“I think all stories are emotionally based. From comedies to action adventures. If you don’t have the emotional center of a piece then you lose everything else.”
Writer/director Paul Haggis
“In L.A. nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”
Det. Graham Waters (Don Cheadle) in Crash
“I was carjacked in 1991 and we writers don’t react like human beings, rather than rage or anger I became curious about who these kids were that stuck guns in my face. It took a long time, every year I’d ask myself questions about them because they were never caught. I just wondered who they were. Were they best friends? Had they just met each other that night? What was their worldview? I didn’t know. I never intended to write about them, but about ten years later I woke up in the middle of the night…and I just kept following the characters. So 10 o’clock in the morning I had this entire 30 page outline done. I thought it was a TV series at first and tried to pitch it and no one wanted to buy it. And a year later after writing Million Dollar Baby on spec I was still unemployed, so I called my friend Bobby Moresco and I said, ‘I’ve got these pages and I think it’s a movie,’ and he said,’no it’s not.’ I said, ‘I think it is.’ He said, ‘we can make it into one,’ and two weeks later we had a first draft.”
Writer/ Director Paul Haggis
The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters interview with Mike De Luca
Haggis and Moresco won an Oscar for their Crash (2004) screenplay and the film won the Oscar for Best Film of the Year. And Haggis’ gut was right in the Crash (2008-2009) was developed by creator Glen Mazzara into a TV series in 2008 starring Dennis Hopper.
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Emotional Archaeology
Emotional Autobiography (2.0)
Goal: Elicit Emotion (Tip #77)
Four Emotional Needs
40 Days of Emotions
Screenwriting from Iowa 