Paul Haggis quotes:

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.

For me, the most interesting people are ones who often work against their best interests. Bad choices. They go in directions where you go, 'No no no nooo!' You push away someone who is trying to love you, you hurt someone who's trying to get your trust, or you love someone you shouldn't.

I thought 'The King's Speech' was great.

I don't think I'm against all wars, but you'd have to have a damn good reason to send your son or daughter to fight, or to go yourself. So often, we are lied to and manipulated by our governments for their own very cynical reasons.

I don't know how much credit I can take for 'Walker, Texas Ranger,' because I only worked on it for three weeks. I re-wrote the pilot, and then my name was on it forever.

A lot of films made me love the movies, everything from Hitchcock to Godard. But the ones that really grabbed me were Costa-Gavras's films like 'Z' and 'State of Siege.'

Every 10 years, I know less about love and relationships. The smarter I get, the less I know.

I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.

I don't pay much attention to the press. My films always get good reviews and bad reviews. I just try to make the best film I can.

The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything.

I just figure if you have a modicum of celebrity, you need to use it, and you need to use it for more things than just promoting yourself or your film or your image or your product.

I like to write about things about which I have no answers, questions that trouble me. These things trouble me.

I don't think it's the job of filmmakers to give anybody answers. I do think, though, that a good film makes you ask questions of yourself as you leave the theatre.

The great majority of Scientologists I know are good people who are genuinely interested in improving conditions on this planet and helping others.

If you're in a relationship and you try to trust somebody who's completely untrustworthy, when trust is the basis of any relationship and everyone else says not to trust, is love transformative.

I wrote an episode for 'thirtysomething,' and a producer said, 'That's really good, but what is it about? What does it say about you? What questions are you asking yourself?' I had never thought about that. This comment changed who I was, because it made me look at my own soul, the dark corners in my soul, and accept that dark side.

We're trying to reinvent Bond. He's 28 - no Q, no gadgets.

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.

As a general rule, I don't plan to travel with my Oscars, but we may have to make an exception.

I don't know if 'Crash' is a good movie or not because I didn't set out to make a movie. Really, what I wanted to do is more of a social experiment.

My one guiding rule for success in the film world would be, be careful of your friends.

If there's magic in boxing, it's the magic of fighting battles beyond endurance, beyond cracked ribs, ruptured kidneys and detached retinas. It's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

I moved to Hollywood when I was 22. I was married. I had a kid right away. And I had worked as a furniture mover amongst various other jobs, and I'd work eight, ten hours a day to support my family - and I'd come home and write for two hours a night or two and a half, or three hours a night.

In 'The Next Three Days,' even though it was a prison breakout movie, I was asking myself, 'What would I do? How far would I go for the woman I loved? How far would I go, and what would I do when the person then told me that they were guilty? Could I still believe in them?' So it was very personal.

We crash into each other just so we can feel something

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

If you believe in someone enough, and you just don't stop believing in them, mo matter what, no matter how much they push you away, and no matter how often they prove they're only there to use you.

The radical rightwing pegs Hollywood as a leftist town, which is completely wrong. There are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who talk a liberal agenda... but all the studio bosses, for as long as there have been studios, have all been as far rightwing as you can possibly imagine.

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'm such an antsy type of person. I can't write in a room without other people around. I write in coffee shops.

Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

Even a modicum of celebrity is hard to deal with. You see it with actors and directors all the time.

I have never pretended to be the best Scientologist, but I openly and vigorously defended the church whenever it was criticized, as I railed against the kind of intolerance that I believed was directed against it. I had my disagreements, but I dealt with them internally.

I'm a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.

I made a very good living as a bad writer. I wrote a lot of comedies, 'Diff'rent Strokes,' 'Facts of Life,' while all my friends were doing the good shows, like 'Cheers,' but I loved it because I got to be a working writer in Hollywood.

Crash' came from personal experience. I saw things inside me from living in L.A. that made me uncomfortable. I saw horrible things in people and saw terrible things in myself. I saw a black director completely humiliated, but the three people around me just thought it was funny. 'No,' I said, 'that is selling your soul.'

I have so many questions about love. How do you win at it? Especially if you're in a relationship with an impossible person? What if you believe in someone who's completely untrustworthy, who at their core can't even believe in themselves?

You don't make a film because the audience is ready for it. You make a film because you have questions that are in your gut.

The worst thing you can do to a filmmaker is to walk out of his film and go, 'That was a nice movie.' But if you can cause people to walk out and then argue about the film on the sidewalk... I think we're all seeking dissension, and we love to affect an audience.

A creative person has to believe in the unseen and the untouched.

All the studios are owned by multinational corporations, which are not usually bastions of the left. So all the actors, writers, and directors - or at least a great majority of them - live in fear because we're all insecure, we all want that next job, we all want to be loved, and we don't want to piss off some studio chief who won't hire us for the next movie.

Always write from your gut, no matter what the project is.

I found two true stories. One was in 2003. One was the beginning of 2004. I decided to meld them. Richard Davis' story which is the largest portion of this, a lot of the events are exactly as you saw, exactly what happened and the locations. Exactly as it was said with the chicken house and the strip club. Richard's parents were on the set and they'll tell you that the story is different than their son's. I was very concerned because I called them to say, 'You understand I'm fictionalizing this story?

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

I just love actors, and I've always loved actors. I empathize with their job. Everyone thinks it's easy, and it ain't. To be that vulnerable and brave on camera is tough.

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with In the Valley of Elah. I said, Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax. And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

I like to really respect the audience and let them come through on answers.

I miss my mother very, very much.

I optioned the magazine article. That was end of 2003. It was a time when the war was incredibly popular here and everyone was driving around with flags on their car, if you remember not too long ago.

I really wanted to make a nonpolitical political film. I wanted something that folks in red states and blue states could look at and not ask if this is the right thing to do to be in this war, but what this war is doing to the fabric of our society.

I try not to think of actors as I'm writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they've already done.

I wanted to do a political film that is as nonpartisan as can be, because I wanted to do a story that was American. I wanted to tell an American tragedy.

I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't.

I was trying to talk about where we are right now as a society, and talk about the fear we all live in, and certainly since 9-11, how it's affected us and the world.

If you change the right mind, then that person can perhaps change the world.

If you make a film and then two and a half, three years later, suddenly the country's changed and you look like you just happened to hit it. I actually like being contrarian. I would have preferred to come out three years ago when everyone was disagreeing with me. But hopefully it asks a lot of questions about our responsibility in sending young men and women to war, especially a war that's so complex, where there's no right answer, where they're forced with impossible decisions every day.

Independent films are very hard to get made, but I'm lucky enough to get them made, so I'm going to keep doing it. I like my independence. I like being able to tell a story the way I want to tell a story. I don't like developing it with a team. I like coming to a story and deciding whether I want to do it or not.

It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.

It turns out that good actors can make anything believable.

I've lived in America for many years. I mean, I love being a Canadian, but I truly identify with America. I love America so much.

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.

Right after we invaded Iraq, I put a sign on my lawn that said "War is not the answer." That sign was either defaced, ripped up, or stolen every week. I had to replace that sign twelve times.

The hope is what America represents to the world and has always represented - the hope for a better life and a better world. We have a duty to protect and support that hope with not just our words, but with our deeds.

The wrong one will start saying things like "withdraw with honor." We've heard phrases like that before, and they led to thousands and thousands of deaths. Democrats always want to look tough...

There are very few guys like me. I make a lot of money. I didn't always...

There's something that's so basically corrupt about any system in which a good and fair profit is not enough. There has to be more, every year, every quarter, because your stock price has to rise.

This is our fault. My fault as much as the next man's, because even if I was against the war, I didn't do enough to stop it.

United States could be a great country. It needs to be a great country. It's our responsibility as citizens to make that happen, every single one of us.

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

Walk through Santa Monica and try to find somebody who knows a young man or woman who's in this war. Here, war is an intellectual concept. If you lose your son or daughter, it's no longer an intellectual matter.

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 are manipulated by fear and the fear of others, and how we're often manipulated into doing things and voting in ways that are against our own best interest. Look at healthcare. People will tell you that healthcare is socialism and communism, and they're doing this while their wife needs an operation and their kid needs braces.

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

We never did just one take. Multiple takes. Many. I did a bunch. Sometimes I do one take. Sometimes I did 20.

We think we know what's right. With excessive pride comes blindness.

What happens when these young men and women come home so scarred and so wounded? We are ignoring that fact. We're just shoving them under the carpet.

What I love about writing is the contradictions we all embody as human beings.

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

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

You don't do pictures because the audience is ready for them. You do them because there's something gnawing at you, something inside.

You have to be careful of the advice you take.

You hear this story that we're all on the left, but when there's a demonstration, you count how many actors actually come out. If there's a half dozen, that would be a big day.

You'd be surprised how many writers, or how many actors, if they miss a paycheck or two, they've got nothing. As a writer or an actor you can have four or five jobs in one year and then have none for two years.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

I just want to thank people who take big risks in their daily lives when there aren't cameras rolling. I want to dedicate this award to people who stand up for peace and against injustice and intolerance.

As soon as you think you know Clint Eastwood, you don't know Clint Eastwood.