Million Dollar Baby is also startling in disguising, for most of its length, the film it really is, appearing to be a sports story before turning into a drama about medical ethics. This structure is not recommended in the textbooks, nor is the use in Crash of multiple storylines that seem to have no connection, or the fact that In the Valley of Elah combines the genres of war film and murder mystery. Does Haggis simply not care about the rules?

"I care really deeply," he says. "I'm just not very good at following rules. With In the Valley of Elah, two-thirds of it is a murder mystery and then I say, 'That doesn't matter any more.' Another thing you're not supposed to do is take the crisis out of the protagonist's hands, and as Elah progresses, people just start coming forward and confessing. You don't do that in murder mysteries and you don't change a movie three-quarters of the way through it. But I think the rules have to be made up by the story."

Crash, the script that changed his life, was created after he was sacked from a TV show with enough of a pay-off to buy writing time. Following the advice of his mentors on the TV show thirtysomething, he drew a story from within, trying to dramatise the lives of two non-white youths who had once stolen his car, and the crisis of liberalism the crime induced in him. In the Valley of Elah was provoked by seeing a video posted by US troops on the internet, in which young soldiers fool around with the corpse of a dead Iraqi. Continuing his tendency to mix plots, Haggis combined this with the true story of a Vietnam veteran whose son, a serving US soldier, went missing. The film's central visual motif makes use of the American flag in a way that, in a country where the star-spangled banner has almost sacred status, must be regarded as genuinely brave. When I saw the movie in a New York cinema, there were audible sounds of shock at the final image.

"That was a tough decision," Haggis agrees. "I really, truly didn't want to insert my politics into it. I wanted to make a political film. But I wanted it to be an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. I didn't want characters on stage making speeches about Bush and condemning this and condemning that. I like movies which sneak up on you, and I imagined the experience of sitting in the audience and relaxing because it's just a murder mystery and Tommy Lee Jones is going to solve everything for you - so you don't have to really worry. And then slowly getting the feeling that a band is tightening around your chest until you can't breathe at the end. I actually went back and forth with the ending and finally realised it wasn't my decision. It was what the character would do. So I left it to the character."

In common with several other movies dealing with Iraq and the war on terror, In the Valley of Elah failed at the US box office, apparently confirming the belief of conservative commentators that Hollywood liberals make movies for themselves rather than middle America. Haggis, though, while accepting the commercial failure, reads the demographics in a different way: "It didn't do well at all, but where it did best was the midwest and south, exactly where I wanted it to do well. The kind of place where people think, 'I like Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, she's pretty. I think I'll go see this.' These are the places where they are sending people to Iraq. We're not sending them from New York, LA or Philadelphia. These are the children of the poor".

Paul Haggis was in conversation with Mark Lawson in the Guardian Interview at BFI Southbank, London.
To see a video clip go to guardian.co.uk/film.

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