Oscar-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis talks about his latest small screen venture, The Black Donnellys, to RUSSELL BAILLIE
KEY POINTS:
Paul Haggis might be best known these days as an Oscar-winning director and screenplay writer. He won two Academy Awards for Crash - best picture and best original screenplay - which he directed. He wrote the best picture winner Million Dollar Baby directed by Clint Eastwood and his other scripts have included Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, as well as work on the scripts of the past two Bond films.
So it's odd to be talking to Haggis about failure. His NY mean streets drama The Black Donnellys - about a group of young Irish-American brothers starting out in organised crime - didn't last the full season when it screened on NBC in early 2007, the network pulling it off air after a month of underwhelming ratings. Here its 13 episodes are screening on C4.
But speaking from New York, Haggis, who had a long career in television before making it in features, says that's just the way of television ...
Were you particuarly disappointed that it didn't fly in the States?
I have a long history of disappointment so I wasn't particularly disappointed but I did love the series. I was very sorry to see it go. But all my best stuff fails very quickly.
You were having quite a good run there with all those awards - did this balance things out?
This is something that [writing and producing partner] Bobby Moresco and I wrote in 1996 which we really loved. But the thing is, failure is part of this game - we really truly have to embrace that. If you aren't willing to fail then you are not going to take any risks.
What was the genesis of the series and the inspiration of the family?
I had just written a series called EZ Streets which had failed spectacularly and I had hired Bobby Moresco to work on that as a writer and then we started talking about his family in New York when he was growing up and I wanted to take some of those stories and fictionalise them. It was about this Irish working class neighbourhood in New York.
And as we developed that, that was really the centre of the inspiration and then there was also the story of the Donnelly family who lived in Lucan which is a town near where I grew up in Ontario. I guess they were considered lowlifes and criminals. They were Irish and largely discriminated against so who knows what the hell they were? They were supposed to be horse thieves but you often branded someone a horse thief after you hung them. So the idea of discrimination is always something I like to toy with in my work. So I sort of melded the two ideas.
The Irish experience in New York has been touched upon before - the Donnellys the great, great grandsons of Gangs of New York in some ways.
Yes, exactly.
But those Italian crims have always had a bigger reputation.
You don't know about the Irish because they just weren't very good at what they did. It was mostly petty crime and whenever they ran up against the Italians they lost.
And that really is the battle here - the Irish versus the Italians for the control of this little pocket of the city and no one expects these Irish n'er do wells to amount to anything.
In fact they don't want to amount to anything - they're just trying to survive the day but slowly they start to become more of a threat and we see how that plays out within the family.
Is TV harder than movies?
Yeah, it's much harder. You have to keep the quality up while doing 13 to 22 hours each year of this. In a movie you have two hours of that year to work on. It truly is that amount of work and it is daunting.
It is the writing that is the most difficult. As the writer you have to supervise the production of it, the acting and the direction and editing. It really is draining. Not that hard work isn't a good thing, it just catches up with you. You can't keep your attention on everything, you can't keep the quality up, it's very, very hard. Well, it's not that you can't, a lot of people do it successfully, it's just very difficult to do.
So basically, you got into movies to relax?
Well, no, you are working as many hours in the day but just focusing on one story.
With your trophy cabinet does that mean you can now pick and choose what you want to do?
Um, you would think so. But no, it never gets much easier. You are still trying to convince people about whatever it is your idea is and convince people to finance it.
And if it is at all risky it doesn't matter how many times you have succeeded at doing a risky project, they forget those things.
So you can't take your little gold men along to meetings?
It would be nice. I would like to mount them on the hood of my car. But a tad ostentatious I think on the front of a Prius.
LOWDOWN
Who: Paul Haggis, Award-winning screenwriter and creator of The Black Donnellys
Movie Credits: Director of Crash (2005) and In the Valley of Elah (2007) which he also wrote. Screenwriter of Quantum of Solace (2008), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), Casino Royale (2006), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) The Last Kiss (2006), Crash (2005), Million Dollar Baby (2004)
TV credits: Thirtysomething, EZ Streets, Walker Texas Ranger, Due South (creator)
When & where: C4, Mondays 8.30pm
