The newest issue of Entertainment Weekly has a pretty amusing article with Paul Haggis (aka “Paul Hack,” the article is not online yet.) In it Haggis seems to be painfully aware of how much you hated “Crash” and how much you hate him for it.
Backing up, in case you forget, “Crash, – the ham-fisted, hammer over the head intersecting racial issues in L.A. film – won the 2005 Oscar for Best Picture and a nation of movie-goers groaned and took up pitchforks and flaming torches in a confederacy of disgust and outrage.
Well, Haggis is well aware of this and likes to point out to everyone within earshot that while he might have made, “Crash,” but he didn’t award himself the Academy Award for the film. His guilt and apologeticness about the film is rather funny.
“I think what people didn’t like about Crash was that they thought it was overrated. But I didn’t rate the movie!”, he protested, also noting the fact that trumping the popular, “Brokeback Mountain,” didn’t help its case.
In fact, he all but disowns the film. When he’s asked what he thinks about people calling the film manipulative he answered, “It’s completely manipulative. I set out to manipulate, and I did! All good films are manipulative. What people probably didn’t like was that they could see the manipulation happening and that may be true. That’s one thing that made me uncomfortable about the screenplay [ed. which he wrote] – it all happened in very short bursts, there wasn’t a long lead-up to anything. So yeah, it’s totally manipulative.”
He also apologizes for “Crash” by way of his new film, “In The Valley Of Elah” (see our Fall Preview). “I think it’s a much more subtle vehicle,” he said playing to the audience that wanted to burn him at the stake. “But hopefully it leaves people…talking about it in the lobby.”
You gotta give the guy (a Scientologist, btw) points for a least being cognizant.
