Paul Haggis Character Quotations

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

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.

I'd only seen him as the hero or the foppish best friend - so I felt predisposed to like him. On the other hand, Granger's character is not particularly attractive at all - 1950s film heroes were supposed to be strong and confident, yet here is this rather tediously weak man, who allows himself to be pushed around by women.

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

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.

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