Paul Haggis interview - Clint Content

[Hammerhead]

Interesting Paul Haggis interview from Scottish Newspaper The Sunday Herald here:

http://www.sundayherald.com/50976

Some interesting Clint content, especially the comments re Death and Dishonor.

[vik]

yeh nice - i think the thing is its like white hunter white heart everyone wonder why he made it - simply because he was interested

its great for us because we get some real unusal movies like mdb

its great for haggis - i only hope he is versatile enough

mdb will be hard to follow - be intersting to seeif americans will go watch a ww2 movie there hasn't been a good one for a while

[Lilly]

Thanks, Hammerhead.  That's very interesting.

Pulling out the Eastwood bits...

He has also reunited with Clint Eastwood for two projects: the Stephen Spielberg-produced Flags Of Our Fathers, which tells the story of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, and Iraq war drama Death And Dishonour. The former film’s title smacks of jingoism, which doesn’t seem to chime with Haggis, who is well known for his work with organisations such as The Centre For The Advancement Of Non-Violence and Artists For Peace And Justice. But he insists there is no contradiction.

“Clint didn’t want to make, as he put it, ‘a bulls@#t John Wayne movie’,” Haggis says. “It’s a difficult film about war. It’s going to honour the men, but it’s not going come down and say: ‘Yes, we should go to war. It’s an honourable thing.’ It was a brutal, brutal battle and the toll it took on those men’s lives was something that we don’t shirk.”

But where do Haggis and Eastwood, who once said he thought Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good governor of California, find common political ground?

“The wonderful thing about Clint is you can never second guess how he is going to react to anything. I sent him this project, Death And Dishonour, about Iraq, and I thought he could have said: ‘You commie bastard. What are you getting me into now?’

“But he didn’t. He said: ‘Wow, difficult material.’ I said: ‘Yeah, but it’s the truth.’ He said: ‘I think we should tell it.’ So I really admire him.

“People think they know who Clint Eastwood is, but they just don’t .”

 

I wonder what the situation is now with Death and Dishonor.

its great for haggis - i only hope he is versatile enough

I feel very confident that he'll do it well.  He's done a lot besides Million Dollar Baby.  A rising star, me thinks.

(Can't wait to see Crash, coming out in the UK soon. )

[Lilly]

Another interesting Haggis interview (a few months old, but I can't find it posted here before), linked to from the flagsofourfathers.net discsussion board.

From the Writers Guild of America, west website, written by Denis Faye.   http://www.wga.org/craft/interviews/haggis.html

Too long to quote in full, but some interesting details on Million Dollar Baby, and a bit on the beginnings of Flags of our Fathers.

It was interesting because Clint's and my politics couldn't be more different and our views on the war couldn't be more different, but he and Spielberg brought this book to me. It took me a long time to figure out why we should do a war movie. I kept going to the set to turn them down and he kept saying, "You'll figure it out."

Clint must have really wanted Haggis to do it.

Also some little gems about being a screenwriter, gimpy!

[gimpy]

Yea, such a crazy process. I wish I was Haggis!