Paul Haggis, who depicted LA’s racist underbelly in Crash, says Harvey Weinstein scandal is another sign of the film capital’s need for radical change.
A change of the old order in Hollywood is long overdue, according to Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning film-maker behind the hit films Crash and Million Dollar Baby.
The Canadian screenwriter and director said many of the established rules of big-budget showbusiness should be re-examined in the light of falling box-office receipts and the recent scandalous claims and revelations about the enduring influence of the casting couch.
“Los Angeles is a town run by a group of powerful corporations, the studios, and they inevitably want to make what they know they can sell. This means they often lag a few years behind creatively,” he said this weekend.
A reliance on sci-fi and youth franchise reboots is not enough, he added. “I love comic-book movies, but do we want a diet of only that? It is about money, of course. The studios have to make more than they did last year, so we have Fast and Furious number whatever.”
Haggis, who wrote the screenplay for Casino Royale (2006), as well as Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, and whose exposé of gritty Los Angeles life in Crash earned him international plaudits in 2005, said a desire to make grown-up films had led him to leave Hollywood. The insular nature of Los Angeles both concealed bad behaviour like Harvey Weinstein’s and inhibited creative risk-taking.
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