Paul Haggis Interview, In The Valley of Elah

MoviesOnline sat down last weekend with Paul Haggis at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, "In the Valley of Elah,” which he wrote, directed, and produced. The suspense drama tells the story of a father’s (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his missing son, a soldier who is reported AWOL after recently returning from Iraq. Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron also star. Haggis wrote two Best Film Oscar winners back-to-back: "Million Dollar Baby” (2004) and "Crash” (2005). For "Crash,” Haggis won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, though the film also received an additional four nominations, including one for Haggis’ direction. "Crash” reaped numerous awards during its year of release from associations such as the IFP Spirit Awards, the Screen Actors Guild, and BAFTA.

In 2006, Haggis’ screenplays included the duo Clint Eastwood productions "Flags of Our Fathers” and "Letters From Iwo Jima,” the latter earning him his third screenplay Oscar nomination. He also helped pen "Casino Royale,” which garnered considerable acclaim for reinvigorating the Bond spy franchise. Haggis was born in London, Ontario, Canada and moved to California in his early 20s. For over two decades he has written, directed and produced television shows such as "thirtysomething” and "The Tracey Ullman Show,” and also developed credits as a pup writer on many Norman Lear sitcoms. He created the acclaimed, if short-lived, CBS series "EZ Streets,” which The New York Times cited as one of the most influential shows of all time, noting that without it "there would be no Sopranos.”

Haggis is equally committed to his private and social concerns. He is co-founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, a working board member of EMA (The Environmental Media Association) as well as the advocacy group Office of the Americas, among others. He is married, the father of four children, and splits his time between residences in Los Angeles and New York. Here’s what he had to tell us about his latest film:

Can you talk about the genesis of this project?

PAUL HAGGIS: Larry Becsey was my agent for a long time and we decided just as Crash was finishing up that we needed to move to a big agency so he became my manager and we moved over to CAA. I really liked the folks over there and so I went to meet with the literary department and I said "Look through your files. Look through all the things you’ve got. Look through your short stories and your fiction pieces and your true stories for anything in your heart you know will never be made and bring that to me. And that’s what they did. They brought me 5 or 6 things. This was like the sixth and I read it and went "Wow!” This was the end of 2003, the beginning of 2004, sometime around then. I took it to my movie agents and they read it and they said "Oh, no one’s going to make this, Paul.” You just remember that at that time, 3 or 4 years ago, we’re still driving around here with flags in our cars in Santa Monica so it was a very different time just 3 or 4 years ago. So they said you’ll never get this done and I said oh.

So it sat around for months. It’s an option thing. I don’t know how to do it but I want to do it. I’d heard a story just a few months before that, another true story that I wanted to combine it with. It hadn’t been written. It was just [something] someone told me, a vet, and it was really disturbing and so I wanted to try and put those two things together but we didn’t know how. But I took it around. I took it to a couple studios and they give the reaction. Crash had just been made and it hadn’t come out yet. "Oh Paul, I really want to work with you. Oh great idea! Yes! Really this is great.” And then they sat on it for 6 months and nothing got done. And you know my agents are right. They’re smart people. No one’s gonna make this.

So I called up Clint Eastwood because I could [laughs]…pretty cool thing, huh? I can get him on the phone. It’s like how cool is that? And so I call him up and I say I want to send you this article and he said okay. And so I’m thinking I’m going to send it to him and he’s going to call me back and go, "You commie bastard! What the hell are you selling this line of malarkey?” But you can never ever guess where Clint’s going to come down on anything and that’s the one thing I know about him is to never assume anything about Clint Eastwood. So I send this and he called me up. I sent it to him on a Thursday and he called me up on like the Saturday two days later and said, "Wow, that’s tough material.” I said, "Yeah, but it’s the truth of what’s happening to some of our men and women, isn’t it?” He said, "Yes. I’ll help you get it made.” So he called over to the head of Warner Brothers, Alan Horn, and said "The kid’s got something. I’d like you to look at it.” That’s how this movie got to Warner Brothers and that’s how it got financing. They said, "Okay, we’ll go with you on the script. We’ll see how it goes.” And they did and they financed that and got the rights for me.

It took me like a year and a half, almost two years, to write the script because it was really tough to write. I didn’t know how to do it. The simplest ones are always the hardest. Million Dollar Baby took me a little over a year to write and that kicked my ass while Crash [took] two weeks. It was done. Bobby (Moresco) and I – with a story that I came up with in one night – a 35-page story. A year after that I sat down with him and knocked the thing off in two weeks and then rewrote it in another two weeks – incredibly complex – no problem. This one – dead simple – takes forever to do. And then I brought it back and we got the financing and I took it to Charlize.

Actually what happened was I was in Italy and I called her up on the phone and said, "I’ve got this script.” I’d been like telling her for the last two years. I’ve been going, "I’m working on this thing.” She’s getting really sick of me. I said, "It’s done. Would you like to read it?” She said, "Yes.” That was a Wednesday and I emailed it to her and Thursday morning she called me and said, "I’m in.” And I said, "You know there’s no money in this. It’s a passion piece.” She said, "I don’t care. I’m in.” I didn’t know Tommy Lee Jones, but I knew his representatives so I called them up on a Friday and sent it to him. He read it over the weekend. His reps called back on Monday and said, "He’s in. He wants to talk to you.” "This is great, but you know there’s no money, right?” "Yeah, he’s in, he’s in. It’s good. He wants to do it.” That’s how simple the casting was in this for those two roles. That’s how it got made.

Q: Given that you worked on Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and this film, do you have a statement that you make about war and who we are as Americans?

PAUL HAGGIS: War is very, very good, I think, and we should have more and more of it. I think that says I’m going in that direction. I think it’s against the popular idea but I think it’s a good stance. No, I never thought I’d do one war film, never mind three. I don’t think there’s such a thing as…well I guess there are pro-war films, but even a lot of pro-war films tend to have an anti-war sentiment, some of them, but I have never met a veteran who is pro-war. I have met veterans who will fight for our country at the drop of a hat, but they don’t want to. They’re not going, "Let’s go over to Iraq and let’s kill civilians.” No one goes over there to do that. But these are very brave men and women who go off and do our bidding and they are treated shamefully when they return. They’re treated shamefully there often, you know, when they have problems.

I was talking to a Marine yesterday morning who had an amazing story. He’d just seen the movie and he and his buddy came over to see me at the house. He was over there, he was one of the best. He was a proud Marine. He was promoted three times during boot camp. He was on the fast track. He was an officer. He was over there and he was doing everything right and he started to have problems. He was starting to have problems with some of the things that you have to do in a war like that. We should know these things. We’ve known for centuries what happens in a war like this. You’re in close quarters here. This is not something out in the jungle. This is not something out in the desert. It’s an urban war. People live in urban centers. Civilians are going to die, lots of them, and you know that going in. And even good men and women are going to have to kill civilians and they don’t set out to do it. It just happens. The enemy is shooting and you’re shooting and they die. That’s what happens. And we know this going in. But you send good men and women over there and say, "Do your best.”

Well this fellow was doing his best. He was going along and he was having a hard time coping with it, with something that had happened, with something he’d done, so he went to his immediate senior who he said was on the same sort of career path as he was. He said, "I’m having a little problem.” And he said, "Well, you can get help or you can have a career -- your choice. Because if you seek help, you will no longer have a career. This is just good advice I’m giving you as a friend. You can do whatever you want.” So he didn’t seek help and then a couple months later he just went crazy over there. He just lost it in his words. He didn’t tell me exactly what happened, but he was brought in and finally they put him in front of an Army shrink and he would go to a psychologist and a psychiatrist team and they brought him in. I didn’t mean to use a derogatory term but that was just the way he said it. They brought these guys in and they looked at him and said, "You have PTSD and you need help. We’re gonna get you the right help.” He said, "Thank you.” And then the Army put him in the brig in a straight jacket in solitary confinement with a helmet on for three months and that’s the help he got.

Then he was released home and when he got here, he was told that he had a pre-existing personality disorder and that was his problem. And that’s what’s being told to at least 70% of our returning vets who have, who admit that they have PTSD which is a really hard thing for most soldiers to admit because of the stigma. The ones who admit that – and there’s 52,000 of them right now I’m told as of yesterday that the Army says have PTSD – 30,000 of them are being told that they have a pre-existing personality disorder.

You see these guys. This guy was a button down soldier. This was a good Marine. This was one of the proudest of them that we could have over there. If he has a personality disorder, I don’t know about the ones that don’t, and why they let him go in that place, why the majority of men… It’s just not true. These are not misfits we’re sending there. These are good men and women that we’d be proud of. And we’re sending them to an impossible situation. We’re sending them over there to a place where…

I wanted to write about the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t want to write about what bad people do in the wrong situation. I wonder what I would do. I think of myself as a good person and a moral person. What would I do when faced with these situations where you have to kill a woman or your buddies are going to be blown up and she may be coming at you with a bomb in that carriage and she may not. She has a kid in the car and what do you do? Because yesterday when a woman came up too fast in her car and she stopped and she pulled a switch and boom, four of your buddies died. And now this woman’s coming up again and it’s probably the fact that her foot is stuck on that peddle and she’s panicked or whatever, but you have to make a decision and you have to make it now. And you shoot and you kill that woman and that child and then you live with that. So how do you live with making the right decision? It’s impossible.

And then we look at the people who come back. This is what these vets say to me. We come back from this and folks say, "You look great. You look good. Glad to have you back. You didn’t lose a limb or anything. Great.” And they go, "Can’t they see what’s happened to me in the last 12 or 18 months?” And we can’t because we want to see what we want to see. We want to see ‘Oh, they’re back and everything is fine, everything is good’ and so we just ignore the effect and they go home. Look at the stories that are coming out in the New York Times and all the various papers. Look at what’s happening to these men and women that are coming back. It’s tragic.

There’s one thing I fictionalized in that movie. Well I fictionalized a lot of stuff but there’s only one event that I wrote about that wasn’t true and that was the soldier who drowned the woman in the bathtub. Last week I was sent a news article by a friend of mine from the Military Times about a soldier that came home and drowned his wife in the bathtub.

Q: What prompted you to move this out of the Fort Benning area since the crux of your story occurs there?

PAUL HAGGIS: I wanted to tell a story that asked bigger questions than that story actually did. I didn’t want to answer the question: "Who killed this particular soldier?” Although I wanted to use all the events of that, I wanted to ask: "What’s happening to our men and women?” So rather than keep it focused on "Oh yes. That’s right. That’s the guy who’s guilty. Now we found out.” You’ll see the movie is structured in such a way that it begins with a murder mystery. It beings with "Ah, we know what this is. We’re trying to find the guy who did this.” And then three quarters of the way through the film, I start to tell you that’s not important any more.

It’s not who did it. It’s who is responsible that we’re interested in, and it goes from a murder mystery to a moral mystery. It’s still a mystery, but I do this sleight of hand. I didn’t know if you were going to sit through it or like it or not. I sort of messed with the rules of screenwriting there. You’re not supposed to do that. A genre is a genre is a genre. Your hero is the guy who solves the crime and gets to the end, and this hero you just see him debilitated by this and you get to the end and people just start handing him clues and people confess. I knew what I was doing. That breaks all the rules. But I wanted to talk about his journey and our journey – where we are in America and ask questions about where we are in America right now and what’s happening.

Q: Do you consider Hank basically representing Americans in general?

PAUL HAGGIS: He sort of does, doesn’t he? He’s the guy we can look at. That’s the fella who we can admire. Yes, he’s old school. Yeah, he’s got a lot of values that maybe aren’t exactly our values today, but they’re values that we really admire and we really sometimes wish that we still had and this sense of family and this sense of community, and he’s a man who keeps his own counsel and doesn’t talk a lot. He’s that quiet American that we say that’s the guy we saw in the John Ford films. It was that character. That’s very close to who Lanny Davis is. I based it on that and then fictionalized it. So yeah, he’s an American.

Q: Was there any concern at all that given the nature of the movie and the current political situation, people will get turned off and not want to see it?

PAUL HAGGIS: Of course. I was concerned about all that stuff. I mean look at Crash. I did that darned thing… It’s all the way you sell something and that’s why I did this as a murder mystery. If someone had told me that was the same weekend as Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven opened and I was like, "Oh great, I’ll be destroyed.” If somebody had given me a chance to see two movies that weekend -- okay, I’m going to show you this movie about race relations and intolerance OR a sword and sandal piece – I’m going for the sword and sandal piece, ladies and gentlemen. [Laughs] But it wasn’t sold as that, thank gosh. It was a good story and it was stuff going on there and people came to see it and I hope this is the same. I think people come to see it because it’s a good story. If there’s something thought provoking, then that’s great.

Q: You spent all this time writing this script and breaking rules, and then as the director…

PAUL HAGGIS: [Laughs] Others have done it before me.

Q: As the director, you have Tommy Lee and a lot of his performance is him sitting there. And we have to imagine what’s going on with him. How difficult is it as a director to create that?

PAUL HAGGIS: Oh, it’s a pleasure. That’s the great pleasure of working with great actors. When I finished shooting this movie, I had 3 hours. I’d cut together the movie and it was 3 hours long. I started hacking at my dialogue and taking it out because I just didn’t need it. The more of my dialogue I cut, the better the movie got. And the more I trusted these actors could do it in a look, the better the movie got. I wanted to make it more and more spare. I don’t know if it works, but that was the intention to make it a very spare film that didn’t talk down to you, that didn’t say this is what you should think. It wasn’t partisan. No matter if you agree with the war or disagree with the war, it doesn’t really matter. This is a murder mystery and you come to it and yes, it’s gonna ask you some tough questions, but it’s not going to make you feel like a villain. It’s not going to make you feel stupid.

Q: Can you talk about the casting of the two guys, Jake McLaughlin and Sean Huze, who are veterans?

PAUL HAGGIS: There are actually 4 Iraq War vets in the film. There’s Jake. Two of them are infantry. That’s what you’re talking about. Jake is infantry and Sean is Marines. They were both there and also Wes (Chatham) who played Penning. He’s Navy and he was there for the invasion. He’s a Navy guy and had very little experience acting. I wanted to use a vet wherever I could so even the voice of the person who calls Hank in the beginning is an Iraq War vet. The casting process is a fascinating thing. You learn so much about your material and the movie when you’re doing it. I had really wonderful actors come in and read these parts. They just weren’t, you know, something’s wrong. And then a couple guys who came in who were Iraq War vets and I went, "Oh, these guys know.” Suddenly you just believe everything they say.” And when Jake says, "You have no idea what we did over there. Just say thank you and kiss my ass,” we believe him. And when Penning is confessing, you know. So that’s why. And also I’m a big proponent of if I cast an extra as a cop, I want it to be a cop. It’s just so much easier. Also, then you get the added bonus of when you’re on the set and I’m shooting that phone footage, the actors are actually shooting it on video on a phone or on a small video DV camera and when they go in to check out a room over there, they know what to do. They know how to act, they know how to do it, they know what to say. I don’t have to give them a lot of direction. Yes, we have military advisors there but they don’t have to do very much. These guys knew what to do. They’d just done it.

Q: Did you get some inspiration from them for the dialogue?

PAUL HAGGIS: A little bit, a little bit of dialogue. But I’d done so much research to start with that a lot of it was pretty close as it went. But some of the blocking and some other things, yes, a little bit. The fact that there was no toilet paper, things like that that I just didn’t know came out. They use their hand all the time when you’re over there at the beginning because there’s just no toilet paper. Things like that, the small details.

Q: Tommy Lee Jones has been an actor for so many years as well as a director. How was it working with someone who has the skills of a director?

PAUL HAGGIS: It was great. It was really, really helpful to me because the person could understand my problems when he was there. And also he could understand the process and I could come to him and say, "Tommy, there’s a big scene here. We’ve got you and we’ve got Charlize. Who do you think I should shoot first?” Because he’s got his process and Charlize has got hers. And he goes, "You know what I think, do Charlize first. Let’s get that out of the way.” He could understand. He wouldn’t be looking at it just from his own point of view. He’s a filmmaker and a really good one. Three Burials (of Melquiades) is one of my favorite films of that year. It was a remarkable film and it should have gotten much more attention. He’s a wonderful director so it made it much easier for the working relationship.

Q: The David and Goliath story that the film takes its name from, is that based on the original story?

PAUL HAGGIS: No, that’s not in the article. Here’s what I thought with that. I’d known the story forever like we all had. But I’d just known it. I’d never really asked myself about it. I started thinking about bravery and the nature of bravery because I really believe these men and women are incredibly brave. I think to step off a plane and to set foot on the sand over there is an act of bravery beyond anything I could comprehend. It’s something none of us should have to do.

So I started thinking about the nature of bravery and I can’t think of anyone more brave than David because you had this kid who came delivering bread. He’s a kid. He was a young boy and my son is 9 so I know how David was very young. He says to King Saul, "I’ll fight the giant.” Now this is a giant that for 40 days and 40 nights they’ve been camped out here, he’s been coming down every day, and none of the King’s bravest warriors will fight him. And this kid’s going to do it. The King says okay and he dresses him up in his armor. He sends him out and the armor is too heavy. He tosses it off; he can’t wear that. So he sends him out to battle with 5 smooth stones. He goes up against a giant with just a pocketful of stones and he stands there and the giant charges him and he hurls a stone and he hits him in the forehead and he kills him.

I can picture myself in David’s shoes, this giant that none of these guys would face and I’m facing him. An incredible act of bravery. And I ask, what kind of king would send a boy out to fight this giant -- a giant that these brave warriors were too afraid to fight? What kind of responsibility would that king have for sending that boy into battle, into an impossible situation? But yeah, he won. That was great. He beat the giant.

So I thought about that for awhile, and then I know something about history. I know that it’s told by the victors. The PR people always put together what the history is after the war, after the battle, after the thing. The people that win get to tell what the history was. I thought well, that’s interesting. The story of David, 40 days and no one wanted to fight him. I wondered, oh wow, how many boys the king sent into that valley before David in those 39 days that we’ll never hear about. How many of their stories will never be told? Maybe not, but maybe there were 39 of them.

Q: Do you think the Iraq War has something that creates the PTSD more than let’s say World War II?

PAUL HAGGIS: I think the big thing is the urban war. You’re in that close proximity with so many civilians and you just cannot tell. There are no uniforms. You don’t know who the enemy is. I don’t know how you survive there. The fear that sets in immediately, the paranoia. It’s not paranoia. They are trying to kill you. You don’t know. Especially when we went there, there are so many friendlies and a few who weren’t and a few had guns and they were shooting at us. You didn’t know who was who. And now you know so many civilians are being killed.

Q: How do you think it compares to the Viet Nam War?

PAUL HAGGIS: Personally I think it’s worse because again it’s urban. A lot of it is urban. I thought during Viet Nam that that was the worst it could ever be. I know how I would react and you know how you would react if you had to kill 12 people today who didn’t deserve to die who were just in the wrong place but for whatever reason they had to die. I don’t know how you live with that. What I guess I wanted this film ultimately to say was if you’re going to go to war, it you’re going to go to this kind of war, you’d better be damn sure. If you’re going to put these brave men and women through this, you’d better be damn sure it’s for a really good reason because these men and women will do it. They will lay down their lives and they will lay down their psyche for us. They’re willing to be destroyed for us and to lose everything. So we’d better make sure it’s for a damned good reason.

Q: Do you have any thoughts yet for the DVD?

PAUL HAGGIS: There’s a lot of scenes I could put in there that I cut out with some great actors that are no longer in the film. There’s a couple of them – just remarkable jobs. I had to cut the scenes because they’re just … In one of them, after I realized I’d shot it and it was beautiful, I did a lot of CG work with it and it was terribly expensive to do, and then I looked at it and went, "Oh, if that story is in the movie, I don’t need a movie.” It tells everything in the one scene. So I had to cut the scene. Another was a very funny scene, a really comedic scene in the beginning that I cut. It just stopped the film. It was so funny that it stopped the film. That was Tommy Lee and this woman who is this wonderful actress. I went, "Okay, if that scene’s in the movie, it just says his son’s not in any problem. You don’t have to worry about that.” You see the balance of things as you go along and there’s many, many things like that. I already know mistakes I’ve made and things I want to put back in and stuff I should cut. So I have plenty for the DVD if they’ll let me do it.

Q: Could you talk a little bit about the Annie Lennox song? Did she write it for the movie? It was so perfect.

PAUL HAGGIS: Thank you. Did you like it? It’s going to be on her new album. Annie’s rep sent it to me two weeks ago. It was the last thing I did was put that song in. I put it in the last day of the mix. I heard it two days before. I called up her management in England and said, "Listen, I can’t negotiate because I have no money. Would you please let me use this song?” And they said, "Sure. Annie would love to have that.” So she let me do that. I haven’t met her yet but I look forward to it. She’s a great artist, isn’t she?

Q: I didn’t really notice the music and then at the end…

PAUL HAGGIS: You didn’t think it was overwhelming? It was okay?

Q: No, it was perfect.

PAUL HAGGIS: Good.

Q: You mentioned Crash earlier. Given that movie’s success, do you see the potential for a second movie involving the same characters?

PAUL HAGGIS: No. They’re going to do a TV series on it though.

Q: Are you involved in that?

PAUL HAGGIS: No. I’m helping, just giving some advice and things like that. But I’ve already done my path. I think it needs a new head to reinvent it. I think I’d just do the same thing over and over again.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about working on James Bond?

PAUL HAGGIS: Sure, sure, sure. I’m on page 22.

Q: Yay!

PAUL HAGGIS: Ha, ha, ha. I’m not writing it today because I’m here but I was writing it up until 8 o’clock last night. It’s a lot of fun. Boy, it’s a whole different set of muscles. You get to get out of this mind set and get into that. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s something I was really concerned about doing because I liked the first one, the Casino Royale, so much. It was such fun doing it and I just thought I could only fail by trying it again, but I’m giving it a shot. It’s an original. It’s not based on any book or any short story or anything that Fleming had done although obviously it’s steeped in a lot of Fleming’s ideas. It starts right after the last one – 2 minutes after Casino Royale is when this movie starts.

Q: Do you think the Broccoli’s might go back to pre-existing material?

PAUL HAGGIS: I don’t know. I’d like to. I think it’d be great. There’s some really terrific books. I don’t know. You’d have to ask them.

Q: The Broccoli’s have gone on record saying they wanted this one to be funnier after the last one. Is that true?

PAUL HAGGIS: That’s not true.

Q: Good. Because I liked that last one.

PAUL HAGGIS: They were misquoted I’m sure.

"In the Valley of Elah” opens in theaters on September 14^th.