Paul Haggis Character Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When I started to allow the characters to go where they wanted to go, I just had to follow.

We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment.

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

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.

Usually the characters are where I start. Then I continually ask myself, 'What's the worst thing that could happen to this character?'