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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Paul Haggis Quotes

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

– Paul Haggis

‘Crash’ came from personal experience. I saw things inside me from living in L.A. that made me uncomfortable. I saw horrible things in people and saw terrible things in myself. I saw a black director completely humiliated, but the three people around me just thought it was funny. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that is selling your soul.’

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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

– Paul Haggis

The great majority of Scientologists I know are good people who are genuinely interested in improving conditions on this planet and helping others.

– Paul Haggis

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

– Paul Haggis

I don’t pay much attention to the press. My films always get good reviews and bad reviews. I just try to make the best film I can.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

As a general rule, I don’t plan to travel with my Oscars, but we may have to make an exception.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

My one guiding rule for success in the film world would be, be careful of your friends.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

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

– Paul Haggis

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

– Paul Haggis

I’m a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock’s films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.

– Paul Haggis

In Scientology, in the Ethics Conditions, as you go down from Normal through Doubt, then you get to Enemy, and, finally, near the bottom, there is Treason.

– Paul Haggis

I wrote an episode for ‘thirtysomething,’ and a producer said, ‘That’s really good, but what is it about? What does it say about you? What questions are you asking yourself?’ I had never thought about that. This comment changed who I was, because it made me look at my own soul, the dark corners in my soul, and accept that dark side.

– Paul Haggis

Even in a comedy, you have to make people feel. You have to put your hand inside their soul and twist out their heart.

– Paul Haggis

Irish and Italian are my two favourite people.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

I just love actors, and I’ve always loved actors. I empathize with their job. Everyone thinks it’s easy, and it ain’t. To be that vulnerable and brave on camera is tough. The more they reveal themselves, the more we love them, but there’s a lot of truth in what they’re showing.

– Paul Haggis

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you’re a writer.

– Paul Haggis

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.

– Paul Haggis

I’m such an antsy type of person. I can’t write in a room without other people around. I write in coffee shops.

– Paul Haggis

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