Film: L.A. Story

LOS ANGELES — Paul Haggis’ provocative new movie can best be described as a Crash between cultures.

The title of Crash, fittingly set in L.A., specifically refers to the opening scene’s auto accident. “In L.A., nobody touches you,” a character observes in voiceover, as the screen shows the upset and angry victims. “We’re always behind metal and glass. We need that touch so bad we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

In a broader sense, it refers to the way people of different races and classes violently collide with each other in big-city America, where they too often otherwise have little to do with each other’s lives. Thus, in this film the automobile becomes a metaphor for their self-imposed segregation. Our segregation.

In the elliptical storytelling tradition of Short Cuts or Lantana, the large group of characters in Crash keeps interacting in unexpected, coincidental and often racially charged ways. The ensemble cast includes Chris “Ludicris” Bridges and Larenz Tate as carjackers, Brendan Fraser as a liberal district attorney and Sandra Bullock as his wife, Matt Dillon as a racist beat cop, Ryan Pillippe as his conscientious partner and Don Cheadle as a homicide detective with his own prejudices.

Their interactions develop like one long, brutal chain-reaction highway accident. But what sparked it all?

“It was 1991, and I was with my wife at the time, coming home from the opening of The Silence of Lambs,” Haggis, the film’s director/co-writer, explains while sitting in his room at the Four Seasons Hotel. It’s a clear, sunny day — L.A. at its best — and Haggis has just stepped in from the balcony of his top-floor room after a smoke.

“We pulled over to get a movie at Blockbuster, and when we came out two guys with guns said, ‘We’ll take your car.’ I said, ‘Absolutely, you will.’ We never found the car, and the people were never identified. Ten years later I woke up in the middle of the night wondering about those kids and wanting to write about them. I made them the protagonists in my story.

“As a writer, you ask yourself questions other people never ask,” he explains. “I wanted to know who those kids were. Were they best friends or had they just met recently? Had they thought of themselves as criminals? Was this just something they were doing to make a couple bucks or was this was a profession?”

As Haggis and co-writer Bobby Moresco began asking those questions, they started thinking about American racial attitudes. In a multicultural city like Los Angeles, that meant imagining what whites thought about blacks when under pressure and vice versa. And they went on — looking at attitudes of blacks toward Asians, whites to Hispanics and Iranians, Iranians to Hispanics and more until the whole urban mosaic was covered.

Haggis drew on his own feelings after the carjacking in shaping the characters.

“I remember we changed our locks at 2 a.m.,” he says. “So I asked myself how I would have felt if the kid who came to change those locks was Hispanic and had baggy pants and tattoos. Would I have felt safe? No, I don’t think I would. So when Bobby and I wrote the movie, we kept asking questions and putting ourselves in the characters’ shoes. How would they react?”

Thin and soft-spoken with a cheerful smile and optimistic voice, balding with blue eyes and a trim beard, Haggis made his initial Hollywood impact as a television writer. He created the series EZ Streets, a 1990s Sopranos precursor.

Moving into motion pictures, he optioned the rights to boxing writer F.X. Toole’s Rope Burns short-story collection and adapted the book for the screen. Clint Eastwood directed it as Million Dollar Baby, which won 2004’s Academy Award for best picture. Haggis’ screenplay received an Oscar nomination. He’s also written Eastwood’s next movie, Flag of Our Fathers.

Throughout all this, he wrestled with his idea to write and direct the comparatively low-budget Crash. He explains he wanted to make a movie about his city — his home — that’s also about much more.

“I wanted to show the hope and the fears we all live with,” he says. “I think it’s a hopeful film, because once you discover who you are you can reassess yourself. So I wanted to put these people in a place where they are forced to confront themselves. This is an important question: ‘What do we do when we’re tested?’ ”

Haggis was aware of the pitfalls: It’s easy to be called a racist when addressing issues of race.

“I was terrified,” he says. “A couple white guys talking about race relations in Los Angeles? Terrified! But the first person who read it was my friend (the late) Anita Addison, who the movie is dedicated to. She was a great champion of my work early on with EZ Streets. She was one of (Hollywood’s) first senior black executives, the head of drama at CBS. And she said, ‘Don’t change a word.’ ”

Haggis then found a supporter in the hard-working African-American actor Cheadle. “He was the first — he came to my house and said, ‘I want to do the movie, and I want to produce it.’ So once that happened, that helped with casting immensely.”

Meanwhile, as Crash is released, Million Dollar Baby‘s reputation as a controversial movie only grows. While it is primarily a boxing movie, it takes a sudden late turn and becomes about a hospital patient’s right to die.

Events in recent months surrounding Terri Schiavo’s death have made the issue timelier than ever. When the film came out in December, Haggis resisted talking on the record about the moral issues the story raised so as not to reveal the surprise plot twist. Now, however, he’s willing.

“As a writer, you don’t want to put morality aside but you want to do what’s right for the characters,” he says. “So what I felt was important was making sure the odds were stacked against (Eastwood’s character’s) decision to the extent it would make it the hardest decision a man could make.

“I’ve been involved in some life-and-death decisions in my life, and they’re never easy. If I’d written it so that this was polemic, an argument for the act, I’d feel very bad about myself. If you know what’s happening in America with euthanasia, you know there is no black and white in this.”

This article appears in May 11-17, 2005.