Million Dollar Boomer

One restless 2 a.m. in November 2001, writer-filmmaker Paul Haggis lay awake, wrestling with whether to get out of bed and write down what, in his half-sleep, looked like a white-hot idea. "I hate waking up with an idea in the middle of the night," he laughs, "because whenever you do write it out, it's shit when you read it the next morning. But if you don't write it down, you forget it by morning, and it's the greatest idea you've ever had."

In this case, Haggis is lucky he dragged himself to his desk -- and so are we. Crash is the fruit of that insomniac struggle, and marks the powerful debut of Haggis as a director, fresh on the heels of his triumph as the screenwriter behind the Oscar-sweeping Million Dollar Baby.

The idea that badgered Crash into being grew out of a nightmarish memory. Haggis and his wife were victims of a carjacking in the early 1990s. He had never considered the incident useful story material, yet, as he recalls, "Once a year or so, I would ask myself: Who were those guys? Were they best friends? Were they professionals? Or was this their first time? What did they do for pleasure, in their off times?" The two had also, after all, stolen the keys to Haggis' house. He and his wife had had to stay up into the wee hours waiting for a locksmith. Remembering that night, Haggis asked himself: What if the locksmith who arrived had come styled as a tattooed gangbanger? How safe would he have felt then? And what if Haggis had been rash enough in his rage to voice such fears (as Sandra Bullock does, in Crash) within the locksmith's earshot? How would the locksmith have felt? And who was that locksmith, anyway? What was his home life? This time, the questions drove Haggis out of bed, which led to other questions, and other characters. By 10 that same morning, without having once left his chair, Haggis had completed a 40-page treatment, which in a matter of weeks he developed into a fully fledged script with his friend Robert "Bobby" Moresco. This comes to the screen intact, with the cooperative support of producer Bob Yari and producer Cathy Schulman.

"Crash is not 'about' race," cautions Haggis. "It's about strangers, others. About how we love to divide ourselves. Take Rwanda -- a perfect example of two tribes, of one race, divided by colonial politics, who slaughter each other over differences that are invisible to an outsider. And that's so much who we are, as human beings. We will always manufacture differences." This seemed a truth so volatile that Haggis feared Crash would be misunderstood: "I thought, 'Oh fuck, I'm either going to be strung up by everyone I respect, or I'm going to be the poster boy for the KKK.' " His late friend and CBS executive Anita Addison (the first African-American woman to hold a top network position) strongly advised him not to change a thing. She died while Crash was in production, but made a wisecrack that went into the film, which is dedicated to her memory: "Santa Monica, Burbank, Toluca Lake -- those are some scary places for a black woman to find herself."

Born in 1953 in London, Ontario (just across the border from Detroit), Haggis, who was raised Catholic, smiles at the memory of himself, at age 6, telling his mother, "I wish there were more Catholics in this neighborhood, because all the Christians want to do is fight." He moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s, determined to become a film director, only to spend the next 25 years in television, writing or executive-producing shows such as The Facts of Life, thirtysomething, L.A. Law, Walker: Texas Ranger and EZ Streets, honing his skills and solidifying his financial base for the jump he made in 2000, when he bought the rights to the two short stories by F.X. Toole that became Million Dollar Baby. "I'm glad now that I didn't get to direct movies at 23," he reflects. "They would've been so bad. It takes a long time to figure out what you want to say, and how to say it."