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The Telegraph (20/Aug/2005) - Film-makers on film: Paul Haggis

(c) Telegraph (20/Aug/2005)

Film-makers on film: Paul Haggis

Paul Haggis tells Benjamin Secher why he was mesmerised by his first Hitchcock

With Crash, writer-director Paul Haggis has created not only the summer's most talked-about film, but also the most manipulative. Barrelling across the multi-racial landscape of LA, Haggis's directorial debut introduces us to a cast of apparently stock characters - the black gangster, the racist cop, the long-suffering immigrant - but no sooner have we set our bearings by these familiar poles than they've moved: the gangster becomes a sympathetic victim; the cop, a hero; and the immigrant, a gun-toting madman.

The effect is disorientating, leaving us no choice but to cling to the plot as it careers between high tension and slack comedy, repeatedly shuttling us to the brink of tragedy and back. Emerging from the cinema, two hours later - tears shed, emotions drained - it is hard not to feel admiration, and just a hint of pique, towards the director who has made us feel as suggestible and helpless as Pavlov's drooling dogs.

"Of course I feel guilty about manipulating the audience, playing on their preconceptions in that way," says Haggis with a full-throated laugh that suggests the opposite. "But that's my job."

Alfred Hitchcock, whom Haggis describes as one of his greatest influences, would surely have agreed. The filmmaker responsible for such haunting classics as Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window is cinema's arch-manipulator, a director adept at keeping an audience pinned to the edge of their seats. And Haggis is a great admirer. "I'll never forget my first Hitchcock," he says. "It was Strangers on a Train and from the moment it started, I was mesmerised."

Hitchcock's film opens brilliantly, with a chance encounter between two very different men: Guy (Farley Granger), a high-society tennis pro, and Bruno (Robert Walker), the darkly charismatic oddball he meets on a train. Within minutes, Bruno has persuaded Guy to divulge the details of his messy love life - he wants to marry a new belle, but his estranged wife is refusing a divorce - and revealed his own grim secret - that he wishes his father were dead. Before they part, Bruno suggests a solution: that they "swap murders". Guy declines, but less than a week later finds Bruno at his door having strangled the wife, and threatening to pin the murder on Guy unless he keeps his part of the "deal".

In Hitchcock's hands, the story becomes utterly compelling. "Watching Bruno start to work his way into the hero's life is so deliciously uncomfortable for the viewer," says Haggis. "You can see exactly what is going to happen but there is no way around it, and you feel desperately sorry for Guy." But, encouraged by the film's ingenious casting, it is not long before the viewer's sympathies start to stray. "I don't think Walker had ever played a villain before," says Haggis. "I'd only seen him as the hero or the foppish best friend - so I felt predisposed to like him. On the other hand, Granger's character is not particularly attractive at all - 1950s film heroes were supposed to be strong and confident, yet here is this rather tediously weak man, who allows himself to be pushed around by women."

In an artfully drawn-out chase sequence - one of Haggis's personal highlights - Hitchcock pushes our mixed feelings about the central characters even further. Bruno is rushing to plant Guy's lighter at the murder scene (with Guy in hot pursuit) when he accidentally drops it down a drain. Hitchcock's camera lingers voyeuristically over him as he struggles to retrieve it. "I'll never forget watching Bruno squeeze his hand down through that metal grate," says Haggis. "Seeing the sweat forming on his brow, feeling his pain as the lighter remains just beyond reach."

"When he finally managed to grab the lighter, I cried out with relief, even though only a minute before I had been happy to see him drop it. I found myself rooting for the villain and realised I had betrayed the hero. I looked around me and the entire audience felt the same. We felt shame. In that instant, Hitchcock taught me the power cinema can have to make you empathise with people you'd normally hate, suspect people you'd normally trust. That's exactly what I wanted to try with Crash. It's an awful, manipulative trick, but if you can get it right, you can really shake up the audience, make them think."

Though the pursuit may be tense, Hitchcock saves his most thrilling set-piece for the film's final showdown: a heart-stopping scene that finds Guy and Bruno fighting to the death on an out-of-control merry-go-round.

"The most amazing thing about that scene is Hitchcock's introduction of that old man who goes crawling under the spinning carousel, trying to fix it," says Haggis. "I couldn't believe it when I first saw it. It looked so real, I thought he was going to be killed."

Haggis has already proven capable of whipping up similar bravura moments, not just as a director but also - for Clint Eastwood's multiple Oscar-winner Million Dollar Baby - as a writer. The success of that film enabled him to finally break away from an early career in television that had dragged on for rather longer than he had hoped.

"The problem with TV is that once you become successful at it, it eats you alive," he explains. "You end up working 11 months a year just to feed that monster."

Now, having firmly established himself on the Hollywood radar, the Canadian looks set to stay. Hot on the heels of Crash, he already has three more features in the pipeline. Among them are a second script for Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers) and a film Haggis will direct himself, co-written and produced by Steven Spielberg.

"To me, Clint and Steven are such icons that I was afraid I'd put pressure on myself to agree with whatever they said," he admits with typical candour. "But then the artist in me reared his head and I heard myself saying 'No! No! No!' "

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